Chapter 39

Mary seemed to have gotten over the teasing and didn't act quite as nervous on the way home. Short of a heavy duty sedative, the only thing that was going to really settle her down was hearing whatever Charlie's father had to say when we got down to Mexico. She told me she was going to stick around and work on a paper that was due next Tuesday and catch a ride with her mother and Rudolfo.

Mary's not a very good liar. My radar picked up that she was hiding something as soon as she started telling me about the "paper" she had to write and why she wanted to get started on it today instead of waiting for next week, going over all the reasons she hadn't been able to start it already. That's OK. If necessary, we had the whole trip that evening to dig out the truth.

It was a couple of minutes after eleven when we pulled into the driveway. I think Mary was beginning to realize how transparent she'd been and got out as soon as we stopped and rushed into the house.

"The game doesn't start till 1:30 but Coach wants us there by noon. When do you think we should leave, Jack?"

He looked at his watch. "We'll never get there by noon. 12:30, maybe, if we're lucky."

"Shit. It's not that far, is it?"

"Shoulda let me go back to bed. Then we wouldn't have this problem."

"You dweeb. Really."

"We could probably make it there in a half hour. But I have no idea what traffic's going to be like around the school and what the parking situation is. I'd like to get going as soon as possible."

"Alright. I've just gotta pee and change into my uniform. Can you let Bozo out and see what you can find in the refrigerator for us to munch on? I can probably talk Daddy into taking us all out for something to eat after the game before we go down to get Charlie."

By this time we were at the top of the stairs. Jack unlocked the door and Bozo did his part without being told. As I went down the hallway towards the bathroom, I yelled over my shoulder, "Make sure he has food and water, please."

I was getting changed when Jack came in the bedroom. "I've got lunch, my camera and the dog's been taken care of. Anything else?"

"You should probably bring my laptop."

"Don't you think you're going to be too busy to use the laptop?"

"The laptop's for you, not me, Silly. There are probably going to be a lot of people who will want to talk to you about photography," I said as I started throwing clothes for the trip to Mexico in my gym bag. "The disk with all the pictures is in my laptop case. And I'm sure they have wireless Internet there — my college does. You can pull up the site and use the laptop to take any notes, store addresses and phone numbers, all that stuff. You've had over twenty emails in one day; you need to get organized right away. Little scraps of paper aren't going to make it."

"Yeah, you're right. Do you think I should get my own laptop?"

I waited in front of the door and Jack opened it, locking it behind us.

"Eventually. I don't think you're going to be able to exist without one. And you're probably going to want to get a new video card and a high def monitor for your editing."

"Jill, I'm taking stills, not videos."

"Tell that to some teenage girl when the only thing she can see in every picture you took of her is the zit you didn't Photoshop out."

"Hey, this isn't Playboy. I'm not interested in airbrushing all the pictures."

He held the passenger door of the car open. I slid in and leaned over the seat, putting my gym bag in back. Jack handed me my laptop and a big bag of food before closing the door and going around the car and getting in on his side.

"I'm not saying to Photoshop all the pictures. But it's a tool that's going to make the difference between happy and disappointed customers. The difference between repeat customers who give out lots of referrals and customers who complain about what you did. Let's face it, Jack. These women aren't coming to you to get pictures of what they look like. They could look in the mirror or get their boyfriends to take snapshots of them if that's all they wanted. They want to see what they could look like. So that people will look at them and tell them they look beautiful."

"It seems like cheating, somehow."

"Jack, is it cheating when I put on makeup when we go out to dinner or if you set up a light to bring out a subject's eyes? It's a tool. It's not like you're going to put teenage heads on movie star bodies."

"How much is all this going to cost?"

"I'm gonna guess somewhere between five and ten grand. The good thing is we don't need to do it all at once. And it's really not that expensive when you realize you'll be set up as good as any professional out there. Actually, better than most pros. Most of them don't have your eye."

"So, where do we start?"

"Well, you can borrow my laptop when you need it for a while. I've got a home version of Photoshop on it that you can play with. Once you find you like it and want to get serious about it, you'll need to get the professional version, but I'm pretty sure they'll let you try it free for a month. That should give you time enough to get paid for a few jobs and then you can buy the pro version."

"How much is that?"

"I think it's six or seven hundred."

"Damn. I'm sure I've gotten emails where it's a lot cheaper than that."

"I don't know what you will get, but you won't get an authentic professional version from a bargain email. Just like you won't get a longer wanger from an email, no matter what they say."

"I was going to order that but I didn't want to damage you."

"You're so considerate. Let's see what we have for lunch."

Jack had thrown a bunch of stuff into a big brown paper bag; the kind with two handles made out of twisted brown paper that people used to use before plastic. I saw four juice boxes — two apple and two grape. There were a couple of premade shrimp cocktails, the ones in the weird shaped glasses with shrimp sitting in cocktail sauce and a pry off metal lid, a good size chunk of sharp cheddar and five or six pieces of fruit. He'd added a knife for the cheese and fruit, a couple of forks and spoons and several feet of paper towel.

"Quite an assortment."

"Yeah, I felt like Mary Poppins when I was putting it together."

"Grape or apple juice?"

"Apple sounds good."

I pulled out one of each and took the plastic straw from Jack's and tried to poke it through the foil. No such luck. I got a pen out of my bag and punched holes in both boxes, inserting the straws.

I held the apple juice up to Jack and he took a good sip. I had some of my grape, then put them both in the trash holder on the transmission hub.

One of the first things that became evident when June gave Jack her car was that there were no cup holders. When I told Daddy about it, he took me out to the garage and pulled this dusty thing off one of the shelves. It was made of plastic and had an open box about five inches deep by six inches wide and four inches from back to front. In front of the box were two cup holders molded into the plastic. They weren't adjustable, just a couple of circles an inch and a half deep that would hold Coke cans still. There was a hinged door that didn't snap shut anymore between them that had a compartment big enough for a wallet or a couple of packs of cigarettes and a Zippo. The whole thing was stabilized by flaps on the sides of the container like flat bean bags.

Jack was very protective of his trash container. You could use it but you'd better clean it up if you knew what was good for you. One time on the way home from karate, Mary was eating Hershey's Kisses and just kept throwing wrappers in there. She was going somewhere soon after we got home and took off to take her shower, leaving a couple of inches of wrappers behind. Jack just picked it off the hump and went into her room and turned it upside down over her bed, showering Dino with foil Kisses wrappers. Dino had great fun playing with them and by the time Mary got back in her room they were all over the place. Mary got pretty good at picking up after herself after that.

I took a sheet of the paper towels and curled it over the top of Jack's shirt, making an improvised bib. Then I opened one of the shrimp cocktails and speared a couple, holding them up to Jack's mouth. He took them off the fork and then it was my turn to eat a forkful.

"We need to go up to San Francisco one of these days, Jack."

"Why? What's in San Francisco?"

"Shrimp."

"Better than this?"

"Much. Daddy took me up there last year when he had to go to a medical conference. We walked to the wharf one night and bought a pound of shrimp and a loaf of sourdough bread that was still warm. He got some cocktail sauce, a tub of butter and a 2 liter bottle of Coke to wash it all down.

"We went out to the end of this pier and sat with our legs hanging over the edge and watched the sun set while we ate. There were all these boats and a lot of them had lights. Every so often you'd hear a splash and could see a fish jump out of the water if you were fast enough. We just sat there and talked and relaxed and made pigs of ourselves. We even had a belching contest."

"Really! Who won that?"

"Oh, Daddy, of course. He's a big man, got lots of diaphragm. Besides, I'm just sweet, innocent little girl."

Jack snorted.

"Say what you will, that was one of our best times. Daddy has always been so busy. I had to really twist his arm to get him to take me up there with him. Most of my time was spent in the hotel room while he went to his conference, and most of our meals were with other doctors he knew and they all talked shop. But that day we just left the hotel late in the afternoon and didn't get back till almost midnight. That made all the sitting around by myself worth it."

"It took that long to eat your shrimp?"

"No. We ate, we talked, we looked at the boats and the stars, then we just walked around the town for a few hours, took the trolley just so we could say we took it, checked out a couple of museums, stuff like that. Just Daddy and me."

"I hope I always have time for our kids."

"Me too. I'll remind you if you forget. And you can do the same to me."

He looked at me and said, "You've got a deal," then puckered his lips. I leaned over and kissed him.

"It's funny, Jack. We're talking like it's a done deal, us having kids. We've never said anything about it before. We've never even talked seriously about getting married."

"I kind of figured we would. Not right away, but someday. All my daydreams of the future include you in them. That's not a problem, is it?"

I wrapped around his arm and kissed him on the cheek, then pulled him to me so our cheeks were together. "No, Jack. No problem. I can just move up from hoping we'll be together forever to planning on it."

We were off the freeway and on the main drag to the college. They had an electronic message sign and it was flashing about the playoffs in the midst of other announcements about the next concert being presented by the music department, the drama department's tryouts for "Our Town" and the due date for registration for the next semester.

We turned into the parking lot and Jack slowed down at the booth, rolling down his window. An attendant came over and Jack told him I was in the tournament and asked where the locker room was. The guard pointed over the roof of our car and told us where to go after going up the stairs, then he pointed over to a section we could park in.

Jack thanked the guard, then turned to me. "You better get going. You have less than ten minutes. I'll park and make my way over to the gym."