Chapter 14: Moving Day

Thursday, August 22, 1985

After breakfast, I went ahead and placed the order for a hot tub. It would take several weeks to get here, at minimum, and we would need them to install it. Still, it was likely going to be awesome, and I could see some really nice fall and winter parties with it.

We had a good head start on being ‘social’ by now. This year might cement it that much more.

Once that was done, Cammie, Mel, Jas (since she was still in charge of MNMS), and I got together in the downstairs living room.

Cammie pulled out a set of fairly professional business plans. I suspected they wouldn’t pass muster with a professor, not yet, but that was because a professor would have expected weeks of polishing, not two days of fairly frantic effort.

With that said, they had covered their bases. The properties would pay for themselves and appreciate. Maintenance costs looked reasonable. Cammie knew enough about home inspections from her classwork to know what to look for.

Of course, professional inspections and appraisals would happen during the purchase process. If anything was wrong then, the deals might collapse, or Camel might pay less. There was no way to know until they started the ball rolling.

I asked a few questions in places, but pretty much just gave my approval. After that, we talked a bit about how things should go from here on. Camel could (and should!) do its own thing. Asking any of us for thoughts was always appropriate, but Camel had funds and could do what it wanted with its funds. I had faith in Cammie as the leader of Camel, and that was it.

It was clearly an emotional moment for Cammie, and there was a lot of hugging and more than a few tears. Still, I wasn’t doing it because it would make Cammie’s day, week, month, or even her year. It was because I trusted Cammie to be, or rather to become, Real Estate Queen Cammie. If she didn’t, we would figure that out. The path to her becoming that was to let her do it, though. She knew much more about real estate than I did, after all. This was her baby, not mine.

Cammie stood to make a commission on each transaction. She initially planned to roll her commission back into Camel, but I (and Mel, thankfully) convinced her to take two-thirds of it (which would amount to $1,600 or so) for herself. That would put her in a much better place, and was appropriate for the President of a company that owned three rental properties.

I’d been trying to make that happen, and mostly had, but it was a work in progress. Cammie was the odd one out, and that was always at least a potential problem. After all, Mom and Dad kicked in some money even when we didn’t want them to. So did Camille and Francis, Tony and Jean, and the Rileys. It was hard to turn them down and make it stick. We obviously had money, but ... we were college students, they were parents, and that’s how things are supposed to work.

We wouldn’t just return the money to them. Instead, we’d do nice things for them in the future. We would have, anyway, but this was just a bit of additional motivation.

Cammie, though, had none of that, so finding ways to make her more at parity with the rest of us continued to be a priority. She shouldn’t be left out, nor should she feel like she was mooching off of us.

I should have expected it, but I didn’t. When we finished, Mel went upstairs first. I spotted her making a thumbs-up sign.

As Cammie reached the top of the stairs, there was a cheer from Angie and Paige, one Jas and I took up quickly. Mel was caught between wanting to cheer and realizing she was as included in those being cheered on as she was doing the cheering.

Angie and Paige had made a house-shaped cake with a camel made of frosting on it. The camel was perhaps a little ... odd. Neither of them were serious artists, after all.

Still, everyone loved it. It was a big deal — Camel’s first foray into property ownership. After all, when we’d bought this house, neither Cammie nor Mel had known we were doing so, nor that we had the resources for there to be a Camel Properties.

As the saying goes, ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.’ For Camel, this was, perhaps, that step. Jas made sure to document it with a few photos of the cake cutting and the business plan.

However, maybe that step was Cammie’s first day of real estate agent classes. Mel had a photo of that. Or maybe it was that first meeting when Cammie made her intentions clear. We had no photos of that.

Like Mom and Dad, who could never decide when their first date was, it really didn’t matter. This was a step, and a big step. It might as well officially be the first step. It would do as well as anything else.

After cake, and then something more substantial as a real lunch, we headed to several stores shopping for things for the backyard. What we wound up with ranged wildly, from a supply of plastic chairs and tables that would be great for larger parties to one nice wooden table with eight matching chairs. We had a number of loungers, too. They were nice, if not exceptional.

The grill we had was plenty good enough, but I splurged on a nice (for 1985!) smoker. It would be fun to try smoking brisket and pork again. I’d done that much, much later. Never an expert, but I knew enough to be dangerous, at least.

Several new coolers and various other supplies finished off the main shopping. We also bought a stockpile of Solo cups, paper plates, plastic utensils, and the like. Something like Sam’s Club would have been invaluable here, but they weren’t even in Houston yet. They would be within a year, though. Mom and Dad would join, and we might split a membership with them or something similar.

In the meantime, K-Mart helped. It wasn’t ideal, by any means, but it helped.

We weren’t going to have a party for another week — our first one was planned for Sunday the 1st — but getting everything in order was good.

Friday, August 23, 1985

The big day was finally here. Candice called us around ten, letting us know that the three cars (the Matthews’, the Doyles’, and Sherry’s) were hitting the road, full of their assorted ‘stuff.’

We told them we’d be ready and would serve them lunch. Dinner would be at The Grapevine, where we already had a reservation for the whole party.

As far as I could remember, this would be my first time seeing Cindy and Danny, Candice’s siblings, since that fateful night in 1981. Cindy would be fifteen now, Danny fourteen. She’d started at Memorial last fall; he would start there this fall. Time flies, sometimes, doesn’t it?

We did a quick pass through the house. Everything was still in order from the last round of cleaning, but it never hurt to check.

I double-checked the basement door lock and made sure two keys were set aside for Candice and Sherry. It was up to them to decide if their parents should have keys. I doubted they would do that, but they could if they wanted.

We’d shifted to the configuration where the door into the basement apartment was always locked. They could come and go into the basement living room, and from there up to the kitchen, anytime they wanted, but their apartment was off-limits for the rest of us, as it should be. All of the apartments had their own keys, but none of us had ever locked our doors. We weren’t going to start now, even with Candice and Sherry having the run of the house.

I had made sure anything particularly ‘unusual’ (P.C.’s Limited reports, for instance, or bank statements with big numbers) were locked away in my file cabinet or the safe. The odds were high that Candice and Sherry would never even know there was a safe.

We were hanging out in the living room at noon when the cars rolled up. Angie and I were out the door right away, with the others trailing behind a bit.

Erwin, Sandy, Cindy, and Danny all emerged from the first car. Surprising me, Cindy zipped over and hugged me tightly.

“I still remember that night,” she said. “Really well. Thank you, so much!”

Danny had caught up.

“From me, too,” he said, shaking my hand. “You’re ... just ... what you said, about Candice being precious and praying for her. I ... just ... it’s meant a lot.”

I smiled and said, “Thanks, both of you. My reward has been seeing Candice thriving. That’s all I ever wanted.”

Sandy and Erwin came over, apologizing for Cindy and Danny in the way parents do when they know no one’s done anything that actually needs to be apologized for.

I shook Erwin’s hand and shared a hug with Sandy.

By then, Sherry’s parents (whose names I didn’t know) had gotten out of their car. They had no other children with them, though I thought (but wasn’t sure) Sherry had an older sister.

Sherry and Candice emerged from Sherry’s car, smiling.

By this time, Jas, Angie, Paige, Cammie, and Mel were all meeting and greeting, too.

The Doyles came over.

“Hi!” the guy said. “Fred Doyle, Sherry’s dad. And my wife Ellie.”

“Steve Marshall,” I said.

He chuckled.

“Oh, I’ve heard your name a few dozen times! Nothing wrong with that. All good stuff!”

“Very good!” Ellie said, smiling. “Especially since...”

Her eyes flicked to Candice and Sherry.

“Not many boys we’d let her room with, but this is pretty much unique,” Fred said.

Erwin chuckled and said, “You and me both! It all works because of who it is.”

“Let’s get the tour underway,” Cammie said, grinning. For her, it was a chance to break out her real estate agent skills, I’m sure.

We headed around to the basement entry and started the tour from there. The Matthews and the Doyles both seemed very impressed right away with the fencing and entryway. I’m sure they had seen pictures, but in person is always better.

Erwin and Ellie had both lived in houses with basements before, but neither Sandy nor Fred had. They were as surprised as we’d been to find one in College Station. Cammie told the story we’d come to believe was mostly accurate — that at least the foundation of the house and some of the very basic structure dated back a long time, back to when some Northerner professor insisted on a basement. It had been redone so many times that most of that was gone, but the basement remained.

They loved the way the basement connected to the rest of the house. Fire code required the second exit, honestly, but they just saw it as a really nice feature. No one really wants to mention ‘fire code’ while showing off their child’s new residence, anyway.

They all got a bit of a laugh out of the movie posters in the basement living room. Sandy and Ellie were openly jealous of the kitchen, though. Enough so that I was slightly worried for Erwin and Fred. They might be financing kitchen updates sometime soon. If a bunch of college sophomores had better appliances than their wives, something was clearly wrong!

On the other hand, they laughed at our adorably mismatched (and/or ‘just plain ugly’) living room furniture. It had grown on us (and not, as Paige had said more than once, ‘like a mold’), but it was still very much ‘college student furniture.’ We would almost certainly replace it before we moved — maybe this year — but with quality used furniture. If and when we rented this place to others, we didn’t want the furniture to matter. It needed to be durable and comfortable, but people were going to spill stuff on it. New furniture for renters would be ridiculous.

They loved the rest of the house, too. It was abundantly clear that everyone had their own spaces and no one was going to be on top of each other. Candice and Sherry had more room than in a dorm or many apartments and plenty of room to have friends over. They had a really nice backyard (Ellie, in particular, loved Cammie and Mel’s flower beds) and everything was convenient to campus.