A/N: I tried really hard to finish this before I posted...and I'm weak. Let me know what you think and as always I love you all.

Carol sat in her jeep on a sunny fall day at the school bopping her head to her favorite Nirvana song. It was her day to pick up the kids and do homework and dinner with them. On nights she worked her neighbor and best friend Lori did the same with Sophia for her. She was lucky to have such a good friend, right next door now. In the beginning when her parents were still alive it had been so hard.

Bringing a baby into their home was not on her mother's to do list and she never let Carol forget it.

Her friends were all young but they helped as much as they could, without Tara and Maggie she would have been sunk. He parents had been older when she was born so when she had Sophia they couldn't help as much as they might have wanted to. Her father anyway, he tried though as best he could.

Getting through Nursing school as a single parent and trying to be a good mother to Sophia had been a tall order. She cried herself to sleep on more nights than she wanted to remember, with her books in front of her, thinking she would never get through it.

But she had done it and was still doing it. Now she and Sophia lived in the house she grew up in. They were happy. She missed her father and Sophia did also, he had been dead almost a year now. Her mother for five years now.

In the jeep her head was going and her foot was tapping to her favorite music and it was a good day. Her car was always a compilation of '90's grunge music and so far her daughter Sophia didn't complain and she actually liked her mother's music.

Sophia would sing right along with her and knew all the words.

But she was getting older and Carol knew it would be a matter of time and everything would change. There was no way around it, but she would enjoy her daughter as long as she could.

Sophia was turning sixteen at Christmas time and it was just the two of them, Sophia's father was long gone. He hadn't been around since he helped make Sophia.

It was ok though. She held no hard feelings and left it up to fate to decide if he would be in Sophia's life or not. So far she hadn't heard from him, no one had that she knew of in their old gang.

Carol and Sophia had a wonderful support system in the small town they had lived in all their lives and that helped a lot. Friends were what helped you get through life and Carol was blessed.

She watched Sophia and Lori's kids seventeen-year-old Carl and his fifteen-year-old sister Judith walking towards her. They were Sophia's posse and had been for the last ten years when Lori and Rick had moved in next door.

She watched these two children grow up with Sophia and now they were all teenagers, wasn't it just yesterday that they played in a sandbox in the back yard?

They were like the three musketeers all these years and next month Carl would have his car on the road. These kids were growing up so fast in made her head spin.

Where was her baby?

Carol and Lori were good friends and she had a few others too. Life was good and as she watched the three teenagers walking towards the jeep all smiles and giggles she said a silent prayer of thanks. Things had worked out when really they shouldn't have.

She had been a mother before she turned eighteen and by that time Sophia's father had already joined the service. They had said they would keep in touch but that wasn't how it worked out. He was out there somewhere not knowing he was a father.

He wasn't on Facebook, because Carol had looked one night after too many glasses of wine and some false courage. If she had found him or his brother she would have messaged them, tried to get in touch, but they weren't there.

Sometimes she thought he was dead, he had gone to Iraq in 2000, she had heard. Then the attacks on the World Trade Center happened and the country was at war. She wondered sometimes if he still even walked this earth.

He had been her friend and the thought of him dead made her heart hurt.

She could still see him, sitting on the hood of his truck listening to some Nirvana song, with his baseball cap on backwards and his shaggy hair. She could see him everyday in her daughters face and some of her mannerisms.

She was pulled by her thoughts by the kids pulling the doors to her jeep open and throwing their backpacks in the back seat. Sophia got in the front and Carl and Judith were in the back. The three kids immediately started to talk a mile a minute, which was not anything new.

"Are we going Mom?" Sophia asked. "You said you and Lori and Rick would talk it over and let us know today, so did you?"

"We talked." She started and she could hear the three of them start to giggle with glee. "Are you sure you want us to go too?"

"Of course we do Carol, you and my mom." Judith sang from the back of the car as Carol started it and pulled away from the school. "Why wouldn't we want you to go?'

"My mom seen it already." Sophia said turning back to Carl and Judith.

Yes, I have, with your father.

"Come on mom, it's Halloween Friday and everyone is going." Sophia said. "We can dress up if you want."

Carl shook his head. "You girls are not putting any make up on me."

"You should dress up too Carol and my mom. Aren't there a few women in it?" Judy said.

More than a few Carol laughed to herself. She was now that mom and she was dragging Lori right down with her.

"My days of dressing up are over guys."

"You could so still pull it off." Carl mumbled from the backseat.

She looked up at him in the rearview mirror and laughed. This was what gave her joy, being with these kids and doing things with them.

She was so grateful that she was as close to Sophia as she was. She didn't have that with her mother, not even after Sophia was born. When mothers and daughters got closer, Carol and her mother just became more at odds with each other, there just wasn't a bond there.

Carol and Sophia had an unbreakable bond. They were tight and always had been. The morning Sophia was born it was 1 am when she finally arrived after a long horrible labor. They took her to the nursery as per the hospital protocol. By 2:15am Carol was at the nursey window asking for her baby and it was the two of them against the world ever since.

"And FYI Carl. If me and Soph want to put make up on you, we're going to do it." Judith said to him. "Right Soph."

Sophia nodded turning to her friends in the back seat. "What's the matter Carl afraid your manliness will be threatened?"

"No." He said making a face at his sister in the back seat. "Just don't wanna."

"Well you're gonna." Sophia said and they all erupted into giggles again.

Music to Carol's ears, the sound of her daughter and her friends laughing. Life was good.

Her mother would not approve of this, but she wasn't her mother and she was going to take her kid to The Rocky Horror Picture Show with her best friend.

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Later Carol watched the kids from the kitchen as she cooked dinner for them. She had music playing and was humming to herself. She always had to have her music playing, it was her touchstone. It got her through the good times and the bad and it was always there for her.

Tonight they were having spaghetti and meatballs, and all the kids loved it. Every Tuesday night she made it for the three kids and herself. Carol always made her mother's cheese bread too and there were never any leftovers.

This was her favorite time of year, Halloween, her favorite holiday. Soon it would be Thanksgiving and then Sophia's birthday December 14th, then Christmas. The years had flown by it seemed like yesterday that she had brought her home from the hospital, so scared and alone.

But she had made a life for them, after so much hard work and now it was paying off. The nights of leaving Sophia with her parents and more often, her friends so she could work as a Nurse's Aide while she was in school were done. The times she had to burden Maggie and Tara were over finally.

For the first four years of Sophia's life she was either in school if it was daytime, or at work if it was at night. She had managed it somehow and now they were on the other side of it.

Now, she worked three days a week twelve hour shifts and owned the house outright. Sophia said that she was her best friend, above Judith even and that was saying something. Carol knew that at this age kids didn't normally want to hang out with their mothers.

She certainly didn't ever want to hang with her mother. For what? To be judged more, for having a baby at seventeen and not naming the father. Carol's mother never let her forget how disappointed she was in her.

Carol didn't care, Sophia was her world. She never regretted the decision to have her, not once, even during the hardest times.

The relationship they had was unique and she treasured it.

As Sophia grew up through the years she looked more and more like him. She didn't have Carol's dark auburn hair, she had his blonde hair. She had Carol's bright blue eyes, and a mole over her lip, just like him.

She was the best of both of them, with her mother's fiery personality and mad sense of humor. Her short fuse and ability to speak her mind was all him though.

Sophia bit her thumbnail when she was nervous just like he did and loved chocolate malts, not milkshakes, just like him. She covered her French fries in gravy which Carol knew was the way he ate them too.

Sometimes Sophia asked about her father and Carol told her what she could, his name and that he was in the Army. She told Sophia that they had been friends for a long time but that she didn't know how to find him, which was true.

Eventually Sophia just stopped asking. It was just them and that was enough. When she was older, if she wanted Carol would help her find him. I would be entirely up to Sophia at that point.

"Hey mom." Sophia called from the living room where they were doing their homework drawing her out of her thoughts.

"Are we cooking Thanksgiving this year?"

"Maggie is and we have the mission in the morning anyway." Every year they volunteered on Thanksgiving and Christmas to feed the homeless and the hungry. She and Maggie alternated the cooking and if it was Carol's year to cook, Maggie came to the house and watched the turkey and food until they got home from the mission.

They all would get together for holidays, Carol and Sophia, The Grimes family, the Greene family, Tara, Alisha and Glenn, Maggie's fiancée and anyone else who didn't have a place to go was welcome.

Tara and her girlfriend Alisha would make peach and apple cobbler and help out with the mission too. It was Tara who got Carol into volunteering and now, it was their holiday routine.

Tara was a social worker and was always looking for ways to give back. Carol found that it was important to her too.

Helping others was in her nature, even if she wasn't a nurse she would still be that way, she believed. She was raising her daughter to be compassionate to others and empathetic.

She was proud of the young lady Sophia was now. She was a friend to everyone and a truly wonderful child.

"Ok, so we need the apples for the pies right? Are we going to the farm this weekend?" Sophia asked.

"Saturday after we wake up from this adventure you have us going on Friday night." Carol said. "Tara is going to come by around two."

"Ok, sounds like a good weekend." Sophia said.

"I try." Carol replied.