Chapter 14

Preface:

I was headed to pick up Thuy and the girls. Our destination this time was Mall of America and I wanted to get an early start since it would take several days of driving to get there, and we only had two weeks allotted to the trip.

Day 5757
Tempe, Arizona

Details:

At 6 a.m., when I pulled the coach into the drive in front of the condo, Thuy and the girls were waiting, thus depriving me of my opportunity to lay on the air horn and wake up the building. Thuy, seemed to know by the look on my face that she had damaged my morning fun, but she smiled and wagged a lovely, slender finger at me. It took about 10 minutes to get the luggage loaded, and both Thuy and the girls comfortable. These semi-annual road trips with Thuy and the girls were the highlight of my year.

These were the only two of my children that I identified with, and who knew that I was their father. I knew that I had hundreds of children all over the world, and I spend no small amount of other people's money setting up anonymous foundations for their care and education.

For example, Jana, whom I had impregnated about four years earlier when she was but 15 years old, was not 19 and the proud mother of a three year old son. She finished high school and was now enrolled at Mesa Community College.

While I didn't take an active role in the lives of my other children, I did keep track of all of them, thanks to the mindscript that required their mothers to call into the special phone number and report on their progress once a month. I rarely even revisited their mothers.

Thuy, Tha'm and Nhu were the exceptions.

The years had been kind to Thuy, and she still had an ageless beauty and grace about her. We still got together for a week or two several times a year, always in the RV, and always with the girls. Tha'm was now 15 and a spitting image of her mother. Clearly the presence of my genes in her pool had done nothing to take away from her inherited beauty. Nhu was now 10, and was going to be just as beautiful.

The girl's settled in for the trip. Nhu was curled up with a Harry Potter book, while Tha'm worked away on her laptop, gently complaining that we didn't have net access while going down the highway. I teased her that I didn't have a network cable that was long enough.

This coach was about a month old, and was totally custom built on a Prevost bus chassis. Plenty of power, plenty of storage and plenty of luxury. I was getting picky in my old age. I also liked my luxury. I'd had a private jet for a while, but it just didn't feel comfortable.

"Tha'm, do you have a LAN card on that thing?"

"Of course Father, it is built into the laptop."