Chapter 20: Taking Charge

John

Bloody hell! You leave those two by themselves for a few days and shit hits the fan again. Apparently my ranting had grown in volume a bit too much and Rhonda came into my office to calm me down.

“What have they done this time?” she asked. She didn’t have to guess whom I was on about, considering she had passed several calls from Germany through to my office.

“For a change, nothing, at least not recently,” I said and noticed her confused look. “Well, an American Olympic champion, who originally came from Germany hasn’t gone unnoticed since she arrived to look after her sister. Apparently her scumbag parents decided to use that interest in her to sell the whole sordid story of her teenage pregnancy to the yellow press.”

“Fucking hell!” Rhonda hissed as her face adopted a look of sheer panic. “Where is Mark?!”

“Frank, his father, kept him from doing something stupid. He was hell-bent on getting his hands on a bat and wanted to redecorate their faces.”

“Jesus!”

“Don’t worry, he’s being looked after. Frank drove him straight to Emden, where Meri is keeping an eye on him.”

Somewhat relieved, Rhonda sat down. “And what do we do now?”

“Bill is on his way to Germany anyway, so I’m taking a ride with him. One of our corporate lawyers worked for the JAG Corps at Rammstein air base, didn’t he?”

“Trent Myers, yes,” Rhonda answered.

“That means he should be fluent in German and have more than a passing familiarity with German law as well,” I speculated. “Frank wants to sue them to kingdom come, which means we better have someone supporting him who keeps our interests in scope as well.”

“Good idea,” Rhonda said and turned to go. “I’ll send for Myers, and give my regards to Bill.”

Mark

Meri collapsed into a pile on the cold floor. With no furniture other than a lonely fridge, a small table and a telephone to decorate the house, the wall had had to do for support.

“You know,” Meri said, still gasping for air. “Jeez, Mark. You weren’t supposed to take it literally.”

“How many ways are there to interpret ‘if you want to pummel something, there’s a pussy who hasn’t gotten any for a while.’?”

“Smart ass.”

“It was either listening to you lecture me, after Frank had already done so for all the seven hours from Berlin to here, or fucking the brains out of a blond bombshell. I admit, it was a tricky choice,” I claimed ‘innocently’.

“Okay, you had your fun, now help me up or my tits will freeze off.”

“We can’t have that,” I conceded. I helped her stand up and put a jacket around her naked torso. Some of the clothes she had been wearing were no longer usable, or even in one piece for that matter.

“It’s not like you were an unwilling participant. I even dare say, eager,” I reminded her while she was fishing some new garments out of her duffle bag.

“I’ve missed two weekend sleep-overs,” she argued. “My hand can only help me so much.”

“Besides, you can save yourself the lecture,” I assured her. “Not only has Frank spent half a day spelling out the facts to me, he’s also letting his lawyers have a field day with them. Somehow that’s even more satisfying than administering a good ol’ beating.”

“Good,” Meri said, putting on a bra, quite deliberately slowly. “That means we can actually concentrate on putting some furniture in these two shacks, and if you’re a good boy and help a lot, I might even blow you incoherent as a reward.”

“I’ll be on my best behavior, ma’am.”

Lydia

Bea and I were in stitches after I told her about Mark’s grand entrance in our new homes. Meri had told me every little detail about it on the phone.

“It’s so great to hear you laugh again,” I said. “But at the same time, I’m worried.”

“Because I’m not a hysterical wreck, crying all day?” my sister asked back.

“Well, not that extreme, but in essence yes. You certainly took it better than Mark or I.”

Bea shook her head. “I didn’t. You just didn’t see me at my low point. And if it wasn’t for Mark’s idea to put Jenny and me into this room, I would be a lot worse now.”

“Figures,” I said, carefully.

“Look, Lydia, I’ve known for years that this could happen. It is after all a dangerous job. It might sound silly, but I wasn’t really afraid that Rita could die doing her job. She had always been very clear about that. My fear had always been she could die before she managed to save anyone. Well, he have living proof that she did save people. And knowing that this little girl lives because Rita sacrificed herself gives me more solace than anything else. She didn’t die a senseless death.”

“And you were there to help her with it,” I said, tears welling up. “In a sense she didn’t die alone.”

“Now you’re starting to understand it,” Bea told me and he hugged each other tight.

Our propensity for laughing out loud and crying in each other’s arms just moments later was a sign that we badly needed some quiet time.

Meri

I started to understand why men hate shopping. Mind you, for me walking endlessly through a furniture shop the size of Los Angeles county is what I call ‘having a good time’, especially when you’re told not to be too skimpy as long as you keep it below a million Deutschmarks. Try telling your wife that and watch her leave a contrail.

Both Lydia and I are runners. Our feet are used to working overtime. Not so the ones of poor Mark. By the time we were back and had unloaded the few items that weren’t pending delivery the next day, he was practically waddling.

True to my promise I treated him to a nice, gentle blowjob. I’ll probably never be as good at it as Lydia, but if his cross-eyed look was anything to go by, he certainly appreciated the effort.

“Great, now I can neither think nor walk straight,” were his last words before he fell down on one of the mattresses we had bought and was practically instantly asleep.

I made sure he was tucked in and went to the living room to deliver my daily phone report to Lydia.

Bea

Obviously tired of constantly calling Lydia to the nurse’s office and vacating it for privacy, the nurses had lobbied to get a phone put in my room. What would be a no-brainer in the Western part of Germany was still not common place in the East, as even three years after the re-unification, the phone network still wasn’t up to Western standard.

From what I could make out from my sister’s talk to her friend, poor Mark had been tortured with a day-long shopping trip, but royally rewarded for it. I could imagine what the reward was, considering the two youngsters’ antics the day before.

I could definitely commiserate with my poor nephew. Rita had always mocked me that I was basically a man when it came to shopping. I knew what I needed, went to where it was in the shop, got it, paid for it, and was done with the whole experience. By that time my better half would still have been mulling over which color of shopping basket would go best with her jacket.

This memory made me tear up a bit and Lydia sent me a concerned look. I waved to say that everything’s fine, so she could continue her telephone chat.

Mark

I woke up quite refreshed, and my feet no longer felt like they were going to rot off. That was a good thing, as I would oversee a dozen of handymen putting up all the furniture we had bought the day before. And I would be doing so by myself as Meri would be going to neighboring Netherlands to visit her future training center and team.

Still running on mental emergency lighting, I made my way downstairs to find out if Meri had a coffee ready to jump start my basic bodily functions. Considering we had brought back three crates full of kitchen utensils and appliances, surely something was in it to make a good brew.

I found my hopes fulfilled when I trundled into the kitchen on reserve energy, where a way too cheery Meri handed me a veritable bucket of finest Colombian bean soup. While my system was slowly going through the booting up process, she overloaded me with way too many information on what I was supposed to keep an eye on while the craftsmen were in. I stopped her mid sentence.

“Honey, right now it takes all my capacity to walk upright and not to pee on the floor. Can we talk about it after I inhaled the contents of this here bucket?”

“Jeez, you’re just like Lydia,” she ribbed me and laughed.

“We’re somewhat related, I think,”

She shook her head and left me to being a caveman for the time being. Since the kitchen table and the chairs were still in the back of a truck heading our way, she had prepared some makeshift breakfast and put her offerings on the interior window sill.

I had switched to mental auto-pilot after what felt like walking 20 miles the day before, so I wasn’t quite aware how many shops we had been through, but to my great relief, one of them had been a grocery store and I was low-energy elated to find a plate of scrambled eggs waiting for me – German style – with lots of bacon and onions. It looked like Meri had taken cooking lessons from my better half.