Love Is Where You Find It

Part 27

It's April 1962 and Loretta is convinced that life can't get any better than this.

They moved into the house next to the diner now. Norman declared that he no longer wanted it because he didn't know what to do with all the extra room and offered it to them. It was a no at first but needless to say they changed their minds and that's where they have been living since 1960.

When they moved, the kids went from one neighborhood school to another and Loretta let them change their last name. It turned out that it's possible, and not all too difficult either. Doo didn't have to give permission unless Henry would adopt them and Henry always says that he doesn't need that piece of paper to tell the world that they are his. They are his in his heart and that's what matters.

The diner's become a second home to all of them and the kids love it there. They are always making suggestions about improvements to the menu and petitioned hard for a juke box- Norman said over his dead body but Norman lost. Now her children and their friends gather around said juke box to play all their favorite songs.

Loretta can't believe how big her little ones are getting. Betty Sue is thirteen already. She's interested in boys, older ones with cars and motorcycles especially. It scares Loretta half to death because she herself is a walking cautionary tale in that regard. They fight over too short skirts and heavy make up, but for the most part having a teenager is not as bad as Loretta feared it would be.

Jack Benny, at twelve and a half, is into sports and discovered his love of horses when visiting a school friends farm. He helps out there now in exchange for riding lesson, says he wants to be a jockey when he grows up. Every day Loretta prays that he'll get a growth spurt and that dangerous possibility will be snatched away from him.

Ernest Ray, just eleven now, is what can only be described as a modern day Huckleberry Finn. He's a little businessman and Henry always says that if he gets to pick who to leave the diner to, he wants it to go to Ernest. He took to the guitar like a duck to water and is the newest member of the church youth band.

And Cissie, that little girl she'd worry about so much all the time, is a decade old and ironically the one she has to worry about the very least now. Unlike her siblings, she loves school. She reads the newspaper already when Betty groans every time she has to for a school assignment. Whatever is going on in the world she knows it, though some of it goes straight over her head. Howard, who still comes into the diner, often complains that it's overrun with youths now but everyone knows that he likes Cissie even though he won't admit it. She asks him about the things she's read in the paper but doesn't understand and though he acts gruff at times, he'll sit and talk with her for hours.

Loretta's kind of made it to be somewhat of a local celebrity by doing not much more than singing in the diner. The radio and a local TV station both featured her once and so did the paper. That drew quite a few new customers, some of whom started coming regularly.

Ernest will stand in front of the door and call "Come in, buy one milkshake and my mother is gonna let you request a song". Norman yelled at him until he realized that his sales tactics are working.

The weather has gotten nice and the children are impatient to be released from school. Even Cissie is looking forward to summer.

Ernest and Cissie already arrived and are hunched over their homework with milkshakes in front of them. Betty and Jack are going to come bursting through the doors at any minute.

"How about we go out tonight?" Henry asks behind her, making Loretta jump.

"Tonight?" she echoes.

"That's what I said, didn't I?"

"On a school night? The kids are just gonna stay up all night and give me the worst time about school tomorrow."