Lauren's Season Nine Continued!
A Room of One's Own
By Missy

SERIES: Lauren's Season Nine, Continued!
CHAPTER TITLE: A Room of One's Own
PART: 7 of 14, Episode 7, Pt.1 of 1
RATING: PG(Adult thematic material)
PAIRING(s): L/L; S/C; S/R (Possible)
DISTRIBUTION: To LW, Kai, Myself and FG so far; any other archives are welcome to ask, but disclaimers must be included, my email left intact. send a URL, and provide full disclaimers as well as credit me fully. Please inform me if you are going to submit my work to any sort of search engine. Please do not submit my work to a search engine that picks out random sets of words and uses them as key words, such as "Google"

Please contact me in order for this story to be placed on an archive, or if you want know of a friend who would enjoy my works, please email me their address and I will mail them the stories, expressly for the purpose of link trading. MiSTiers are welcomed! Please do inform me that you'd like to do the MiSTing, however, and send me a copy of the finished product. I'd also love to archive any MiSTings that are made of my work!
CATEGORY: Drama
FEEDBACK: PLEASE?!
SETTING IN TIMELINE: Post-Cali
CONTINUATION: Of Lauren's Season Nine
SPOILLER/SUMMARY: Halfway through the series! Laverne begins to chafe at Squiggy's constant presence in her life, and tries to figure out what Lenny finds so interesting about him; Fonzie collapses when Ashley leaves town with Heather.
NOTES: Thank you to Lauren for letting me continue her established continuity.

****

A lot of love went into making a pizza.

Laverne guided her open hands over the dough, trying to punch out bubbles of air. She could remember, as each bubble decompressed, that there had been a time in her life during which she had dreamed of greater things, larger goals. Weirdly, it seemed childish now; she had never fantasized of anything outside of marrying a man who could club her over the head and make her wife.

Now she did have a dream. One of solitude.

"Squiggy, watch the tap!"

Squiggy had been pouring a pitcher for a team of sailors, but his eyes had grafted onto something in the middle distance.

"Wimmin!" he muttered.

"Squiggy, give me the pitcher!" She yanked it out of his hands, spilling beer all over his boots. This would have, in the past, been nominally funny; now Laverne found herself shrieking at him to pick up a mop. The dinner crowd was arriving, and she had promised Shirley she would pick up Davy from Edna's apartment by six.

She stayed right in her angry mood. Not a single thing could be said to appease her. Squiggy was unusually distant and quiet until she left him to handle the late-night crowd two hours later than she'd promised Edna she would leave.

On the streets of Milwaukee, Laverne calmed down. Her hasty anger dissolved with a backwash of self-recrimination. She truly didn't understand why she had snapped so harshly at Squiggy. Bitterly, she realized it was her own frustration in running the restaurant with him, then in seeing him when he came home. Squiggy was Lenny's friend; his best friend. Banishing him from their lives would be just as cruel as Lenny suggesting she rid herself of Shirley. But her every attempt to get to know him had been thwarted by his very existence. He was SQUIGGY, and that alone was enough to make him an alien being.

In truth, EVERYTHING seemed to be wrong; Shirley was absorbed by her son's presence, and provided no sounding post for her frustrations. She did not truly trust Edna, and could not fully confide in her. That left Lenny, Lenny, who was suddenly busy every night at the garage while Fonzie escorted Ashley Pfister around Milwaukee.

She realized, in her thought, that she had bypassed Edna's house. Backtracking made her fifteen minutes later. Edna, to her credit, did not overtly seem to mind taking care of the children for such a long time.

***

Lenny carefully stitched the border of the material together. He wondered, belatedly, if Laverne liked green. He had picked that shade because it had matched her eyes...

He dropped the material in shock when Fonzie stormed into the room, slamming every door and marking his entrance with a boot to the side of a repaired caddy.

"Fonz! I just fixed that bumper!"

"Bumpers? You care about bumpers?"

"Well, yeah." The hysterical tone in Fonzie's voice was starting to scare Lenny. "You wanna sit down?"

"She left? I go to her place, and she's GONE."

"Gone where? Who?"

"Who do you think, chowderhead? ASHLEY!"

"Don't call me names!" Lenny said, forcefully. Fonzie, naturally, simply cracked his knuckles to regain Lenny's submission "Please?"

"I don't get it; we were havin' a great time. Her parents even liked me. Then she leaves me a note that she and Heather got a place in California, and she's gonna go be a student..."

"That's good!"

"No it ain't! She said she was leavin' because there were too many girls; I wasn't stayin' focused on her..."

"So? You weren't."

He glared at Lenny. "You're sayin' somethin' that ain't true, Kosnoski."

"No I ain't. You dated my wife for two years and there ain't no way you guys was exclusive..."

"So I gotta dump everyone else in my life I wanna hold on to this girl?"

"That's right?"

Fonzie shook his head slowly. "That ain't ever worked for me."

"Well..." Lenny said, getting up, carrying his material with him, "there is a first time for everythin' yanno. You go find her, you talk some sense into her, and I'll go find my wife. It's past six. I gotta get home."

***

Laverne entered her empty apartment with two squalling babies. Shirley and Carmine were not home, she had no bottle for Davy, and the sound of his screaming was enough to wrench her heart out of her chest.

She sat the boy on the couch and headed toward her bedroom to nurse Tommy. Turning on the light, her tears boiled over.

"Lenny..."

In the northernmost corner of the room, near the closet, He had pegged up some curtains, and taped a paper sign onto them with scotch tape.

Lahverns Rum. Keep Owt!

She turned around to the ringing of the phone, her husband's calming voice. When she found him in the living room, Davy was sucking calmly at his thumb.

"Carmine says he and Shirl'll be here by ten..." She cut him off with a kiss that lasted until the babies between them squalled their displeasure. "What was that for?"

"Cause you're real sweet. How did ya know, Len?"

He shrugged. "We're all around here all the time. You need somewhere quiet." When she sat down beside him, he continued, "ya know, you shouldn't keep stuff all bottled up inside. It'll make you hurt Squiggy one day."

"How did you..."

"He threw a pizza at me when I stopped by the restaurant."

Laverne winced at her own behavior.

"Tomorrow, you'll say you're sorry, and we'll get Francine out of his place. Maybe Fonzie'll be with Ashley again, too."

"It's all so impossible."

"I have faith, Laverne. Cause I do."

She smiled into the lee of his neck. Why did it seem so easy for him to do what was clearly an impossibility? The least and the mighty, they had a way of combining in his skin.



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