Chapter 2

This is our second Jamesons story. Chapter one was the first, and I think it’s best to read that one first. But for those who prefer chronological order this one is chronologically first. We just write them, we do not judge.

My birthday had been on Thursday, but both Jeff and I had classes on that day, so as a present to me he flew me up to Stuart on Saturday. The beach there was an easy walk for us from the airport where Jeff showed me the proper knots used to tie down the little Cessna and keep it safe for our return to Tamiami. We walked along the semi-deserted beach and watched the breakers roll in.

“Jeff, do you ever think about going back home?” I asked while throwing a shell or something like a shell out into the waves.

“Yeah, a lot.”

“I mean it’s kinda crazy, more and more people are moving to South Florida every day, other people seem to love it here. But I don’t.”

“Yeah, it will get better after you are released from the insane asylum.”

I smiled at Jeff’s euphemism for Miami Sunset High School. It was a totally different world for us. 1600 students, a great many of which had just come in the last few years to this country, with it seemed like 1600 particular issues and 1600 individual needs.

There were as many social workers, psychiatrists, politicians, lawyers and interpreters as teachers milling around it seemed. Since the two of us hadn’t set the library on fire, or assaulted anybody we were pretty much ignored by the faculty and administration.

1600 students in one school, there had been like 2000 souls in all of Freedom Corners Texas, our home.

Ignored we were, except for when we were the unwilling protagonists in a previously undiscovered novel by Franz Kafka.

“Oh, you loved it there, especially Senorita R.,” I said.

“Yeah, illiterate in two languages.”

“That’s jus’ ‘cause you speak ‘Mexican Spanish.’”

“And ‘Texican English’ too.”

I laughed. It felt so good to laugh and in a flash I suddenly realized how long it had been since I had last laughed and who it was that made me laugh like this before, and then the time before that. I reached out and held his hand in mine.

“I love you Jeff.”

“Me too sis.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“Nope, I really do love me.”

I turned and punched my big brother on the shoulder as he just grinned like the darned Cheshire cat.

“And I love you too Janet ... Even though you punch like a girl.”

I shoved him hard with both hands and took off running down the beach yelling, “tag, you’re it,” over my shoulder.

We had both run cross-country in high school, and while I had a good jump on him, his legs were longer than mine and he eventually caught up with me and tagged me.

“No tag backs,” I triumphantly stated.

Jeff was right I had less than a semester to go. As hard as it was for him he did his final year of penance in the insane asylum. It was harder for him in that he just had that one year. At least I had two years to check all of the arbitrary and ridiculous bureaucratic boxes, and so fulfill the State of Florida’s requirements for granting a high school diploma.

“I wish you weren’t so unhappy,” he said.

“It just that I have nobody.”

“Jan, you have it all, you could get somebody.”

“Yeah, I misspoke I don’t want just anybody. Do you?”

“Noticed my love life lately, sis?”

“You have one?”

“No, and that’s exactly what I meant.”

“Me neither, It’s kinda boring.”

“I’m pretty busy logging hours.”

“Yeah ... You know that could help fix that boredom thing.”

“Janet, would you like to fly with me to Marco Island tomorrow? See the Gulf Coast, decide if it is really any better?”

“Yes, I would.”

“It’s a date.”

“Only one I’m getting.”

“But, do you know what I’m truly honored, I get to fly the prettiest girl in Florida around.”

“You’re just saying that because I am your sister.”

“No, I am saying it because you are the hottest gal in South Florida, the fact that you are my sister is incidental.”

It was an interesting courtship. I’m not sure that a ‘courtship’ is what Jeff had in mind, but it isn’t as if he really had any choice. It’s just a fact of nature, girls develop faster than boys. Mom once told me any girl who couldn’t control her boy was a moron. We flew to Loxahachee on the Gold Coast, as well as to Marco Island south of Fort Meyers and to Jupiter a bit beyond Stuart as Jeff slowly banked the required hours for his commercial license.

In little, and I do mean little, we were forced into intimacy by the aeronautical engineering dictates of Clyde Cessna. In that little 152, november four niner eight six two two, or rather in the places that it took us I found my life partner. The boy, the beautiful man that had actually been there beside me all along just waiting for me to understand that it was him who would complete me.

Forty hours to a private license, that part had been completed before Jeff could fly me anywhere. Two fifty to a commercial, two thousand for that coveted ATP. One forty of that in a multi-engine, two hundred total IFR. Jeff had lots and lots of hours to burn in the little 152 based at Tamiami whose owners charged only by the accumulated numbers on the Hobbes Clock. As much as possible I was his persistent companion there in those hours. As much as possible we talked sharing our common frustration.

The move to Florida had been good for dad, for he had been one of many at DFW. He had been chosen to head his employer’s new operation out of MIA. They called it ‘corrosion corner’ that corridor along NW 36th street where the FAR 99 and 123 operations were based.

It had been good for mom, she got a nice condo in Kendall Lakes. A tasteful Spanish mission style stucco exterior with a barrel tile roof. Compared to our old home near Dallas it was rather smallish. But it had a very fancy kitchen with an oak floor, stainless steel appliances and granite countertops. The real cherrywood cabinets were lesser in number but oh so very perfect in their execution. The condo’s two very fancy bathrooms featured gauged slate in place of familiar glazed porcelain, and the showers featured floor to ceiling glass and gleaming chrome hardware.

Besides Jeff’s and my bedroom sets it seemed that mom’s beloved wrought iron and glass ice cream table and matching chairs were the only artifacts of my sixteen years growing up in Texas worth the relatively small cost of transportation to Florida. Mom was having a blast starting over.

So one day months after my eighteenth birthday, or more importantly that sweet Saturday thereafter when my brother had first said he loved me. At least in my mind not in a platonic brother-sister way but in the way that lovers so often say they share love, we were again walking the Atlantic Ocean beach near Whitham field.