Cadences (Epilogue)
Word Count: ~1000
Summary: Life doesn’t get much better than when you get to spend it with your favorite fella. Follow the boys as they navigate from young love to newlyweds to fatherhood and beyond.
Author’s Note: Thanks to the betas, Becca and Kerry.
I feel like I should write a really long note here, but nobody reads these things anyway. Mostly I want to say thanks for reading and for being awesome and for all of your kind messages and comments and fic recs and I'm getting all emotional, so just go read the darn thing. <3
Epilogue
Spring, 2070
A Moment of Addie
I’ve spent a long time trying to convince my parents that it’s time for them to move out of the old house and into something more manageable, something with fewer stairs. But of course it takes Poop needing a double knee replacement before they decide I’m right.
We’ve spent months now looking for just the right place for them. I kept telling them that it’s not that they need to go into an old age home or something, just a condo or a smaller house with less to take care of. We found a beautiful little bungalow in a lake community in North Carolina. When we started talking about this, I didn’t expect them to decide to move away. But that’s the way it goes sometimes. At least it’s not Florida.
Today I’ve been given the job of going through the boxes in the attic.
Of course it’s about 800 degrees up here. Even though the temperature is nearly brain melting, I still manage to have plenty of time to think.
I’ve been in a rut lately. A super rut lately. I love my husband, and I love our kids. They’re getting older now and I think I’m going to have to go back to work. I spent so many years trying to be a writer. And I am a writer in a lot of ways, but I’ve never become the writer that I want to be.
I’m going to end up teaching high school English, I can feel it.
Not that there’s anything wrong with teaching high school English, I admonish myself. I loved it for the 10 years I did it before having kids. And I love these years I got to spend at home thanks to Tom making enough to support us. But I want more. And my daughter Michelle is going to be heading off to college in a few years and we’re going to need my income. So it's going to be back to teaching for me this September.
I continue digging around in boxes, not thinking much of anything, humming songs. I find a picture here and there of Declan at baseball practice or my college graduation or both of us with Matt’s kids at the beach. I smile thinking about the years these photographs spent hung on the refrigerator. No one prints pictures anymore. It’s quaint and nostalgic. I put them aside, wanting to make sure I bring them down to show my dads.
And then I find a large box labeled “Poopdum” with an infinity sign under it. This looks worth investigating.
The box is filled the brim. At the very top, there’s a frame with four photographs. I can’t believe how young my parents look. Sometimes I forget how long they’ve been together.
In these pictures, they’re sitting on a couch in what I’m pretty sure is my dad’s old apartment that he shared with Rachel. And in each photograph they’re making such consummate Poop and Dumdum expressions. It’s really quite remarkable. There’s one where they’re both looking in opposite directions but making very similar faces and then one where Dumdum’s looking at Poop and Poop is smiling at something on the coffee table. Another where Poop is side-eyeing Dumdum while Dumdum is falling over laughing and one where they’re looking at each other, both tight-lipped but moments away from laughing.
I smile just looking at them.
I put the frame back in the box and close it up. Then I take the box downstairs and put it in my car. They won’t miss it and I’ll make sure it gets back to them. I want to bring it home and really take my time going through it.
Later that night, after the kids are in bed and my husband’s busy with something on TV, I go through the box thoroughly. I find letters and notes and more photographs. There’s a huge stack of printouts of IM conversations and emails, with dates from the summer of 2014. There are more photographs and a flash drive and the notebook with the notes from their first date that I’m familiar with from way back when. But the more I dig, the more I find.
A stack of sheet music all titled “The Tuna Salad Song,” a brochure from the Coney Island Aquarium. Little trinkets, a handful of red moleskin notebooks that I remember Poop always writing in. I flip through one of them and find a note from January of 2038 that says, “The kids have formed an alliance, be very afraid.”
I stick the flashdrive into my computer and find a ton of files, mostly of my dad playing music, one of him reading what sounds like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. The best file is a video of him and Matt singing a vaguely familiar song while Matt plays the ukelele.
By the time I make it through the box I’m laughing and crying to myself, and realize I’ve been going through it for hours.
They’re so inspiring. It’s such an amazing love story.
I put my hand over my mouth.
This is the story.
This is the story I’ve been looking to write for my entire life.
This is the one I’m supposed to write.
Because every time I sit down to pen the great American novel, I’m not writing what I know. I’m writing what I think people want to read. I think too much about trends or what’s missing in the world.
When what I know is love. The love between my dads that grew and grew, and then created more love, and then that love got shown to Declan and me, and my kids, and his kids.
What have I been thinking when I have such an incredible story, a lot of it already written down? Just waiting for me to piece it together and make it cohesive. And even if it doesn’t get published, I can give it to them for their 50th wedding anniversary.
And I know just where to begin.
Kurt is in the basement of the English building when he hears a familiar tune.