Chapter 61: Marathon

August 22, 1988, Chicago, Illinois

I made it to the hospital just in time for Jessica to come off duty. We kissed and started walking home.

"How was your day at the races?" she asked.

"We had fun, though Bill lost a bit of ground in the points race. He finished third, but the guy in first place in the points finished second."

"How is Jason?"

"OK. He invited us to come to Georgia for the race next Summer. I didn't say 'yes', but it's going to be pretty hard to not honor his invitation. Maybe you can schedule your vacation and we can visit Mammoth Cave or something like that on the trip. Make it a vacation. If you can stomach a day at the races."

"I think I could do that for you, Tiger! How was Milwaukee? All business, or some pleasure too?"

"A bit of pleasure," I said.

Jessica laughed, "I won my bet with Kara. You followed the rules?"

I wasn't even going to ask what the bet was. I just smiled.

"Yes, I did. How was your Sunday with the girls?"

"We spent a lot of time talking shop and bitching about our Attendings and Residency in general."

"I'm glad I went to the race!" I chuckled.

"We also traded all the gossip about the Attendings, Residents, nurses, and med students!"

"And you complained that Alicia was the gossip!" I chuckled.

"I listened, I didn't share! But I sure got a lot of questions about you!"

"That really shouldn't come as a surprise!"

"No. Though I did pass on giving a review of your skills!" she giggled.

"There's something very sexy about a doctor giggling," I chuckled. "Though I'm not sure why! So your friends gossip about who's good in bed and what they did with them?"

"Among other things! You should hear the male doctors! They have ratings systems for nurses. It's worse than a High School locker room!"

"So just how WOULD you rate my prowess?" I teased.

"Tiger, you make me cum so hard I can barely stand it! I hope you didn't forget about our all night sex-marathon next weekend!"

I chuckled, "Is Kara invited?"

"She and I can take care of each other while you recover. I'm sure you won't mind!"

"No, not at all!" I smirked. "Speaking of Alicia, did she and Howard ever get together?"

"One date, but I don't think he was all that interested. Did you have a good day today?"

"I did, despite not having enough sleep and three hours in the car."

"Did you run with Jacquelyn this morning?"

"Yes. I don't want to discourage her or give her a reason to slack off. You've seen the progress she's making. Did you get to do anything interesting today?"

"I'm covering the ER this week. We're short a second year surgical Resident because he has a badly sprained ankle. I got to help with a severe trauma and did most of the procedures myself. Supervised, of course. Femoral cut down; pericardiocentesis; and a tracheostomy."

"Did the patient make it?"

"To surgery, but he died on the table. Getting him that far was pretty much of a miracle. He was hurt worse than Bethany. Most of the same injuries, plus a broken back and crushed arms. His Chevy Citation lost an argument with a double-trailer semi."

"You can't win those any more than against a train," I said.

"Usually the only thing to do with train accidents is hose down the tracks," Jessica observed. "Mostly people die on impact or if not, then before they even get to the ER. Metra trains hit a number of people every year. Oh, shoot, before I forget, Lyudmila called yesterday. She's flying through Chicago on Saturday but she only has an hour layover. She couldn't arrange to stay, because she didn't really have the time."

"She's not the only one! I have so little free time these days as well!"

"All three of us have that problem," Jessica said. "Even Kara, with school, teaching, and the baby. It's going to be difficult to schedule vacations together, at least for a few years."

"I was thinking we'd aim for Holy Week, so we could go to church. That's the end of April, even though Western Easter is in March."

"I have enough time to request that week off. But won't Kara be in class?"

"Probably. Her Spring break will be in March."

"What did you and Jennifer decide about taking Jesse to church?"

"We agreed to disagree. You know her take, but Jesse wants to go, so she agreed that we can take him when we go. Maybe in a few weeks, but I need to coordinate with Jolene because of our Sunday morning training."

"Don't forget about being Sensei next year for six months."

"I know. That's going to be nuts. I'll need to work extra hours to make up for the time I have to miss to teach the afterschool class. Jolene can't help with that one, or the lunchtime class, because of her work schedule."

We arrived home, and I helped Jess with her shower, and then went to the kitchen to start on dinner.

"Mr. Adams?" Veronica said, coming into the kitchen. "Do you have a minute?"

"If you call me that one more time, you're fired!" I chuckled.

"Sorry, it's just my previous employer was a real stickler for formality. I'm not used to kids calling adults by their first names."

"It's OK. We run a very strange household here, in case you didn't notice!"

"Oh, I did. I wanted to ask you about Jesse having his friend Francesca over to play. He keeps asking to go to the park to see her, but with her mom working, she's in daycare. I wondered if it would be OK to have her here one day a week."

"Absolutely! Do you need me to call Carol and talk to her?"

"No. Jesse showed me where her phone number was kept. I'll call her after dinner."

"How's everything going?"

"Jesse is quite the handful, as I'm sure you already know! Birgit is no trouble at all. And Matthew is a complete sweetheart. They enjoyed a visit from Peter Kallas today, and I think you know that Kristin visited twice last week. And some of Jesse's friends are coming to play tomorrow."

"Sounds like you have it well in hand. Is there anything I can do for you?"

"Not really. You've made me feel like part of the family!"

"I think that's the only way this will work. It just seems wrong to expect you to stay in your room during the evenings. Are the arrangements working out for you?"

"Yes, quite well. Having Tuesday and Thursday afternoons off, and then all day Saturday and Saturday night, is great. And being able to switch to Sundays if I need to, as well. And with everyone here on Sundays, there isn't much for me to do when I'm here except play with the kids if they want to."

"So you're happy?"

"Very!" she said.

I went back to preparing dinner and watched her walk away out of the corner of my eye. Visions of beautiful, naked redheads ran through my brain, but I tucked them safely away in the area reserved for fantasies.

August 25, 1988, Chicago, Illinois

"We haven't seen you at church since Pascha," Father Basil said when I sat down across from him at the diner in Bridgeport.

"True, but you'll see us one of these Sundays. We were at a pair of weddings and Jesse asked about coming back to the church that had the pictures of Jesus and his friends."

Father Basil chuckled, "An interesting way to put it!"

"I think it was Vasily, one of your older parishioners, who explained it that way to Jesse."

"He's really good with kids. He taught Sunday School until a couple of years ago, when he decided that thirty years of doing that was enough."

"Wow!"

"It's pretty impressive when you think about it. How are things going for you?"

"Business is good, and I'm crazy busy with everything going on in my life. Between the karate dojo, work, my kids, and my wives, I manage to carve out a bit of time with my friends, and even a bit of time to read. But that's about it."

"What are you reading?"

"Now? The Cardinal of the Kremlin, by Tom Clancy. Given my ties to Russia, including some friends in the KGB, it's kind of the perfect book!"

"Yes, well, you might want to keep quiet about the KGB around the church. Most of our parishioners were Whites, or descendant from Whites."

"So there are Tsarist sentiments?"

"He was the God-ordained ruler of all the Russians. Remember how the Orthodox view the state — there are two co-equal leaders. In Russia, that would be the Tsar and the Patriarch in a kind of dual monarchy, with each responsible for their own domain. Of course, it didn't quite work out that way in practice."

"No, it certainly didn't!" I agreed.

We placed our orders and had our food about ten minutes later.

"Do you have software that could help us track membership and giving?" Father Basil asked.

"We have software that the unions use to track membership and dues that could easily be adapted. The only issue would be linking families together, but we do that in our medical software, and our modules are pretty easy to bolt together. Why?"

"At the last clergy symposium, Archbishop ALYPY asked the priests for ideas on improving how we keep our membership lists. Right now, every parish does it by hand, and so does the diocese. I said I would ask you about it, and see if something could be done at a reasonable cost."

"I think so," I said. "I'd need some more details, and I'd need to have Dave Kallas, who's Greek Orthodox, involved, because he manages all of our programmers, including me."

He smiled, "Speaking of that, how is Tasha doing? We haven't seen her since Pascha either."

"She's doing well at work. She's back in school now, and working a couple of days a week, plus Saturdays."

"She has a boyfriend, I understand."

This was a bit of dangerous ground and I had to tread very lightly.

"She's been dating, yes, but I don't ask her about details of her life outside the office. I have to be very careful about social relationships with employees."

"That makes sense, though she does consider you a close friend."

"And I consider her one as well, but there are some things a boss can't ask an employee and she doesn't volunteer much about that part of her life."

"To me, neither, and I'm her priest. But that's a matter for another time. Would you be free to meet with the Bishop's aide, Deacon Peter, sometime in the next week or two?"

"Yes, of course. Let me clear it with Dave and I'll call you tomorrow or Monday."

I thought this might actually be a good opportunity to try out our Windows programming skills. It would be a very simple system and would give us a test bed before we undertook a complete conversion. Jeri was still working on prototyping, and this would be the perfect first step.

"Perfect. And we'll see you in church soon?"

"Most likely, yes. And I'll call you no later than Monday with our availability."

"Thanks!"

We finished our lunch, I asked for his blessing, and then headed back to the office.

"Dave, do you have a minute?" I asked.

"Sure."

"Penny's in our office, so let's go to the conference room."

We walked to the conference room, and I shut the door behind us. I motioned to a chair and Dave sat. I took the seat opposite him.

"I just had lunch with Father Basil from Saint Innocent of Moscow. He asked if we could help them with programs that would let them track membership and donations. I told him that I needed to talk to you, but that I thought we could do that. I had an idea that we'd use the union software, and the family modules from the medical software. But then I hit on the idea of using this as our first Windows product. It would give us a chance to try things out in a fairly safe environment. Jeri's been doing prototyping, and she could easily work on this with me. A lot of it would be able to be reused when we port all of our programs to Windows."

Dave nodded, "That actually makes a lot of sense. And if we can charge them anything at all, that's found money, because we'd be doing that work for ourselves. Is this Archbishop ALYPY of ROCOR?"

"Yes. I just need to tell Father Basil that it's possible, then meet with the Bishop's aide."

"Take Jeri with you because she'll be working on this. I guess it's time to bite the bullet and request another programmer. I have enough work to keep one busy, and a lot of it is chargeable. Speaking of which, I saw your time report for Belarus. Are we going to keep billing them at the lower rate?"

"No. For this invoice, charge a normal rate. Not my full rate, but what you'd normally charge for, Charlie. Think of it as a personal favor."

"You can't do too many personal favors," he said.

"I know. This is the only one. We'll charge the diocese at a reasonable rate. One they can afford and one that we can as well."

"I do have some other consulting work that is right up your alley, I think. Would you be willing to do some Unix server setup and administration? And some basic shell programming?"

"Of course! But what about the legal software?"

"It's on schedule, and most of the major overhaul is done for 3.0. Greg is doing the security overhaul now, and Alonzo can finish up the new modules. I want to put you on some billable work and this is a good time to do that. There's quite a bit of work available for the IBM RT running either AIX or Pick OS. The latter are conversions from PRIME systems, because PRIME is in real trouble and their systems are simply too expensive."

"You're the boss!" I chuckled.

"Let me know when you and Jeri are going to meet with Archbishop ALYPY."

"I will. Thanks, Dave."

I went back to my office and called Father Basil. He wasn't back to his office at the church, so I left a message on the machine. He returned the call a few hours later, and we confirmed a visit to meet with the archbishop and his deacon on Thursday. I let Dave know, and he said he'd talk to Jeri and let her know that she'd be on my team.

I met Jessica as usual at the hospital and walked her home. When we walked into the house, Veronica asked if she could talk to us.

"What's up?" I asked.

"Jesse asked about using the sauna today, and Kara has shown me how to set it and explained what temperature was acceptable. I put on my bathing suit and took him in, and he had a fit about the fact that I wasn't naked. Am I missing something?"

Jessica nodded, "We usually don't wear anything in the sauna. That's the default here. I guess it hadn't come up because you never joined us when we asked you to."

"Adults and kids naked together? Non-family members?"

"Yes, my close friends and their kids and my kids," I said. "In the past, when people have been uncomfortable, we've used towels or suits, but it's been some time since we did that. You do what you're comfortable with."

"Jesse basically read me the Riot Act about it, in a two-year-old kind of way," she said.

"I'll have a talk with him. Nobody is required to do anything they aren't comfortable with."

"Have you been told that your family is very unconventional?" she asked.

"More than once," I replied with a smile. "Remember, it's about being comfortable. Jesse needs to learn that. And if you want to use the sauna, it's perfectly OK to wear a towel, or your suit, or whatever. If others are there, everyone needs to agree on the rules, but my usual mode is to wear as much as necessary to make someone comfortable so we don't exclude anyone. My sister, on the other hand, has the attitude that if you don't like it, you don't come in!"

"Hang on! You're in there naked. With your sister and her boyfriend?"

"It's not about sex, Veronica," Jessica said. "Steve and his sister have been in the sauna together like that for seven or eight years. It's no big deal to them. It's not like they're interested in each other in that way!"

"I'm not sure I could ever be naked in front of my brother," Veronica said. "Or my dad!"

"So don't," I said. "The rule of this house is pretty much to let everyone do what they want, so long as they aren't harming each other. That attitude has served me well for quite some time."

"It's a bit odd, you have to admit."

"Odder than having two wives and kids by three different women, none of whom is my wife according to the State of Illinois?" I asked.

"No, I guess not," she said.

"Jess, I think I need to go find the Lord High Ruler of the Universe and have a word with him."

"He is that," Jessica smirked. "In his own mind!"

"Tell me about it," I sighed.

I found Jesse in the sunroom, building his BRIO track into a complicated layout.

"Dada!" he said.

"Hi, Jesse. How are the trains?"

"Fun!"

I sat down sideways on one of the lounge chairs and patted a spot next to me. Jesse came over and sat down.

"Jesse, I heard you were in the sauna today."

"Yes! Veronica broke the rules! She was dressed!"

"Those aren't the rules, Jesse. Everyone gets to decide what they wear in the sauna."

"We never wear clothes in the sauna!"

"That's true. But Veronica is new, and she wants to wear her bathing suit."

"Why?"

"Because not everyone wants to be naked in front of other people."

"Why?"

I could see this continuing ad infinitum. Jesse, as advanced as he was, wasn't ready for a philosophical, moral, or ethical discussion.

"Because each person decides. If Jesse wants to be naked, that's OK. If Dada wants to be naked. That's OK. But Veronica doesn't want to be. So we let her wear her bathing suit. If Dada and Veronica were in the sauna together, Dada would wear a towel or bathing suit."

"Why?"

I suppressed a chuckle.

"To be nice. You want to be nice, don't you, Jesse?"

"Yes!"

"Then be nice to Veronica."

"I have to wear my swimming suit?"

"If she wants you to, yes."

"OK," he said, not sounding convinced.

"Thanks, Jesse. You can go play with your train again."