Chapter 3

Bill’s turn:

Maddie says I need to get used to it and it’ll go away. She says that the girls are in charge, including her, and that like Nikki and Cindy in Alabama, here it’s Haley and Carlita.

“But don’t worry,” she laughed. “We’re kind of like those wildebeest migrations in Africa. We don’t need to do much guidance except to make sure nobody gets eaten on the path we take.”

“Women are so smart. You do all that while allowing us the illusion of being in control.”

We were exchanging banter and pregnancy talk when Melinda showed up. Melinda’s a college student, part-time help for Maddie. 5’4”, brown hair, brown eyes. As the phrase goes around here, a standard brown-haired girl.

Of course when that statement was made following her hire, it was helpfully pointed out, “You MARRIED one of those...” who said it? I don’t know. Several people find joy in producing upon me a mild state of discomfort, as evidenced by the statement being made in front of Haley, who was smirking when she heard it.

“Yes, Bill. Do tell,” she snickered.

Anyway, Maddie’s got a doctor visit this afternoon, her pregnancy thing, and you have to know that she’s keeping close track of the OTHER preggo in Alabama, Tommy’s wife Mimi. Maddie’s a very satisfied mommy-to-be and her husband’s proud and protective and nervous and Maddie’s folks have visited here to see her workplace and yes, we picked up the tab for dinner.

Family doesn’t get ignored here.

My ‘family’ is on campus today. Dan 3.0 and Nina are in their office, going back and forth across order packages for a good-sized project. Dave Johnson’s in the conference room with HIS two, Carlita and Brindy, explaining to them the overview that is the beginnings of another project.

I stuck my head in the door. “How’s it going?”

“I’m keeping the lid on a rebellion,” Dave sighed.

“Won’t ask WHO the rebels are. What’s the issue?”

“They’ve been talking with Carl and Sunny and they want to get field time. They say THIS will be their project.”

“You’ve done these,” I said. “Soup to nuts, right?”

“Yeah.”

I looked at the two faces of the rebellion, one exotically Central American, the other – you guessed it – ‘standard brown-haired girl’. They looked back at me, smart, confident, sassy.

“Son,” I told Dave, “if these two said they wanted to spend weeks on a job with me, going home in the evenings to a hotel room, I’d be packing my bags.”

Carlita smiled. “See, Dave? Opportunity. Thank you, Bill.”

Brindy doesn’t let things slide. “We shall report favorably on your response to your owners.”

“If they haven’t sold one of their trailers, you could make a deal with Sunny and Carl for one...”

“Those things have queen beds,” Dave sighed.

“Yeah, you’d have to be VERY friendly.” These three are that level of friendliness.

“We are thinking about that, though,” Brindy said. “Lita and I think we could remodel Sunny’s old trailer and have a king bed. We’ll lose some convenience in the sleeping compartment, but we’d get a bigger bed.”

“Then you agree with us,” Carlita said. “Engineers should have practical field experience.”

“Oh, Dave thinks that, too,” I said. “He just doesn’t want to ruin your nails.”

Brindy, smirking, showed me ONE nail. Carlita giggled. Dave just shook his head.

“Control her, Dave,” I said.

“Yeah, THAT’S gonna work.”

“If you’re gonna be mean to me, Brindy, I’m going back into my office.”

“It’s probably safer there,” Dave laughed.

I returned to my office. The thought crosses my mind – me and Haley and Deena doing the same thing that Dave’s going to do with Carlita and Brindy. Yeah, we could. It’d be fun, it’d definitely be educational as far as their engineering careers, but we have obstacles that Dave doesn’t have. Neither of my girls is eighteen – therefore proscribed from actual work on a project, and that other thing – only TWO of us are married and right now there’s not a way to explain how we’d get around the intimacy of the three of us in a travel trailer.

I was reconciling some shipping tickets with invoices when the phone rang. “Yeah, Melinda...”

“Can you take a call from Cindy?”

“Unless I’m unconscious,” I said.

“She said to ask.”

“I’ll take it.” A click, then “Hey, Cindy...”

“What’s Friday look like for you?”

“I’m afraid that Maddie’s not gonna be satisfied until EVERY bean has been properly counted,” I said. “Why?”

“I called you first, lest you think that the squeals portend some disaster.”

“What disaster?”

“You’re getting the 185s.”

“BOTH of ‘em?”

“For the time being,” Cindy said. “I think we’ll have room for one back here in mid-summer – new hangar.”

“Oh, man,” I said. “You’re tilting us off our axis.”

She giggled. “I know. Just last week Deena was whining about needing something so more people could get into the air over there.”

“There is that, although we do love our Stearman.”

“I love mine, too, but it’s less practical than a unicycle for traveling.”

“Are you staying the weekend?”

“Yep. Dan’s flying one, I’m flying one. Jason’s doing the 180 so we’ll have something to get home in. Susan and little JW are coming with him, going to visit his folks.”

“We’ll make sure you have wheels.”

“Uh, pavilion? For food ‘n’ stuff?”

“Tell Dan to bring his guitar. You’ll get Nina or Sandy on the piano. And I might try to get Carl to drag his folks over. His dad...”

“Outshines Dan 2.0 on the accordion. Hilarious.”

“Dueling accordions,” I laughed.

“You know, we did that Cajun music festival one time. ‘Dueling Accordions’ might be our path to a trophy.”

“That would be worth watching,” I said. “So, early Friday, late Friday?”

“We’ll leave about eight, it’s a three and a half hour flight, so we’ll get there for lunch...”

“You know how the girls’re gonna react.”

“‘Bout the same I did,” she laughed. “It’s truly squeal-worthy.”

“Don’t tell ‘em you told me first,” I said. “They love breaking news to me.”

“You love ‘em, don’t you?”

“I do, Cindy. We make a neat little family. Could’ve been a horror if my daughter and my new wife didn’t get along, but they’re like sisters. Life is good.”

“It truly is, Bill. Lemme go. The girl’s’ll keep you updated.”

“Okay, bye, boss...”

Giggle. “We don’t do ‘boss’ very well in this company. Bye.”

We don’t know how to do bosses very well. The four of us engineers at this office gather at opportune moments and compare notes and ideas. Maddie’s usually there with the financials, often with a report from the home office.

Today’s big topic is not how to generate more work, but how to cover the work we have.

“Bill Carmody’s got one crew and two managers,” Dan 3.0 said. “We have five technicians, but we agreed that Carl and Sunny are a team.”

“Can’t fault ‘em. They said they’d endure an occasional night apart, but they prefer to work longer projects as a team.”

“Or...” Dave said, “Carl gets out of the field service business and they both go back to college to get engineering degrees.”

“And they’re trying to find a way they can do both,” I said. “So we need to recruit, but we need to be up front with people – we don’t do like a lot of companies – hang around here in the local area and send ‘em out for an occasional out-of-towner.”

“We don’t need to recruit very hard,” Maddie inserted. “We have a stack of applications.”

“Has Jason looked at ‘em?”

“Not the new ones,” Maddie said.

“Well, let’s get him to do a high-altitude look first, just to get his input. We’ll do the same.”

So we conduct business, talk about our TWO ‘pavilions’, the patio attached to the office, and the larger one in amongst our row of homes. The one next to the office is getting ready to get assimilated into the office. The other? Same function as its counterpart in Alabama. We don’t have the crowds they have, but we do pretty good.

Also today, the girls are in a meeting on campus. They don’t need my help. They’ve made a case for graduation in the spring. The university’s balking, something on the order of ‘It’s entirely too much of a departure. Neither of you is eighteen, nor have either of you spent four years in college.”

I overheard the conversation between my girls and Cindy and Nikki and Doctor Patel at Auburn.

“I will call them,” Doctor Patel said. “They either matriculate you this spring, taking a bit of the spotlight for nurturing precocious intellects, or we simply transfer the credits to Auburn. I know that Doctor Hoskins and Doctor Stebbins both derive great pleasure from the association with 3Sigma, both on and off campus.” She read off a list of names. “Haley Simon. Deena Simon. Carlita Johnson. And we fully expect that Brindy McPherson and Sandra Gleason will follow next December.”

I’m thinking that some on-line courses and my girls will do an Auburn graduation anyway, in MATHEMATICS.

I was busy in my office when my cellphone went off with Haley’s ring.

“Hey, baby,” I said.

“Double squeal, love,” she said.

“Double squeal?”

“Yep! We’re graduating in May. And Cindy’s coming in Friday and she’s bringing AIRPLANES!”

“Really? They’re letting you graduate?”

“It was a good meeting. The chancellor was the impediment and we had our professors on our side.”

“I figured as much,” I said. “Those who’ve visited...”

We entertain visits from any and all of the college faculty. Haley’s history professor is a regular. We’ve drawn engineering professors, English professors, and even one of Sandy’s music professors.