Part 2 - Two Walters

Like most people, Walter Hubbard did not remember his own birth. But his parents didn’t remember it either. The fourth child of nine, Walter was born to Richard and Athena Hubbard, of the Tucson Hubbards.
“The lovely Mrs. Hubbard!” friends would say. “Adding to the troupe again, we see. How you glow when you are with child, how many is this dear?”
“Old mother Hubbard, more like,” she would respond with not a little exhaustion, her brood of mini-Hubbards dancing around her like demons ready to burn their mother at the stake. “I believe this is number seven.”
“Eight, mother! This is number eight!” Walter would correct her.
“Are you quite sure dear? I was certain we were only on number seven. Let me see, there’s Winston, Warren, Walter, Wallace, Wanda, and Wendy…so yes, this should be number seven.”
“Yes, mother, but there are two of us.”
“Two of who?”
“Walters.”
“Two Walters? You must be joking. Why would we have two Walters?”
Indeed, our Walter was born exactly two years to the day after his older brother, Walter. Walter the second was welcomed into the world rather unceremoniously, and a worn out Athena signed the birth certificate with little ado in her groggy post-partum state.
The naming mishap was only the first of hundreds of incidents which would render Walter the second (a man who would be largely forgettable even if he had been given his own name) a perpetual shadow in the memories of those who knew him. Regardless, Walter the second never realized he was constantly being forgotten until well into college. He always had a birthday party (though it was thrown for his brother Walter…he just thought there wasn’t enough room on the cake for two names) and somehow in the mix of nine little devils leaping around the cramped household, Walter always had a bed to sleep in and food to eat.
What Athena Hubbard did not know (aside from the number of children she already had) was that she was pregnant with numbers eight and nine. The birth of the twins Wilbur and Eunice was quite eventful in the Hubbard household. Athena was caught off guard without a name for the little girl. She considered the name Wanda but realized, almost too late, that she already had one of those…so the child was named after the almost blind nurse who caught her as she slid out into the world on the heels of her brother.
“How are we going to house eight children, Richard?”
“Nine, mother. You just had number eight and nine,” interrupted Walter the Second.
“Nine? Impossible, I’ve only been pregnant eight times.”
Ten year old Walter decided to leave that one alone.
“You’re quite right, Athena,” said Richard, ignoring his son, “We have no more room where we are now. We are going to have to find a larger home.”
And so it was decided. The burgeoning Hubbard family, with eight or nine children decided that they were too numerous for Tucson, and moved to Tempe. A stranger might argue that it was fate that brought them there. They might argue that it was an uncharacteristically rainy night in Tucson when the children were in bed that Richard Hubbard and his wife Athena conceived twins, causing the family to have too many children in a small house which prompted them to move to Tempe where there was a larger house perfect for a family their size and where the second child of theirs named Walter would grow up, fall in love, and marry Alice Snogbottom and one day encourage her to have an affair with Stan Meierhoffsteinschmidtberger which would lead to that man's unfortunate death at the bottom of Pickler Ravine which is why, to this day, there is no Tasty Freeze in Flagstaff, and why we can blame almost everything on the weather.