Chapter 15

Still Mimi’s turn:

Woke up in the morning to the throbbing of my ankle. Stirring, wincing, Tommy woke up.

“Mornin’, pretty girl...”

“Good morning, husband of a klutz,” I said.

“Hardly a klutz.”

“Hurt myself on my honeymoon. Trust me. Klutz.”

“Love you, graceful or not.”

“Love you right back. Wanna help me out of bed?”

“Sure,” he said.

Winter cabins in the mountains are COLD, a fact that I announced to him.

“I’ll get us something on the stove and get a fire going again,” he said. He got out of bed, pulled on a sweatsuit that served as pajamas in the cooler cabin, and disappeared. I heard some thumping, some shuffling, waited, then he showed back up.

“Fire’s building. Here’s a glass of water and your pills.”

Yeah – anti-inflammatories and a mild pain-killer. My backpack held the OTHER pill, the one that would hold us away from parenthood for a while.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome. How’s the ankle?”

“I feel it. Let me try standing.”

“Don’t hurt yourself.”

“I gotta walk, buddy,” I returned. That first step onto that foot, though ... Okay, maybe my mouth had spoken something my foot didn’t support. I winced and shifted weight quickly to the other foot.

“Baby?” Tommy blurted.

“Worse than I thought. I think I can walk, but without my customary grace.”

“I can carry you,” Tommy laughed.

“I can piggy-back ... At least to morning coffee.”

“Breakfast...” he said.

“I can’t cook you breakfast...”

“Let me put something warming on. Hot cereal?”

“And honey?”

“Sure, sugar,” he said, looking to see if I caught his shift. “If they have it. How about brown sugar?”

I looked at him like he just arrived from Mars, then saw his little grin and grabbed his arm. “Rule 1, Buddy! No jokes till I get my first cup of coffee!”

“I’ll get you your first cup of coffee, meanie. Then after breakfast I’ll carry you next door. I’m sure that there’s something happening at the big cabin.”

He really DID carry me over to the Solheim cabin, much to the mirth of Cindy and Johanna. Jo was out with a bundled-up little Stoney, letting him savor the snow.

He waved and grinned hugely. Tried to say ‘snow’ but his toddler mouth morphed it to ‘Noooo’. Cute.

The chill air felt refreshing. Made the cabin’s warmth even more welcome. Lovely company. Great coffee. Some kind of sweetish coffee cake. Inquiries about my ankle.

Honeymoons are supposed to end eventually. As we loaded up into the plane to return to Alabama, I considered the man whose arm was around me. As he helped me buckle my seatbelt and arrange things in the cabin, I mused. Boy, how fast things turned around. Only a few weeks ago I was a miserable human being, selling myself in truckstops for enough money to keep a roof over my head.

Now ... I looked across the cabin. Executive seating in the plane, okay? Four seats arranged facing each other, little fold-down tables between them. Tommy’s seated across from me, Johanna beside me with little Stoney on her lap, her husband seated across from her.

Dan and that crazy little redhead are in the cockpit. I definitely want to learn to fly. My husband’s learning. Everybody in this load of people is a pilot of one level or another, except me. If course, that big blue boot wrapping my ankle limits my reality at the moment. Still, I want it.

Other things I want: Tommy’s sitting across from me. I look at him, conservative, normal-looking from that old ‘normal’, not the new one with the tattoos and the ear gages and lip piercings. I look at him and think that my future’s not dependent on the quality and quantity of drugs he sells or whether somebody snitches him out to keep themselves out of jail or whether I can do a double or a triple night at the truck stop.

I can be Mimi. I can be the Mimi that makes GOOD people proud. I can be the Mimi that Dad wanted me to be – that Mom wants me to be.

“Here we go, people!” Dan says over the cabin speaker.

I feel the surge of power as our little plane ... Okay, I’m rethinking that ‘little plane’ thing. ‘Little’, like the Munchkins’ ultralights, or ‘little’ like the Cessna 150 that everybody trains in, or ‘little’ like Cindy’s Songbird or ‘little’ like this one that Cindy tells me knocks against the 12,500 pound line that the federal government says is the heaviest a ‘light plane’ can be? This one’s beautiful. The pilot today is Dan, with Cindy in the right seat watching him like a hawk, but one day I want to be that good.

She says that Dan needs the hours. I think she’s gonna send him to Florida for training. I’m told that when you put a ‘teacher’ hat on Cindy, you get a whole different creature.

Goal for Mimi. Be as good as Cindy at something.

Of course those blue eyes watching me as my mind wanders, he already thinks I’m good enough. I think he’s way past ‘good enough’. I harbor the thought that possibly he thinks that about me, too, but I’ll not let my head swell.

After we climbed to cruising altitude, Johanna turned little Stoney loose to play on the cabin floor. He immediately toddled over and sat next to my splinted foot, reaching out a hand.

“Careful, baby,” Johanna started.

He looked over his shoulder as if to say ‘I got this, Mom’ and gently touched. “Mimi foot hurt.”

“C’mere, big boy,” I said.

He grinned and stood for me to scoop him up.

“Are you a doctor?” I asked him.

He grinned, letting his smile spread over his whole round face. “Doc-tor...”

“What’d’you think of Tommy?” I asked him.

He turned, grinning at Tommy. “Tommy. Mimi. Good. Fam’ly.”

That’s what I keep seeing here – families. When I was little, when it was me and Mom and Dad, I think we had that kind of family. Now I think it was a lot of Dad’s doing. Maybe that’s being unfair to Mom. Losing Dad hit her and me very hard.

Still, I NEVER see any of the moms in this community trying to unload kids so they can go out partying. I don’t see ‘helicopter moms’ either, moms going to the other extreme. I’m a nanny and I’m encouraged to get them out in the fresh air and to the park. Of course it helps that these kids pay attention and obey when I call or warn them.

And I keep notes. Observations. My mommies know it. It’s the subject of occasional conversation. You see, the New Bunch is the subject of on-going study, a collaboration of Rachel’s dad, Doctor Simon Weismann, and a psychologist at the university, Doctor Stanton. I’ve talked with both of them after they talked with the mommies because I’m not going to do anything to jeopardize my babies.

They’re doing a paper on precocious development. It’s a hoot, when I think about it. I never imagined I’d be part of academic research, although now that I look at it, I could be the subject of a paper about how kids go wrong. Now we have coffee with one or the other researchers once a week to compare notes.

They’re ‘uncles’ to the kids. Little JW or Elise or Stoney or Kathy will lead the herd when Doctor Stanton shows up with a new test, cleverly disguised as a toy or a game, looking at motor skills and problem-solving capabilities and communication skills. I take notes. The doctors take notes. The kids play.

Sim shakes his head. “Like kittens playing. You watch and you think ‘how cute!” and at the same time you know they’re preparing for stalking prey.”

“What do you think ‘prey’ is for Kathy?”

“Oh, I don’t begin to fathom. I’m trying to understand what they see in solving those puzzles and how they translate and store that. I need to get Harry (Doctor Stanton) to see if he can come up with something that sequences – today’s puzzle logically leads to tomorrow’s puzzle.”

Those two talked to me, too. Doctor Stanton said, “Mimi, I can see that you really do love this job, but seriously, lady, you have the intellect to go far. Sign up at Auburn. I’ll personally intervene on your behalf.”

“I have no idea what I’d study,” I said. “College wasn’t really something I ever put a lot of thought into.”

He smiled. “You’re in the middle of ‘intellect central’ here. I’m looking at three different groups, the originals, Cindy, Nikki, Susan, Tina. The Munchkins. And now that bunch over there trying to get toddler motor skills to comply with ideas and thoughts much more advanced.”

“But – high school dropout...”

“No, Mimi. I’ve seen – read your notes. You graduated high school before you left. Nobody saw it and acknowledged it.”

Back to the present. “What ‘re you thinking, baby?” Tommy asks.

“Huh?” His question pulled me right out of my thoughts. “Just what I’m facing when we get back.”

“College?” Johanna asked.

“Yeah ... Mimi does college. Some kind of dream...”

Tommy smiled at me. “Took me a week of talking with you to figure out what you are, baby.”

I bowed my head, then looked at him. “I’m glad you did.”

“We’re ALL glad he did,” Johanna said. “You belong here.”

Little Stoney climbed off me, went over to his dad. I looked them, father and son, got a flash in my mind – MY child, Tommy’s child, loving HIS father like that.