Jeff laughed, but Gretchen gasped.
At least, Veronica thought, they wouldn't be able to find fault with his manners.
Martha came up with Joey. He turned away from the strangers, burying his face in her neck. "He's cold," she said apologetically. "He doesn't want to put his face out in the wind."
The others, old enough to remember, wanted hugs.
After dinner, warm and fed, Joey was happy enough to play with the visitors. Until bedtime. When Jeff started to pick him up, he yelled for Martha. She took him and started upstairs. Gretchen got up to come along. Then he yelled for Thea. Until he got Thea.
Jeff and Gretchen sat down at the supper table again.
"He's just a baby," Will said. "You can't expect him to be polite, yet."
Will was very nice about letting Jeff and Gretchen help Annalise put him to bed.
"Joey'll start warming up to you in a few days," Henry remarked while the womenfolk were upstairs seeing to baths and bedtime stories for the rest of the bunch.
Jeff looked up, startled. "Didn't Gretchen tell you? We can't stay that long. We've been on the train all day. I only have a four day pass and we'll need another whole day to get back to Magdeburg. Two days. That's all we have. I have to get back to work and she has to hit the campaign trail again."
"Until the election," Veronica said. "Until the election, and no longer."
"There is no way we can move everyone to Magdeburg." Gretchen shook her head. "Rents are out of this world. We're living in two rooms. We can't afford a house with room for eight more. Nine more, if you're intending to throw Annalise out, too."
"Gretchen, don't be . . ." Jeff put his hands out, palms up. "You can see for yourself that Henry's a lot more feeble than he was when we left for Paris."
Part of the problem was that Gretchen could. See it, that was. Which made her a little sharp tongued.
"Well, don't say that in front of him," Veronica said tartly. "He knows it, but he doesn't have to know that other people notice. And of course I am not intending to throw Annalise out. She's going to college."
"We can't take them all back with us. Not now. Not at Christmas."
Veronica grimaced. "Not as far as the eye can see, perhaps?"
"We can probably hang on here a while longer," Henry said to Jeff. "Just letting things ride. But not forever. That's the simple truth of it. I know it and Ronnie knows it. I'm watching a lot of my contemporaries, couple by couple or one by one, get to the point where they have to give up their houses and go into assisted living. Extended care, if something really goes wrong. The longer Gretchen procrastinates, the crankier Ronnie is going to get about it. She's younger than I am by quite a few years, but this is one thing where you have to make your decisions on the basis of the 'weaker vessel,' No matter what the Bible says, this time it's not the woman."
Jeff shifted in his chair. "If Gretchen's grandma thinks that she's short on cash, she ought to look at our budget. Being a political organizer has its rewards, I guess, but they don't come in the form of money. What do they call them? 'Psychic compensation?' Something like that. In Paris and Amsterdam, we were living on the embassy's dime. We had to pay for our clothes and stuff, which we covered out of my army salary—whenever that got delivered through the siege lines; we had to borrow a lot—but Becky provided our room and food. Covered the travel expenses, too. That's gone now. We're on our own, and while I'm at least getting my army pay regularly now, the fact is that the pay sucks. After the election, Henry. I'll try to get something organized so we can take the kids with us after the election. That's the best I can do. And, honestly, Gretchen hadn't let me know that Ronnie was so upset."
"—college tuition. And that's just for Annalise. Martha's only a year behind her in school; Henry's already paying for Hans Balthasar. You should leave him here, at least, and not take him away from his master. They'll let him board. Then four more who are between fourteen and twelve now, three of them boys. To be apprenticed or kept in school." Nicol shook his head. "Honestly, Jeff. What was Gretchen thinking?"
"When she adopted them? That, with any luck, she could keep them alive. In a way, this argument's showing me, better than anything else could, how far we've come in how short a time. The day I met Gretchen, even the day I married her, she wasn't thinking about schools and apprenticeships for these kids. She just hoped she could find food for them, one day at a time. Talk about a 'revolution of rising expectations.' The problem is that our income isn't keeping pace. Especially since they're so bunched up in age, except for Will and Joey. If it was just Will and Joey, we'd have a break, another twelve or fifteen years for me to get promotions and raises before we had to worry about paying college tuition."