Chapter 107: Birthday Surprises

Friday, June 21, 1985

We didn’t do much all day, but I did call Kyle and tell him there would be gambling winnings to report. I think he almost had a minor fit before catching my phrasing and making me explain. When I explained these were Angie’s, and they were legal, he breathed a sigh of relief and asked me not to make his blood pressure do what it had just done. After that, he asked me to tell Ang to send the gambling information directly to Martin. This didn’t need attorney-client privilege, so he was quite happy to be out of the loop.

His blood pressure was going to take a hit sooner or later, though. We had already agreed Angie would be the one to break the bad news, though.

Honestly, it was ... complicated. Martin was doing Angie’s taxes as a favor to MNMS. Kyle was MNMS’s lawyer. Kyle was not Angie’s lawyer, however, nor was Martin Angie’s accountant.

Both of them had plenty of right to call me on the carpet when needed. Angie? She was in a different category. Kyle might suggest that she retain her own lawyer, but he would probably be joking. For now, at least.

Cammie called late in the day. Judge Collison had ruled on the protective order. Since Joseph and Magnolia hadn’t responded within the allotted time, she issued the order. A copy would go to them, to Cammie, and to the College Station Police Department, the Bryan Police Department (we didn’t live in Bryan, but it made sense), A&M’s campus police, and Hedwig Village and Memorial Villages’ police departments. That pretty much covered our bases.

Sunday, June 23, 1985

This had been the most ‘idle’ weekend I’d had in a long time. Nothing to do, and plenty of people to do it with.

Ang, Paige, Jas, and I went with Mom and Dad to church. After that, the six of us, plus Tony and Jean, went to see ‘Fletch’. Camille and Francis opted out, saying it didn’t look like their cup of tea. It was about as good as I remembered it being, which is to say pretty good. I remembered nearly none of it, which was probably a bonus.

The much more important part of seeing ‘Fletch’ was seeing a trailer for ‘Back To The Future’. That got everyone excited, both to see it themselves and on my behalf.

Heck, I was excited, too! Everything in the trailer looked exactly as I remembered it. Jess wasn’t in it, but why would she have been? That part of the movie was hardly trailer-worthy.

I didn’t get any more questions, because everyone knew I couldn’t know the answers to them.

Even if I probably did.

Monday, June 24, 1985

Just after we got up, Angie pulled me aside and told me she wanted to talk with Mom for a while. That was probably true, but I thought Angie also suspected that we’d forgotten her birthday and needed presents in a hurry, since she’d been with us for weeks and we hadn’t had a chance to shop.

She was wrong, though. I already had a present for Angie. After talking with Paige, I’d gotten her a new Walkman (still the cassette version). Her old one was having issues, and it was time for a replacement.

In it, she would find a mixtape. It was, in fact, a rule-violating mix tape, but no one but me would ever know that (at least unless Angie ran into a really interesting guy who wasn’t even working in the film industry yet). Well, no one but our little group would know it, and they wouldn’t get it.

In other words, it was a bit of a time bomb and an in-joke that could work only among our little group.

I’d recreated the soundtrack from a mid-2010s superhero movie, or at least as best as I could remember it. I strongly suspected some of the songs were from its sequel. Didn’t matter; they were awesome songs, and that was the point of the thing. Heck, it’d been called ‘Awesome Mix’ in the movie.

This one was called ‘Awesome Mix For Angie’.

God help me if it led to an alien outlaw arriving on Earth and taking her and the mix tape with them. I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen, but who knows? Stranger things had happened to us, after all.

Still, it was a perfectly normal 1980s thing to do, and only our little group would also know there was a sneaky hidden meaning. One that would take three decades to reveal.

Who knows? One day Jess might wind up working with that ‘really interesting guy.’ That would be cool. Awesome, even!

Paige’s gift (a tennis bracelet with their names inscribed inside of it — one she said Angie had loved while window-shopping months ago) and Jas’s (a photo collage of a bunch of photos of Angie, featuring Paige but also with me, Jas, Marshall, Meg, Steffie, Mom and Dad, Candice, Cammie and Mel, and Janet and Lizzie) both were also things that had obviously required a bunch of work. We couldn’t possibly have bought them today.

Instead, we bought silly gag gifts. Socks from Paige, a four-function pocket calculator from me, and cheap costume jewelry earrings from Jas. They were all considerably worse than things she already had.

We’d clue in the parents (including Tony and Jean, who were joining us this year), then give her the gag gifts. After she’d finished pretending to be thrilled, I’d ‘run to the bathroom’ and come back with the real gifts.

It would only work once, but it only had to work once.

Though, actually, it would probably work twice. Not this year, but in a decade? Angie would think we couldn’t possibly be so crazy as to pull the same stunt twice. That might make us ‘crazy like a fox’ for doing just that.

After we’d done our gift shopping, we picked up Angie to go to a couple of used book and record stores. Angie’s pager went off while we were driving. The number that came up was familiar: Jane’s. Angie called her back from a payphone, right away.

The news wasn’t particularly unexpected and was generally good. Sharon’s therapist had gotten back to us. Sharon continued to be a ‘model prisoner’ and was slowly getting some privileges back.

The delay, this time, turned out to be Sharon. She’d hemmed and hawed on what to say for about two months, apparently.

The message, in the end, was interesting. Paige wrote it down as Angie spoke it: ‘Thank you for believing in me, my daughter. I know — all too well! — that I wronged you greatly. I can never make up for what I did, nor for what I didn’t do that I should have. All I can do is apologize and try to be a better person. Your support means so much to me, especially since I know I did nothing to deserve it. It’s hard being where I am now in my life. There is little to look forward to, yet I can’t give up. Please bear with me as I try to figure out what I can do with my life.’

Angie promised to figure out what to say as soon as she could. How fast that would be was a question, but it would be soon, I thought. No one wanted it hanging over us during the trip, after all.

We talked about it for a while. Everyone agreed: ‘There is little to look forward to’ was both honest and not encouraging. From Sharon’s perspective, there was little to look forward to. Her odds of securing a boyfriend through sex and mooching off of him were likely greatly reduced. She was in her mid-40s, had lived a rough life for at least the last fifteen years, and had a criminal record and would be on parole for quite a while.

That left honest work. For a woman with few marketable skills, that wasn’t the most enticing prospect. Sober, honest work, too. That ‘sober’ was a big deal. Sharon had been (for the most part) ‘sober’ for the past five years, but much of that had been forced, and (in Angie’s estimation) she might well have been able to get the occasional hit.

The past year had been in far more strict conditions, though. She knew they’d catch her and that things wouldn’t go well.

Angie feared Sharon would do something to get herself incarcerated for real. As rough as prison life is, it’s predictable. You know what you’re going to do, things don’t vary a lot, and there are ways to get high if you really want to. At least, there are in most prisons.

For the most part, all we could do was support Angie in supporting Sharon. Things could go horribly wrong, but we wouldn’t cause that.

I was worried that things going horribly wrong would deeply hurt Angie, though. When she’d just hated Sharon, maybe she would have been fine if things had turned bad. Once she’d moved on, though, and found some level of forgiveness, seeing Sharon flounder and fail would hurt.

After shopping, we made a fairly quick stop by the AAA office. Angie and I each converted quite a bit of cash into American Express Traveler’s Cheques. While some European hotels would cash a US personal check, and there were American Express offices that would do so as well, traveler’s checks were the way to go. They were effectively theft-proof, widely accepted, and had low fees.

Jas and I both spent the night at Mom and Dad’s with Paige and Angie. It made perfect sense; Paige wanted to wish her a happy birthday first thing in the morning, and Jas and I wanted to do so as soon as Angie was out of the bedroom.

Tuesday, June 25, 1985

Dad did something I couldn’t remember him ever doing before. Perhaps he had and I’d missed it, but I suspected this was the first time.

He’d taken the morning off, having checked with his usual Tuesday early morning customers either yesterday or Friday (and not telling me, though he probably told Mom), and hung out in the house until Angie got up.

Thus, it was all four of us, plus Paige (who was likely repeating herself), shouting ‘Happy Birthday!’ to Angie when she emerged.

She both blushed and burst into tears, but was also beaming.

“You ... you all ... this ... it’s...” she said.

Then she cleared her throat a little and finished, saying, “Thank you! Thank you so much!”

Everyone hugged her, starting with Paige and going from there.

In terms of birthdays, Angie was the last but in no way the least.

Dad left after that. He still planned to call on his later-morning customers, which made sense.

Mom, meanwhile, had prepared Angie’s favorites, and we gathered around the bigger dining table to have breakfast. We were interrupted a bit later by Cammie and Mel, who wanted to say ‘Happy Birthday’ as well.

Most of the rest of the day was quieter. We hung out around the house, talking to Mom or just doing our own thing.

Once Dad was home, and had had a moment to wind down, we headed to Brennerman’s for dinner. It had become a staple, though I had vague memories (courtesy of the ‘me’ who had lived in this body before I got here) of Angie picking a seafood restaurant for her fourteenth birthday.

Of course, we’d also been to Giordano’s a time or two.

Still, this was a favorite. We had a table near the window (also a favorite), and Angie skipped the menu. She knew her favorites there, too.

We all told funny stories — ones where we were laughing with Angie, not at her, naturally.

It wasn’t all funny, though. Paige spoke, rather emotionally, about the first birthday she’d spent with Angie, two years ago at Andrew and Millie’s. They had still been ‘new’ and Paige had been a bit unsure of things. I hadn’t known how much that birthday had mattered to Paige, and I’m not sure anyone else (including Angie) had, either, but now we all did.

Jas spoke about how she was eternally grateful to Angie for suggesting I ask her out. I think everyone at the table teared up at that — even the Seilers. That one suggestion had, over time, made a world of difference. At least four couples who were together today (Gene and Sue, Amit and Sheila, Jas and me, and Angie and Paige) might not be together if not for that. Jess might not be our friend or in show business. The ripples went on, and on, and on.

I spoke about how much my deepening connection with Angie had meant to me after my bike accident, and how I could never have made the changes I’d made at the start of my freshman year at Memorial without her. Angie sniffled a lot at that. So did Jas and Paige. Mom did, too, but (of course) she heard it differently. Her version was ‘true,’ but Angie, Jas, and Paige knew what I was really saying. I would, literally, not be the man I was today without Angie, and I knew it. I might be a very good man, possibly, but I would be a hugely different man.

Mom and Dad spoke about their experiences getting to know, and coming to love, their niece-turned-daughter, and Tony and Jean spoke of how they’d come to love their future daughter-in-law.

Angie talked about Frank, naturally. She wouldn’t be here without him, notwithstanding that she shared no blood with him (something that was still very much a secret), and she remembered him, as did all of us who’d known him. Perhaps he was in another world, living another life, but perhaps he was ‘up there,’ somewhere, watching us with a smile. Knowing Frank, it would definitely be a smile.

Sharon, too, got a mention. I couldn’t remember Angie mentioning her at a birthday before, but she’d gotten to where she could. It was a simple mention, simply saying she wouldn’t be here without the woman who’d borne her. She hoped that woman was, somewhere, remembering her daughter’s birthday, and was in a place where she could celebrate it, just a bit.