Book 3: Chapter 54: Party
Riker
March 2257
Romulus
I knocked on the door, still not sure if I really wanted to be here. Oh, I was always happy to see my relatives, but Justin—
The door opened, and one of Justin’s great-granddaughters opened the door. Beatrice, I remembered. She’d been introduced to me on one of the video chats a few years back.
“Uncle Will! Come on in. Grampa is in the sitting room.” She shut the door behind me and pointed, then was off to take care of something else.
I looked around the house, or as much of it as I could see from the front foyer. There must have been fifty people, from gray-haired elders down to toddlers barely able to stay on their feet. The occasion, Justin’s seventy-fifth birthday, was being used as an excuse to get the whole clan together. Or as many as could come, anyway.
The organized chaos was—no, scratch that, there was nothing organized about this. The chaos was mostly confined to the common areas. Children were not allowed in the kitchen, as the women worked on the meal. Funny, two hundred years after Original Bob’s death, women still ruled the kitchen. Probably, I admitted to myself, because men would have just opened up a bag of chips and a jar of dip.
Well, nothing wrong with chips and dip.