Ring of Fire(32)

"We heard about it, Pop," he said, without specifying it. "Wish we could do something to help. Magdalena's pretty cool, I think she'd make a great stepmom."





"Stepmom, heck," Gerry said, a wistful expression on his round, freckled face. "She can cook."





Tom's throat ached, and his chest felt squeezed with misery. What kind of cruel fate was it for him to find his soulmate four hundred years in the past, only to have her wrenched away from him? And the worst irony of all of this was that up until the moment that Tom had evidenced interest, Magdalena had been the "unwanted" spinster-daughter of her family—a victim of her times. Betrothed three times, all three of her husbands-to-be had met with nasty demises, and after that, a combination of a lack of suitors that met her father's rigorous standards and the reputation for being a romantic jinx kept her on the shelf.





Stupid, that was—she was clever, sweet-natured, attractive, and exceedingly well educated—the fact that she was over thirty shouldn't have mattered. They'd met quite by accident; she'd come along with her father when a group of guildmasters from Jena arrived as a trade delegation and Faramir had volunteered his old man to act as a guide for a small group that included her.





He'd never believed in love at first sight, and this wasn't it. It was, however, the attraction of kindred souls. Love came later. Not much later, but later.





And the irony was that if he'd just listened to her and let her handle her father, they'd be scheduling a wedding right now. She liked the commune, liked the boys, wasn't afraid of hard work, rather admired his public-spirited attitude—irony of ironies, because of his wardrobe, her father had thought he was rich. If he'd just let her handle it. . . .





"I dunno why you got as far as you did with her old man," Ron said callously, helping himself to a tomato—teenage boys took a lot of filling. "I mean, we're trailer-trash compared to the Edelmann family."





"Believe it or not, it was my T-shirts," he sighed. "Dyes like that, only the rich can afford—"





* * *



And that was when it hit him, and why it had taken so long, he couldn't imagine—except, maybe, that the Adventure of the Tie Dyed Festival Shirts had been something so traumatic that he had repressed the memory.





"Pop—" Frank said warningly. "If you're thinking what I think you're thinking—remember what happened the last time!"





"Yeah," Ron chimed in. "People want their shirts colored, not themselves!"





Which was what had happened, after a sudden heavy rain shower . . . rainbow-colored customers, dripping dye all over their pants, their cars, their friends. Not good. Not good at all. Lothlorien had folded the tent and snuck out the back way, leaving behind a lot of angry people looking for someone to strangle with tie-dyed rope.





The dyes got stored, the remaining shirts distributed among the rest of the commune, and no one, no one talked about it anymore.





"Yeah, but there's two things different this time—the big one being that I'm not stoned. Come on, give me a hand, let's see if the dyes are still any good!"





If they weren't—well, he still had some ideas, and he could not believe that no one else in Grantville had realized the profit-making potential lying around unused and dusty in the grocery, the hardware-store, and the pharmacy, all of whom had their own little racks of commercial dyes that no one had even looked at. This might work. This just might work!





"Mordants," he explained, as they headed for the barn, the loft of which formed the main storage facility for all the assorted flotsam and jetsam, useless for all practical purposes but too good to throw out. "That's what we need. Mordants."





"Sounds like an RPG villain," said Frank, holding open the barn door.





"Mordants are the things that chemically bind dye to fiber," he explained. "That was where I went wrong. I forgot about mordants." Then, shamefacedly, and because he had a policy of always being honest with his kids, "Actually, I was too stoned to remember about mordants."





That was when the unexpected happened, the thing that made every bit of the pain he'd gone through in the last several years worthwhile. Frank grabbed his elbow and stopped him.





"Pop," he said, looking straight into his father's eyes (when had he gotten so tall?), his own honest brown ones the image of Tom's own, "Pop, you have not once, in the past fifteen years, been stoned. Don't think we haven't noticed. Once in a while, about half as often as most guys' dads drink a six-pack, you've been a little buzzed. Never when we needed you. Maybe the rest of the town thinks you're a doper, but we know better. Always have. You've been a damn fine dad, as good as the best, and better than most. No shit."