Variation on a Theme, Book 6
Copyright© 2024 by Grey Wolf
Chapter 98: They Say I’m Crazy, But I Have a Good Time
Sunday, February 16, 1986
Memorial Drive Lutheran had several advantages, as it turned out. It was easier to get to, some of the hymns were notably less dour and more uplifting, and Pastor Granson welcomed Angie and Paige very warmly, even commenting on their engagement rings and wishing them every happiness.
The first two wouldn’t have mattered to Mom and Dad in the short term. In the long term, I thought the second one would. ‘Dour’ wears on you. I had found Mom’s funeral to be, in a word, ‘miserable.’ The hymns weren’t ones that shared a happy message about the glories of heaven for those who go there, they were ones that talked about the wages of sin being death and about Jesus being the champion who overcame death. It was much more ‘theological’ — belief in God can get you to Heaven, thanks to Jesus — rather than ‘practical’ — Heaven is a cool place and we should be happy that someone’s there.
There was nothing uplifting about that service, and Mom herself wasn’t so much as a cardboard cutout. Besides her name itself being mentioned a few times, there wasn’t so much as a ‘beloved wife, and mother of Steve’ type of description of her. They’d said nothing about her life, nor about how much she loved her family, how fierce she could be when she needed to be, her sense of humor, her love of a good book — nothing about her at all. It was just theology, and that theology was dark and grim: the Church beset on all sides by death and wickedness, but triumphing through faith in Christ.
Dad had approved of that service. He was the only one that mattered, but I thought he loved it because it was what he expected. He wasn’t looking for them to say anything nice about Helen. That’s not what they did.
I was looking for that, and I didn’t get what I wanted. And, no matter how much he approved, I thought some part of him must have been aware that he himself was the one filling in the deficiencies in it.
Someplace less dour, and more about celebrating life, would do them good, I thought. It was closer to how they lived life day to day. The Dad of my first life hadn’t been one to condemn others for their choices any more than this one was. He might not vote for someone, but he wouldn’t say they were ‘wicked’ or ‘evil’ or anything of the sort. He saw the good in people.
So did Mom. She always had.
Unitarianism would likely always be a bridge too far for them. Maybe two bridges, even. They wouldn’t mind that we were Unitarians, though, nor that we would be married in a Unitarian ceremony.
After the service, we met several other families. All of them also seemed happy to welcome Angie and Paige, and no one was hiding the relationship. We didn’t talk to any gay members, but Dad pointed out one couple from a distance.
Since we were in the Memorial Villages this time, lunch turned out to be a pleasant surprise. We went to Cameron’s Barbecue. I’d been there a few times in this life, most notably when surprising Jess with her first-ever barbecue date. It was unexpectedly poignant as well, and I had to take a second to make sure I didn’t react. Dad and Mom, then just Dad, had taken me, my then-wife, and the kids here several times. It was one of just a few restaurants I could say that about.
Oh, it hadn’t been important, not really. My kids, my ex-wife, and I had sat with them around the table at their house, too, and we ate at that table all the time in this life.
But it was a relatively rare crossover. The new family sitting down to dinner in a place the old family once had. They couldn’t know that, but I did.
The feeling quickly passed, and the food was as good as ever. I didn’t think it was better, perhaps, but it was definitely good.
And it would, almost certainly, still be here over thirty years from now. Many businesses around it wouldn’t be. Whether Mom and Dad would still live in this area was a much bigger question, and the answer to that might be a decade or more in the making.
We hit the road about two and were back home by four. We had exams one week from now, so next week would ramp up the study groups and get things going.
But it would also involve Amy. Probably not Darla, given our every-other-week rule, but I would certainly check in on her.
The next date with Darla might well involve something ‘new.’ Whether that would be her ass, more with Jas, or something else was still unknown. Still, we were more than halfway through February. As early in the semester as it was, we had things to do. I didn’t want time to get away from us and leave things unfinished that she really wanted to try.
Not to mention, some of them sounded really fun to me, too!
Monday, February 17, 1986
Tonight would be an Amy night, but only ‘sort of.’ Cepheid Variable had an interesting event on the calendar — an open forum about ‘Who is the greatest living science fiction author?’ Amy had opinions, ones she decided to save for the event since we only had a little time to talk.
Mel wanted to go, and so did Angie and Paige. Jas and Cammie were sitting this one (and likely all Cepheid Variable club meetings) out. They were both looking for their own set of activities to concentrate on. None of us were all that involved, yet, but we didn’t necessarily have to be.
Date-wise, Amy and I were planning to do something on Friday. Darla and I were taking the week off, as planned. Neither of us was happy about it, but we agreed: it was the right thing to do. We were getting closer to the point where each date might make the inevitable split harder.
We had a call from Megan when we got home. As with last year, she was coming up here to support Calvin (and see us) for the A&M vs UH basketball game next Monday. We let her know we would be thrilled to see her and would do whatever we could to work with her schedule.
There were two other messages waiting. The first was from Paula. She said she still had a few more i’s to dot and t’s to cross. Reading between the lines, I think she was working on bulletproofing everything so that Cammie’s parents were entirely cut out.
Per my understanding of the law, that wasn’t as easy to do as one would expect. A lot of clauses in wills have to do with how long someone predeceases someone else. Order matters. If I left some money to Cammie (which, currently, I was), and Cammie died after I died but before my will was executed, what happened? Would Cammie’s will (which left her assets to Mel, then some to the Rileys, some to us, and most to charity) decide the matter? Or would Cammie’s will be out of the picture? If so, could we get into a corner case where Texas law decided the matter? That might mean the money would go to Cammie’s parents, something none of us wanted.
Perhaps it wasn’t that hard, but that sounded like the issue. It might have been more about bulletproofing some other part of the documents. The law connects parents and adult children in all sorts of ways, and Cammie needed all of those to be blocked.
The second message was from Michael, and I returned it quickly while the others returned Megan’s call. He had news. He and I, as individuals, could buy into the Microsoft IPO at a 25% discount to the intended opening price ($21/share, so ours was $15.75/share) and could purchase up to 1% of the planned offering. That was more plausible than I first thought. 1% of the offering would be 25,000 shares, making the maximum just under $400,000.
P.C.’s Limited itself could go up to 5% of the planned offering. In Angie’s opinion, that could net P.C.’s Limited in the neighborhood of $2 million in short-term profit. It amounted to Microsoft subsidizing the 386 development effort without actually spending any money (just sacrificing some of their funding).
Angie’s belief was that the stock had closed over $30 on the first day. That would nearly double our money. If we just acted like day traders, that might be a huge mistake, but we could, in theory, sell half, leaving us with 12,500 shares of Microsoft, valued at $200,000, and not be out anything. Angie’s guess was that it would appreciate to about $20 million in a decade.
Not the rate of return we’d gotten on P.C.’s Limited, but we might well never beat that. It was still a staggering return on what amounted to a ‘free money’ investment.
In fact, we would probably hold until near Black Monday, then sell. Our return would likely be higher, and we could hopefully buy back into Microsoft once the smoke cleared. Neither of us knew how badly Microsoft had fared, though. Maybe it wouldn’t be at a discount.
$400,000 was not easy, but we could do it. It would require liquidating a bunch of things — or taking out a loan on our existing stock holdings, which might be a much better idea.
Thank God for the mortgages, because there was no way we were doing this without them!
I advised Michael to buy (either personally, on behalf of P.C.’s Limited, or both if he could) as much as he could swing. It was too good of a deal to pass up. He sounded like he agreed. It might well be pocket change for post-IPO Michael, but it might also be a pool of quick money if he could make half a million in short-term profit.
We met at six, had dinner at the MSC, and then joined the Cepheid Variable meeting. Many of the usual suspects were named: Heinlein, Asimov, Niven, and many others. There was a surprisingly vocal contingent supporting L. Ron Hubbard, though I suspected their real reason was more about Scientology than about his now-resumed science fiction career. His recent books were, in my opinion, fairly decent page-turners (based on a forty-year-old memory of them), but they weren’t particularly great.
One group of people were upset that this hadn’t been a week earlier when Frank Herbert was still alive, and pushed for his son Brian in his stead. Brian was good enough, but I felt like he’d never really caught fire.
Another group of people were vocal supporters of Douglas Adams, and it was hard to blame them for that. His was an entirely different branch of science fiction, but one that meant a lot to many people.
Amy, unsurprisingly, wanted to make sure women were in the mix. While she supported Heinlein and Adams, in particular, they were already spoken for. Amy mostly talked about Ursula K. LeGuin, but she had a few others to mention. Cepheid Variable was, at most, maybe ten percent female, and Amy got a lot of support from the few women (much less than ten percent of tonight’s turnout) who had come out.
Amusingly, one of the female students who had come to this meeting, Martha Wells, had become a future (and celebrated) science fiction author herself in my first-life universe. Martha and Amy wound up deep in conversation for a while.
Whether that meant anything or not might never be clear, but it was probably a ripple. Pre-Steve Amy wouldn’t have gone to this meeting, not even with strong opinions on the subject. She just hadn’t been comfortable enough in groups of new people. With us here, and with her newfound confidence in herself in this sort of setting, she was a different person.
She wouldn’t need me, or any of us, at every meeting. Even without friends being there, now she knew she could do it. Once Amy knew she could do something, she would do it if she wanted to.
The organizers gave a plug for a Thursday-night event: learning how to run a 16mm film projector. They needed more projectionists for their events. Anyone who came would become a club member for free. It’s not as if the cost of joining was prohibitive (it was currently $5 a year), but it was a nice gesture. Mel was all over it, while the rest of us planned to pass. We might well join Mel for ‘The Day of the Dolphin’, though. They were showing it at 7:30. Also at 9:45, but we almost always went to the early showings, not being late-night people all that much. If we were up that late, we generally had other things to do. Things that involved privacy. ‘Rocky Horror’ was, of course, the most obvious exception.
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