Chapter 12

After Valerie got through her anger issues about the fact that her mother hadn’t told her she was pregnant, it moved on to, “Who’s the father?” That got a growled, “Who do you think, Valerie? You insisted I sleep with him!”

I can only remember seeing my wife speechless one time. By that, I mean unable to use her voice for more than a minute. Her face, though, spoke volumes. Her mouth opened and closed four or five times. She leaned forward, as if she was going to speak, but then leaned back again. There was tension in the air thick enough to cut with the fabled knife.

Then Val said, “Oops!”

And started laughing.

You’d think that with the unconventional nature of our strange three-way relationship, that this bump in the road would be taken in stride. This bump, however, was a very literal one, and it was in Eve’s belly.

While Valerie was laughing and holding her own pregnant belly, I moved over to Eve.

“You could have told me,” I said.

“And what would you have done if I did?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. I blinked. “I would have talked to you about it.”

“Talking about it wouldn’t have changed anything.”

I reached, tentatively, to put my hand on the results of all those nights we spent together.

“May I?” I asked, with my hand an inch away from her body.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Of course you can. Obviously, my daughter isn’t incensed about this.”

Valerie suddenly stopped laughing and clutched her belly with both hands.

“Owww!” she yelled.

My hand landed on Eve’s belly and the baby in it moved, as if to acknowledge my presence.

“What’s wrong?” asked Eve, suddenly alert.

“I think I just had a contraction,” said Val.

“Sit down,” said Eve, in full mommy mode. “You were laughing a lot. Let’s see what happens after you calm down.”

“I can’t have this baby now,” moaned Val. “We don’t even have a place to stay, yet!”

“Just calm down,” said Eve, taking Val to the couch. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

They sat and Val moaned and worried.

But she didn’t have any more contractions. In the end, Eve said it was just because of the laughter and over-use of those muscles, and that maybe the baby moved around.

It got things back to the conversation stage, though.

And the conversation eventually got around to what Eve O’Malley was planning to do with the baby I’d impregnated her with.

“I have room here,” said Eve, somewhat flippantly. “I can turn the spare room into a nursery.”

“So you’re keeping it?” Val’s voice sounded tense. I couldn’t tell what her preference about this was. I don’t know if Eve could detect it or not. It was up in the air.

“Yes,” said Eve, carefully. “I always planned to raise this child.”

Val may have been hormonal, because she had laughed helplessly, and now she cried the same way.

Basically, Val had been worried that her mother would give the baby up for adoption, and since I was the father, she didn’t want that.

It seems that Valerie, beyond not minding if I slept with her mother, also didn’t mind that I had fathered a child on her mother.

No, that doesn’t communicate well the emotion of the situation.

Valerie was elated that there were going to be two children who could call me Daddy.

You have many more options when you have spendable income. Well, maybe ‘income’ is the wrong word. We had plenty of money in the bank, so the first thing we did was get a hotel room and take Eve out for a celebration dinner. Eve was still a little off balance, because her daughter was behaving in such an unconventional way. What she didn’t think about is that Valerie was raised in an unconventional way, without dating and exposure to boys on an intimate level. She never had to obey the rules of boy and girl relationships, because she didn’t have any. Not on a level where petting or sexual intercourse was involved. If you don’t have boyfriends, nobody ever teaches you that sharing one is forbidden.

At the same time, Valerie was a little off balance, too. She hadn’t expected her mother to be pregnant, so that took some getting used to. She hadn’t expected to have a brother or sister at her relatively advanced age, but that was going to happen. She had endured what she thought was her first contraction, and it had scared her. We thought we were ready to do the birth thing, but when the contractions start, preparation can begin to erode.

“I still want you to be my birth coach,” said Val, over bread sticks.

“Who is your OB doctor in San Antonio?” asked her mother.

Valerie blinked, and the bread stick dangled from her fingers, forgotten.

“I didn’t think about that,” she said. “Crap!”

Eve looked at me.

“Have you been officially discharged, yet?”

I nodded. Basically I was retired, as if I had served a full twenty years.

“Do you still have Tricare?”

I nodded again. I had kept our military insurance because it would help with my future medical needs.

“For both of you?” asked Eve.

“Yes!” I said.

“Then Valerie is covered for giving birth in a military hospital. I know some doctors, and a few of them owe me favors. Tomorrow I’ll see what I can do.”

Two days later we had a realtor named Judy, but that didn’t lead to immediate home-buying bliss. The first thing she asked us was what our price point was. Valerie was vague about that. We could afford just about anything in the San Antonio area, but we didn’t want a lot of people to know that. So instead of telling Judy what we could spend, Valerie told her what we wanted. We (she) wanted a swimming pool, for instance. We (she) also wanted a large fenced-in yard, with lots of privacy, but not too close to neighbors. We (both of us) wanted to be able to have a dog that had room to run around. We (she) needed at least four bedrooms. One of them would become a nursery and she had already told me she loved being “all knocked up” by me and planned to spend a lot of time, over the next decade or so, being that way. We (she) wanted a formal garden and, since there seemed to be a lot of infrastructure being asked for, maybe something with a carriage house that servants could live in.

“Servants?” I asked, as both of my eyebrows tried to relocate to the top of my head. “Now you want servants?”

“Well, somebody has to take care of the garden, and the pool. And I’m going to have a lot on my mind with a new baby. I don’t know how to be a mother, Bob, and it would be a lot less stressful if we had a maid, you know, to clean up, and do laundry and things like that.”

“I can do laundry and clean the house,” I said. “And without legs, I’m going to have plenty of time to pull weeds in a garden.”

“Without legs?” asked Judy, whose eyes had gotten bigger and bigger as first Valerie and then I talked.

I pulled up my pants legs to show her my titanium ankles.

“War wound,” I said. I was suddenly proud that Judy hadn’t been able to tell.

“I don’t want you doing dishes and laundry,” said my bride. “I want you lavishing attention on me.” She looked a little pouty, but then brightened. “I’ve always wanted to live on a farm. You know, with a big barn, and chickens and goats, and maybe a cow to milk. How about that, Honey?”

“This is a joke, isn’t it,” said Judy. “Nancy Patterson, over at Essex Realty put you up to this, didn’t she?”

“Things are a little stressful for her right now,” I said. “If there’s anyplace nice, with four bedrooms and a big yard, let’s start there.”

“I want a pool, Bob!” barked Valerie. “I feel like a beached whale and you know Mom said that aqua therapy would be good for you.”

“And a pool,” I said to Judy. “Let’s just go look at some things. Maybe we can narrow our wish list down.”

“The kind of places you’re talking about are going to be in the half million or higher territory,” said Judy.

“Okay, then,” I said. “We have all day.”

The fact that Valerie was very, very pregnant might have influenced her a bit. She wanted a house to come home to from the hospital with our baby. That was going to be a tall order in any case, seeing as how buying a house usually takes a minimum of a month. There are lots of hoops to jump through. And then there was the issue of furnishing it, once we had it. That normally takes a while. Money can smooth over some of those bumps, but we didn’t have unlimited funds.

Judy got to work on her computer, clicking and biting her lip. She finally looked up.

“I need at least a ballpark figure on price,” she said.

“One point five mil,” I said, before Valerie could open her mouth.

Judy’s eyes got big and she went back to work. She kept going, “Ahhh!” but after peering at the screen for a minute she’d say, “No, I don’t think so.”

“What seems to be causing a problem?” I asked. She looked up at me.

“I’m finding big homes, but most of them are on acreages that don’t have a great walkability rating.”

“Walkability rating?” I asked.

“It means the land around the home might be undeveloped and rough. You’d have a hard time getting around.” She blinked. “You know ... your legs?”

“Don’t worry about my legs,” I said. “I can run five miles.”

That impressed her, even though it had nothing whatsoever to do with “walkability,” which sounded like a made-up word, designed to pump up the price of something. I was to find out the real estate industry loved making up words that made things sound better than they were.

You’re not interested in all that, though, so I’ll just cut to the chase, which chase took four days and drove Judy almost insane. Her commission healed all that, though.

We bought a place south of San Antonio that was on seven acres of land with a poor walkability rating because most of it was wooded. The shape of the property was a long, skinny rectangle, and the driveway into it was half a mile long. The house was unfinished, because the guy who had been building it ran out of money when his investments tanked. He’d been building it as a high-end bed and breakfast place. What made it attractive to me was that the outer shell was complete, and only the interior was unfinished. The commercial grade kitchen equipment was on site, if not installed, and a lot of framing had been done. The builder was owed more than a hundred thousand dollars when the owner defaulted on the loan. Basically, it was a big white elephant repo that nobody wanted.

It had been on the market for over a year and the bank was desperate to get rid of it. We got it for a song. The only issue was getting it finished. It was no longer going to be a bed and breakfast, but we had some ideas about what to do with the room.

The modest in-ground pool was finished, but the plumbing wasn’t hooked up. The original plan had a big living room, with the requisite fireplace, though who would want to use a fireplace in Texas was beyond me. A dining room was to one side of the living room. The other direction led to six suites. Everything was on one level, which I liked, and though you couldn’t tell it by looking at the framing, there would be tons of storage space. There was no garage, for some reason, but that was a small matter.

The builder’s name was Ted Bunsen and he was surly in the extreme when I first approached him, having gotten his name from the bank.

“I’ve already lost a hundred and thirty grand on that place,” he said, his voice rough. “It almost cost me my business. I’m not interested in working on it.”

“I can write you a check for what you were owed,” I said, displaying a check book. “There will be some alterations to the original plans, but not to the extent that we need an architect to get involved. It’s not going to be a bed and breakfast anymore.”

He eyed the checkbook.

“Code will determine that,” he said.

I shrugged.

“If it’s not going to be a bed and breakfast, then what is it? It’s way too big to just be a home.”

When I told him what we had in mind, he told me to write the check, shook my hand, and said, “You’ve got yourself a builder.”

We did not get to bring the baby home to our new house. That’s because it took four months to finish it. Instead, we rented a furnished apartment near BAMC that my legs made possible. It was part of a block of property developed for families of soldiers receiving long-term care at BAMC. Jerry Springfield, the owner of the property, had a son who had gotten burns over 60% of his body in a mortar attack in Afghanistan, and had been treated at BAMC. It had taken over a year and more than thirty surgeries to get things manageable. Jerry was in the real estate business and building the apartment house was his way of giving back.

I wasn’t technically a long-term patient, but since Jerry was in the business, he heard about what Valerie and I were doing and he made an exception for us. He also offered to become an investor. We weren’t sure about that. We had planned to be a small operation, and the idea of having investors made us nervous. Jerry, though, had some ideas that were great, but which would involve serious money. And it was quite possible there wouldn’t be a ton of return on the investment. In the end, he came in as a silent partner with 25% ownership.

What we built, besides our own living space, was a retreat for wounded warriors and their families, a place they could come to and stay for a weekend, or a week. It was quiet, remote, and they would be among friends, other people who understood what they were going through. There would be physical therapy type equipment available, and the pool, and thanks to Jerry’s contribution, horseback riding. Valerie even got her barn and petting zoo. There was a playground that made me wish I was a kid again. We charged only enough to cover operating costs, with two percent for a capital investment fund.

There was also a qualified, experienced nurse in residence.

Aoibheann O’Malley quit her job and moved in with us.

It took four years before the Army decided the “R&R Ranch” met with their specifications as a legitimate rehabilitation venue. When we got a contract to place soldiers who didn’t need to be in the barracks any longer, but weren’t ready to dive back into the cold, cruel world, they came to live with us for a while. We expanded, building a bunkhouse, which resembled barracks life enough to make guys feel right at home. We actually hired two of them who were especially good with the horses. Then we hired a combat engineer named Tracy Walker, who had severe PTSD after surviving an IED that took his left arm off just below the shoulder. His prosthesis didn’t inhibit his operation of the tractor and other equipment we used to expand the riding trails into the twenty acres we bought north of us. He would have stayed on as our handyman, except that the husband of one of our “legless ladies” as we insiders called them owned a paving company and hired Tracy to work for him. A homeless vet with a bad infection was sent to stay with us for three days, and he asked if he could use the kitchen to make something. It turned out he had gone to cooking school on the GI Bill and worked his way up to sous chef before the pace and PTSD he hadn’t acknowledged made him have a breakdown. The pace in our kitchen was a lot slower, and PTSD was becoming our specialty. His name was Jake and living in the bunkhouse was just fine and dandy to him. We ended up with a four star chef and I gained ten pounds.

We didn’t make a ton of money, before the Army started giving us contracts, and we had used up all of what Val got in her settlement, but once Uncle Sam started sending us regular checks, things got a lot more comfortable. It was also a lot of hard work, but it was worth it.

Eve and I ran the day-to-day retreat operation, and Val worked outside, for an actual paycheck. The Office of the General Counsel at the Veterans Administration hires non-military lawyers to provide pro bono legal aid to veterans and there was a position open at the Audie Murphy Memorial VA Hospital, in San Antonio. We basically lived on her salary, and the retreat ran on what the contract money brought in.

I’ve glossed over a lot of what happened, and told things out of order. It wasn’t smooth sailing, but it also wasn’t like being in a rocket attack. I always felt like I was blessed. I’ll back up a little, and give you some of the details I sort of ran past in my excitement about telling you what we did.