Chapter 6

Turns out Jen was a very good cook. “Mom, Dad, six kids. I was the oldest girl, so I learned. It wasn’t a gender thing, Mom made all of us learn, and we each had a specialty. Mine was fried chicken, pan gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans, and fresh biscuits. Allie made spaghetti and meatballs, Joe was a grillmaster. We all were proud of our dishes.” Her fried chicken was really outstanding. We had it about every two weeks.

Lindsey was a blue eyed blond with a bubbly personality, a real piece of eye candy. They made quite a pair and quite a contrast at the same time. She couldn’t cook as well as we thought. We suffered through three hot dog and hamburger meals before we started teaching her. Then she signed up for a cooking class featuring Mexican dishes, and our variety improved quite a bit.

So my home life improved dramatically. It was kind of interesting when we had dates over, they all had a hard time with our living arrangement, but after they learned they adjusted. If one had company, the other stayed absent. Jen even stayed in the house a few times to give Lindsey some privacy. We both consoled her when her relationships tanked. For some reason Jen never brought anyone home, although she did stay elsewhere every once in a while.

Six months went by and we did a followup to our VA story. Our Congressman failed miserably, and denied an interview. We did our remote on his office steps, giving him a public F for his efforts. He did not win his re-elction bid. His replacement was from the other party, and a vet, so he jumped in, making it his personal cause, working both parties relentlessly. He made friends and he made enemies, but he got stuff done.

We did other stories, some fluff, some serious. Jen came up with a thing where we did the interviews together, tag teaming our subjects. Politicians and corporate types hated us, the average person loved us.

We started a side project, purely by accident, that changed the direction of our lives forever.

We’d done an Art Crawl, going from location to location doing clips. It had gotten dark, and the neighborhood we were in was right on the fringes of the event, a not so nice place to be after the sun went down. Jen decided to take a shortcut, to get back to the station earlier. She thought that because she was with me, she was bulletproof. It bothered me, it’s one thing to intimidate a crooked salesman or corrupt politician, another to face down a junkie stoned out of his mind, or gang members on their home turf.

A large man loomed out of the darkness, a street person by his looks. He didn’t see me at first and accosted Jen. “Hey lady, got a couple bucks for someone down and out?”

He was using his size to intimidate, but Jen knew I was right behind her, and it made her brave. “What’s in it for me?”

The man was obviously confused. “Huh?”

“I said what’s in it for me. What do I get for my money?”