Laura Irene James (laurairene) wrote in forgotten_gods, @ 2009-07-16 23:01:00 |
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Entry tags: | jesse james, laura james |
Who: The James family
Where: The James Farm, Kearney, Misouri
When: Friday morning
What: Frank's wildest dreams come true (or, Jesse and Laura tell the kids the truth)
Warnings: Frank's wildest dreams are coming true. He's liable to be excited and generally cute.
St Joseph, in Laura's opinion, had been an unparalleled disaster that even outranked the summer when both children got the chicken pox. Not only had she stood in the room where her husband was murdered, but said husband thought that the spirit of his dead first wife still lingered in the house and their sweetly oblivious son was too absorbed in how awesome everything was to realize that nobody else was having fun. All in all, she was quite glad to bid that city farewell and make the drive to Kearney the next day. So far as she was concerned, St Joseph could fall off the map and she would be perfectly fine with it.
Kearney was a small town, coming in on the last census with a little over 5,000 people living there. The town itself was experiencing economic growth and modernizing left and right, but on the road to the James Farm outside of town time seemed like it had hardly passed at all. By the time they reached the farm grounds, the town had given way to wide swathes of undeveloped land and Laura wondered just how anybody who grew up in such openness could be contented with an apartment city life like theirs. Maybe she would see about getting them up to Long Island a few more times this year, just for the space.
After guiding the car into a parking spot right in front of the building designated as the "James Farm Museum," Laura turned the vehicle off and waited for everyone else to exit before getting out and locking the car. It looked as though nobody else was on the property -- as it should be, according to Jesse's insistence that he'd told the caretakers to take the day off. She supposed that when one donated so generously to a place, the workers there were inclined to be a bit more willing to bend the rules.
"Did you want to do it now?" she asked, coming around to Jesse's side and looking up at him appraisingly. "Or wait until we reach the house?" She had made all the tough decisions in St Joseph and in making travel plans, so now she figured that it was his turn to decide a few things. After all, it was his life-changing secret to tell the kids, not hers.