Variation on a Theme, Book 7
Copyright© 2026 by Grey Wolf
Chapter 13: Covering Enough Bases
Saturday, August 2, 1986
Mom made us a fairly lavish breakfast. Once we finished, we asked Dad and her to join us in the living room.
“Another big talk, I think,” Mom said, chuckling and settling in.
“It is,” Angie said. “It could be one of the biggest, I think. Not the biggest — for me, that was Paige — but ... it’s big. For Steve, Jasmine might be bigger.”
“We saw Jasmine coming for a long time,” Mom said, chuckling. “Paige was a wonderful surprise. It was a big one, though. But maybe less than you thought it was.”
“People are always going to be bigger than money,” I said. “Or ... we think they are. Or should be.”
Dad smiled, looking touched.
“That’s always been my attitude. I’m not sure I’ve ever put it that way, but ... it still makes me feel good hearing it from you, Son.”
“We’ve always tried to listen,” I said.
“Even when you thought we weren’t,” Angie added.
That got Mom sniffling and Dad trying not to.
Before it got to be too much, Mom said, “Go on! What’s the big news this time?”
“We’ll kinda just go right to the big picture on the first one,” I said. “Except that I’ll preface it by saying no one’s done anything rash and our situation is, if anything, better than the last time we talked.”
They both nodded, and Mom smiled.
“The first piece of news, which is big, is: we — or, really, an LLC we own, and I can fill in the blanks on that — own the house in College Station outright.”
Dad blinked, and Mom’s jaw dropped.
“You ... you own your house? Outright?” Mom said.
“We do. Like I said, officially an LLC does. And I own the LLC. But it’s structured so everyone’s involved, even ahead of the weddings.”
Dad shook his head. “I should have known, maybe. I knew you cared for it as if you owned it or intended to. And ... I ... we, rather...”
He glanced at Mom, who smiled and nodded.
“ ... have always known you would do right by Jasmine and Paige. That matters quite a bit! Several of these conversations have had layers of letting us know that you don’t have any secrets from your fiancées. Which we think is a very good thing! If we hadn’t already thought you were mature beyond your years, that would have done it.”
“And the same for you, Jasmine and Paige,” Mom said. “The way you handle things is just as mature. It would be easy to see dollar signs, and I know neither of you does.”
“I see them!” Paige said, which got everyone chuckling. “It’s just not why.”
“And the same for me, obviously,” Jas said.
Dad smiled, shaking his head again. “Seriously, though. That’s a very nice house! Your investments must really be doing well.”
“Better than we can say,” I said. “That’s an interesting segue. We literally cannot talk about some things. We’re under a binding non-disclosure agreement. There will be a point when we can, but ... I don’t know exactly when. Sometime, down the road. And yes, again, all four of us are covered, so no secrets between us.”
Dad nodded, looking serious.
“We would, of course, never ask you to break a confidence. Your word is your bond, and you should always live up to that.”
“Thanks, Dad! Believe me, we knew you would feel that way,” Angie said. “That one just ... fell into our lap. Or ... well. I can say it did, but it’s connected to something we did very deliberately.”
“And that, we can talk about,” I said. “It’s been a long time, and we’ve kept hinting, but I think it might be time to reveal most of the rest of it.”
“I’m curious, of course!” Dad said. “We both are!”
“Very curious!” Mom said.
“That company in Austin I mentioned last time,” I said. “We’ll go ahead and name it. It’s an outfit called P.C.’s Limited.”
Dad’s eyes went wide. “Oh, my! I’ve read about them. That is not a small business! They’re on the scale of Compaq, pretty much. And Compaq is becoming a big deal in Houston!”
“I don’t think anyone would have believed us if we’d predicted their growth,” Angie said. “I’m really pretty good at this stuff, and I still underestimated it ridiculously.”
“And you’re invested in them how?” Mom asked.
“This part is ... not exactly secret, but ... quiet?”
They nodded.
“We had a chance to invest very early on, when their biggest problem was cash flow. At the time, the money we could put in made a huge difference. Now? It would be a tiny drop in the bucket. Right place, right time. P.C.’s Limited was started by a guy named Michael Dell, who was a year ahead of us at Memorial. I met him at those Apple Users Group meetings. He’s a business guy, really, not a computer guy. But so am I, as it turns out. He went to UT, but dropped out when his company hit a million in quarterly sales. Anyway, we became friends, and the four of us went up to Austin to visit at the right time. Our investment bought us a relatively small share of the company and that seat on the board of directors you already know about. The board seat was a non-issue for a while, but once they hired a president, someone had to fill it. And, since they don’t want the headache...”
Jas, Angie, and Paige all firmly shook their heads.
“That’s me.”
Dad blinked.
“That’s incredible!” he said. “And it comes right back to making the right friends and making good choices. Obviously, you took a big risk, but we knew that. Knowing your friend’s abilities would, hopefully, mitigate that. Not that we haven’t had friends who’ve made horrible financial decisions...”
Mom grimaced and nodded.
“ ... but it does help. And, obviously, it’s paying off for you.”
“As with any company, it’s tricky,” I said. “Growing pains and all of that. Still, we’re preferred creditors, and if the whole thing were liquidated, we would be well ahead.”
Dad said, “I’m curious as to how this happened. Meaning, financially. I would have thought the money from the accident settlement would have allowed you to invest or buy the house, but surely not both.”
Mom nodded along.
I’d figured this might come up. I wasn’t entirely happy with my answers — or, rather, the need to misdirect, obfuscate, and even outright lie — but they were ‘good enough.’ Hopefully.
“The money from the accident more than covered the investment,” I said. “Oh, it was a substantial portion of the settlement, and we would definitely have been sad if it hadn’t worked out, but you knew that. That left money over, though. We had the house in our sights from the start. Having the scholarships paying into it definitely has helped, but the main thing has been investments — P.C.’s Limited being one of them. I remember telling you a year ago that, even if everything entirely collapsed, we were already ahead.”
Both Mom and Dad looked thoughtful, then nodded.
“I remember that,” Dad said.
“Given that, we can essentially count that money twice. It was invested in P.C.’s Limited, but they’ve paid it back, so now it’s invested in the house. You can certainly say we still have money ‘tied up’ in P.C.’s Limited, and we do, but that’s unrealized gains, now. We don’t have any sunk costs. We have sunk costs in the house, to some extent, but it’s obviously a different sort of asset, one with an easily estimated value. Anyway, given the returns on that investment and some luck on other investments, the house was within reach, so we purchased it.”
They both nodded again.
I said, “Certainly, it’s quite a bit of money, but the house is fully insured. We shouldn’t lose out there. If there’s a market downturn, we would likely have to hold it for a while, but we’re not paying anything for our housing and can bank our housing allowance. We consider that to be fair, given that it’s our money that paid for the house, and we paid for it expecting the university to help us with that part of it.”
Dad nodded, looking thoughtful, but didn’t say anything. I thought he accepted it. Everything I’d said was true, but you could only ‘double count’ the Dell funds in retrospect. I hadn’t actually said otherwise, though. And you would have to consider sports gambling to be an ‘investment’ and ‘knowledge of the likely outcome’ to count as ‘some luck.’ I did, or close enough. And the conclusion was correct — we wouldn’t lose on either investment.
“We’re well ahead even without the house or unrealized gains,” Angie said, jumping in. “Officially, even though Paige, Jas, and I haven’t done anything, and Steve just gives advice — really good advice, sometimes — we’ve got employee numbers and badges and are officially some of the longest-term employees. That makes us eligible for profit sharing, and the profit sharing alone has far more than paid back the investment. Everything else is gravy. But we’re hoping for lots of gravy.”
Mom laughed. “I would think so!”
Dad nodded. “Me, too, but I also like how you’re thinking of it. Too many people count their eggs before they hatch. It’s hard not to, but you’re looking at it the right way.”
He paused, then added, “Part of me wishes you’d told me earlier, but I think that’s not realistic. I would have worried too much. We raised you to think for yourselves, then made it clear we thought you were doing a good job of doing that. I can’t fault you for acting based on that. The same is true for not telling us earlier. You’ve told me bits and pieces of this over time. We certainly could have said something when you said you were intending to eventually purchase the house! But it made sense then, and it makes sense now. It’s a shock, but I think my blood pressure would have suffered far more if I’d been worrying about this for years. And we’re getting used to you outdoing anything we would have imagined.”
“We are!” Mom said, smiling and patting Dad on the leg. “I have to remember not to brag about you as much as I might want to! You’ve already done so much, and you’re still not even twenty-one.”
Dad sighed, stretched, and then said, “I could be jealous, too. It would be easy. Perhaps I even am, a little.”
That made me a little nervous. What he said next erased that and made me a little choked up.
“But it’s silly, and I don’t want to be. The amusing part is that my not being jealous is your doing, too! If we hadn’t talked so much about how fate can turn bad things into good things, I would be sitting here jealous of your being in a financial position I could only have dreamed about when I was your age! But my not having those resources...”
He sighed again, shook his head, and said, “If I’d had them, I would have been so happy, then! But none of this would ever have happened. I wouldn’t have met Helen, wouldn’t have the jobs I’ve had, wouldn’t have adopted Steve, and would likely only know my niece Angie a bit. Everything would be different. It’s ... we never know what might happen. But, in hindsight, we can see what wouldn’t have happened.”
Mom squeezed Dad’s leg, smiling, her eyes a bit damp.
Dad shook his head a little, smiling back at her, and gave her leg a squeeze right back. Then he hugged her, and she hugged him right back. None of us joined in, not right now. They deserved their moment.
After that moment had passed, Dad said, “I’m curious about how it is for you, Steve, being in that role. Suddenly helping decide the future of a business employing hundreds of people.”
“Daunting!” I said, smiling. “In a good way, but there’s pressure. For quite a while, I just wanted to be a very silent partner. A friend to Michael, sometimes a source of advice, all of that. But, sooner or later, I knew I was going to need to step up. And, from my perspective ... well, how many undergraduates have spent a day accompanying a company president they helped hire making the rounds of investment banks in New York, seriously pursuing a multi-million dollar loan and line of credit, and with the background to participate in conversations like that? You can’t buy that sort of experience.”
Mom gasped. “You did that?”
“I gave up an entire day of Manhattan window-shopping — including Tiffany’s — to do that,” I said, chuckling.
“It was a win-win for all of us, I think!” Jas said, giggling.
“You’re right,” Dad said. “You can’t buy that kind of experience. I won’t even say you did, by investing, because that’s not why you did it. And you weren’t invited along because of the investment, but because you could be in that room and contribute.”
“I think we all could,” I said.
Jas started to say something, and I said, “Yes, including you. You’re not a business major, but that doesn’t matter nearly as much as being smart and knowing when to talk and when not to.”
Jas blushed and smiled. I had this feeling that somewhere inside her another tiny little piece of impostor syndrome just lost its grip on her.
“But I could do the most because I’ve taken on the role of being the not-so-silent partner. So, I read weekly statements and quarterly reports and ... all of that. And, every so often, make a board decision. Which, so far, have always been unanimous. But we should be unanimous, pretty much. If someone has serious reservations, either it hasn’t been explained well or there’s a good reason. If there’s a good reason, we need to deal with it.”
“Thank you for telling us all of this,” Dad said, with Mom nodding along. “You know I’ll start reading every bit of information I can find on them.”
“I know!” I said. “We agreed last time: that’s why I didn’t name names. But now it feels like the right time to name names. Some of it is scope. It’s easy to say, ‘We made an investment, the company is doing well, and they’re growing and need more management.’ Each of which was true! But it’s different if you know they’re closing in on quarterly sales of a hundred million. Just like with the house, all four of us need to be in the loop on that. And you, and Camille, Francis, Jean, and Tony, all need to know we are. Because ... that sort of thing ... well. If the eggs hatch, that’s serious money.”
“And it matters that we know,” Paige said.
“And that we’ve been aware since well before it was serious money,” Jas said.
They both nodded.
“I’m curious,” Dad said. “What are you thinking of as ‘serious money’ right now? I know, I know! That’s counting chickens. But I’m sure you have a guess.”