Chapter 2

Dana’s turn:

There’s a lot going on in my life right now. Sometimes I just want to get home and get Ed’s arms around me and forget.

Sometimes Ed’s not there. He’s being a real engineer now with a real job and real duties and a couple of times those real duties mean that poor little Dana comes home to an empty house and hugs a cat. Of course next thing I know, I get a phone call.

“Hi, Terri,” I said.

“Hi, Dana. I know Ed’s out of town for a couple of nights. Are you going to revel in your morose solitude or do you desire company?”

“If you know somebody who can describe ‘morose solitude’, I’d like to see that person.”

Giggle. “That would be me. Tell Tina, okay?”

“I’ll call ‘er right now.”

“Okay. I’m just sitting here with these block diagrams. A break would be nice.”

I smiled at the idea of my eleven year old (almost TWELVE!) compatriot at work. Incongruous? You bet! But I know that if she’s over here, my mind won’t stagnate. I spoke ‘Tina’ to Siri.

“I know,” Tina said, before I could speak.

“Well, she offered.”

“You don’t have to, you know.”

“Tina, I’m here taking to the cat. He’s a wonderful cat, but a poor conversationalist. Ed’s gonna call about eight. That’s all I have going this evening. Terri’s a welcome improvement.”

“You poor, poor thing,” Tina tittered.

“Oh, I’ve heard about the sisterhood slumber parties, Tina,” I laughed.

“So come over, have dinner with us, then take Terri home with you.”

“I’ll do that. Who’s driving me?”

“I’ll come get you. And take you home.”

“That’ll work,” I said.

“I’m handing off Kathy to Terri. I’ll be there in a bit.”

“‘A bit’ is what it took me to empty DC’s litterbox and give his waterer a cleaning. Then I was out at the sidewalk waiting for Tina.

She rolled to a stop long enough for me to hop in.

“Nasty day,” I said.

“Yeah. Alan’s got gumbo on the stove.”

“Wonderful.”

“So how’re things going?”

“School. Lovely.” I sighed. “One course after another. Cindy’s not exactly pushy, but...”

“Cindy is Cindy,” Tina said. “She just smiles and you want to believe what she says about you. She got me over several ditches. Susan, even more. Her and Nikki...”

“We all KNOW,” Tina sighed. “But look at us. We did the impossible.”

“They’re still doing it,” I laughed. “And now everybody’s watching the Munchkins.”

“They’re worth watching, Dana. Very interesting, my daughter and her friends.” She paused for a second. “Everything else?”

“Regarding?”

“Domestic life.”

“I am in love,” I said. “Ed never spent a night away from me until we moved here. Now he flies off with Cindy...”

“And three technicians and a planeload of equipment,” Tina added.

“Yeah, I know ... I get a case of the lonesomes. I miss my Ed.”

“I understand. I’m the same way about my Alan. Was at first, when I used to go stay with one of the others if Alan was out of town. If it was Alan and another husband, we’d stay together. But even in the presence of my sister, I wanted my Alan. Almost killed him when he got home.”

I giggled. I’ve done that to Ed. Happily, he gave me as much as I gave him.

Dinner was great. Wonderful thing about this bunch is that any of us is family to everybody else. After a great meal, Alan drove me and Terri back to my apartment. She hugged her dad before he left. We went inside.

“C’mere, DC,” she commanded. “I know you missed me.”

He sauntered over. She plopped down in the middle of the floor and he crawled into her lap.

“Maybe we need a cat,” she told me.

“Maybe so. This one came with my husband,” I said.

Terri. Ever surprising, ever direct. “How’d you know, Dana?”

“How’d I know what?”

“That it was Ed? The guy to be your husband.”

“Gosh, Terri...”

“You don’t have to talk to me about that kind of stuff. That’s okay. It’s just that you’re closest to my age. I talked with Tina, naturally. And Cindy and Nikki and Kim. They’re all older. So I thought I’d ask you.”

“You know that ... If it was YOUR daughter...”

She fixed me with those blue eyes. “I know. I don’t expect you to tell me anything that would lead me astray. Did YOU get led astray?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You and I, we can talk. You can tell Tina we talked. That’s expected,” Terri stated.

“Okay, that’s good. You’re not putting me in a bad position.”

“I don’t want anybody in a bad position, Dana. That’s what this is all about. I’m observing a Phenomenon. From the inside.”

“I’ve observed a lot of phenomena from the inside, Terri. Some very unpleasant things. You’re very fortunate. You have a herd of people who love you...”

“I know, Dana. I see that. Even in our home-school group, there are some bad things, and that’s supposed to be, well, if I say it isn’t ‘trailer trash’, Cindy starts giggling at me.”

“Because Cindy and I both spent some time in trailer parks. But I know what you mean when you say that.”

“But how did you know?”

“I just knew. I already knew that whoever it might be, it wasn’t gonna be one of those ‘bad boys’ or somebody who wanted to act like a bad boy. He was going to have to be intelligent. Looks? Reasonably good-looking, which is mainly a personal hygiene thing along with a propensity to wear clean, appropriate clothing.”

“Check, check, check,” Terri said.

“We’re talking about somebody in specific, aren’t we, little sister?”

“Possibly,” she said with a wry smile. “But do keep on.”

I know I’m being played, but it’s being done in such a delightful manner that I’m not going to pull up short. Sometimes it’s not about the goal, it’s about the play. “Let’s see,” I restarted, “employable, if not employed. Educated, maybe not formally, but intelligent and able to converse lucidly.”

“He’d better be,” she giggled, “if you’re gonna drop words like ‘lucidly’ into a conversation.”

I giggled back. “I know why they call you ‘pTerridactyl’. You have a prehistoric sense of humor.”

“I’m a land creature that can FLY, too.”

“Not when Johanna hung you with that nickname.”

She tossed her head back, smiling. “I was DESTINED to fly. It’s apparent.”

“Let me know when you show vestigial wings, like Cindy’s got.”

“We’ll just leave Cindy, Queen of the Skies, out of this. And we’re creeping away from my original question. Either you’re VERY good at avoiding the subject, or we’re having too much fun.”

“Put me down for the ‘fun’ thing.”

She grinned. “I know.”

“And it helps if HE is attracted to you, for the right reasons.”

“Reasons which will mirror what you were looking for in HIM.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “I think that Ed saw that pretty quick. Except I was fourteen. Certain things didn’t apply.”

“Yeah. That’s part of ‘If I touch you, it’s a felony.’ That’s significant. You know that in Tennessee the magic number is eighteen? Dad ‘n’ Tina ... She was seventeen. They flew back to Louisiana to get married.”

“I know. Cindy and Dan 1.0. Nikki and Dan 2.0. Me ‘n’ Ed. All those felonies.”

I love watching Terri talk. Her face telegraphs the thinking that’s going on behind the scenes. “You remember that bunch that visited us a while back? Carlita and Brindy and Dave?”

“Yeah...” I do remember. Carlita’s a pixie, kind of like a Latina version of Cindy. I think Brindy’s a lot like Kim’s Aunt Jenn. Dave’s a nice-looking guy who gives the impression that he fell into heaven. Husband and wife and family ‘friend’, indeed.

“I think there’s a bigger story than meets the eye there, too, if you know what I mean. Something sticks in my head that says Carlita was NOT eighteen.”

“Be that as it may,” I conceded, “where does that put the world’s only living pTerridactyl?”

Again, Terri does ‘direct’. “Jerry. Jerry Stengall.”

“I know Jerry,” I said. I smiled at her. “Excellent choice. Does HE know?”

“Did Ed know?”

“And he was afraid to admit it.”

“Bingo! At least at first.”

“Now?”

“I get the feeling that he understands something is there between us. I mean, he’s VERY conscious of us being anywhere alone together. Ever since I kissed him.”

“You KISSED him?”

“Well, somebody needed to kiss SOMEBODY and he’s sooo charmingly careful. We were assembling a power module. Took three hands to get one component to stay in place on the board. He helped. When I finished the connection, he was in range, naturally, so I put the iron down, turned around, put my arms around his neck, and I kissed him.”

Okay, Dana. Let’s get lurid details. “Uh, did he kiss you back?”

Giggle. “Yeah. Might’ve been reflexes, but he did, for about two seconds, then his higher brain functions took over.”

“And then what happened?” I urged.

“He and I had a very serious conversation. A lot of it was all about appropriate contact between men his age and girls my age and how he had strong feelings of fondness for me but we just couldn’t...”

“All this talk between you and me...”

“You have reinforced my hypothesis. Your data points lie right along the previously established curve.” She sighed. “He’s leaving after graduation. He has a job in Houston stinkin’ TEXAS! I may pine away.”

“Pining away is soooo archaic, darlin’,” I said. “And Houston’s not THAT bad.”

“Six hundred miles, Dana...”

“This is the twenty-first century, darlin’,” I returned. “It’s not like he’s standing on the deck of the Santa Maria sailing off to find the Spice Islands. You can email and call and Skype...”

“I know. But Dana – he’s gonna be hundreds of miles away, in a big city, on a new job, surrounded by all sorts of females that don’t carry the danger of incarceration if he has a relationship...”

“Ahhh ... I can’t counter that, baby.” I sighed. Terri’s facing something I never had to face. I had Ed wrapped up from Day One. “You know the saying. ‘If you love something, let it go... ‘“

“And if it doesn’t come back, hunt it down and kill it. And everybody else within half a click.”

“You are irretrievably evil,” I giggled. “Besides, let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that he DOES feel the same way you do...”

“He does,” she defended.

“ ... Okay, he feels that way. Don’t you think that he’s going to be in Houston wondering that if Jerry Stengall could make the pTerridactyl fall in love (there! I acknowledged that she COULD be in love) then just maybe some other guy, maybe one more age-appropriate, might show up and replace HIM...”

“‘Fraid not. You know that outreach thing we’ve done with the high schools. You know my contemporaries in the homeschool group. Nothing there that’s within ten dB of Jerry Stengall.”

“You’re the first girl I knew who rated prospects by decibels.”

“Am I crazy, Dana?”

“Yes, you’re absolutely insane, Terri. Sadly, poets and writers and all and sundry thinkers over the subject for millennia have catalogued that insanity. I suffer, myself.”