Story Time - Part 1

I'm going to divert from my regularly scheduled rantings to start on  a story that's been brewing in my head for some time. I began writing it some years ago, but as with everything else I do, I never follow through to finish it. So, here I am again, trying to start this story and hopefully, one day, complete it. There's no title for it yet, so I'm willing to consider suggestions from you, my loyal followers.

     Every Sunday was 'Game Day'. Not the same glorified day that many fans celebrated during football season, but rather a day in which some friends gathered around a table to roll dice and play a game of High Fantasy. This Sunday happened to be a special occasion as two old friends were finally rejoining the group after several years off.
     The sky that day was clear, the air was crisp, and the breeze was pleasant. It was a September morning in the small town of Enchanted Oaks and most of the businesses in town were closed for today's NFL game. In principle, weekends were reserved for sports. When the high school team played on Saturdays the town shut down to cheer on their squad, The Wolves. Sundays, on the other hand, made passerbys think that Enchanted Oaks was a ghost town. In reality, everyone was huddled around their televisions watching the home town hero, Jayson Lockley, play quarterback for one of the state's pro teams.
     However, not everyone in town watched football. This group of friends, who called themselves the "O.C.", otherwise known as the Outcasts, were gathering at the towns one and only game store, The Tolk Inn. It wasn't a great store, especially from the exterior, but the owner, a guy named Jay Gordon, kept it running for the past four years on little, to no revenue. He'd bought the solitary building cheap and renovated the interior. It was an old restaurant that had been shut down due to several health code violations, so there was still a fully operational kitchen in the rear of the establishment.
     When he bought the place Jay started to strip down the interior to its bare bones, but when he came into some hard times renovations ceased. Jay's intentions were to open this store as a multi-part business. Stage One was the game store, which has been successful, where game stores are concerned, but the large shadow of the past health code violations halted Stage Two. Which was to open up a restaurant and bar on the other half of the building, in a style similar to classical fantasy inns, where  it was part restaurant and part hotel. He had once toyed with the idea of adding boarding rooms in hopes of one day having a chain of establishments that were part store, part restaurant and part inn. In hindsight that was a pipe dream, now it was just a matter of keeping the shop open.
    Jay looked at his wrist watch checking it against his laptop's digital display. 9:45 am it read. With fifteen minutes before the crew was due to arrive Jay walked strolled out of his store to the rear of the building. Parked parallel to the building was an old Winnebago, its once white finish was now the color of sand and course to the touch. Paint was peeling off in small sections, and rust was slowly creeping out from several corners of the siding and roof. The best thing it had going for it was that it was a large camper. With plenty of room for Jay, his wife Lori, and their three cats: Sleepy, Sneezy & Dopey; Lori had a fascination with Snow White & The Seven Dwarves, which stemmed from her childhood when her family used to call her Snow, due to her love for winter, and the astonishing resemblance she had to Snow White.
    During their twenty-five year marriage they were never interested in having kids, but took to socially adopting the boys they monitored and guided during their stay at a boarding school in the northwest part of the state. Those boys in turn took to calling Lori 'mom' or 'Mrs. G', but never did they call Jay, 'dad', it was always 'Mr. G'. But as the boys got older and graduated they came to call the Gordon's by their first names. Only the closest ones ever kept in contact with Jay and Lori, and those happened to be the same boys that comprised the O.C.
    Small stones crunched under his feet as Jay walked across the graveled parking lot. A compressor kicked on as he passed by the rear door of the building; it bucked a couple times before it finally caught a rhythm and hummed loudly as it's blades spun. Jay opened the door to the trailer and was immediately greeted with a nuzzle from Dopey, a sneeze from Sneezy and a yawn from Sleepy. It never ceased to amaze him how spot on their names were. Dopey never meowed, never purred, but was the most affectionate of the three. Sleepy, well, slept all day, except to eat and poop; he was the largest of the three, and had earned the nickname Garfield for his love of anything pasta. Sneezy was the skinniest, and had a strict diet due in part to his veterinarian saying the cat was allergic to nearly every everything -- the sneezing was always a dead giveaway if he'd eaten something he shouldn't have. Petting each, he let the door slam behind him.
    "Has the game not started yet, Jay" hollered Lori from the rear of the cabin. Her Sunday ritual was to chat on the social networks and then play solitaire until lunch time. And hearing Jay come in had thrown her off slightly as any other Sunday he'd have waited in the store until game time.
    "Not yet, still early. But they should be arriving shortly." Jay responded as he grabbed a large thermal mug from a kitchen cabinet. The mug had seen better days, but it was one of Jay's favorites, and it just happened to the largest of his small collection. He filled it, draining the pot of freshly brewed coffee and sat down to read the newspaper that had gone unopened from this morning's delivery.
    "Looks like we're in for one last warm front before fall fully sets in hun." he called back to Lori as he flipped through the ad-heavy Sunday Gazette. He never fully read the paper. Sure he read an article or two here and there, but he was more interested in looking at the headlines and reading the comics.
    Minutes passed before a white tail flicked across his face. Jay flinched at the tail's sudden appearance, almost spitting out the swig of coffee he just took. Dopey had silently hopped up on the kitchen table, which was quite a feat as the table was old and rickety - you couldn't put an arm down without rattling the old piece of compressed wood and laminate. If Dopey had a character sheet, his statistic for Stealth would be god-like. The cat's blue eyes met Jay's frustrated look as if saying, "What?" And then without a second look Dopey gracefully leapt off the table and padded to the back to be with Lori. 
    Jay checked his watch again, 9:57 am, "Time to go hun," he called out, "see you in a couple hours!" He received a barely audible 'goodbye' in return and headed outside. A gust of wind whipped behind him, snatched the door out of his hand and slammed it closed. He turned his head to look towards the horizon. Some clouds were beginning to approaching from the west, but he saw no signs of any approaching storms or tornadoes. Having studied meteorology for two semesters at a community college he was certain of his prediction.

TO BE CONTINUED . . .

Comments, edits, are welcome