Chapter 115

“I may not have believed in lady luck, but I believed in her fucking sister, irony. That bitch was out to nail me to wall.”
—Pippa DaCosta, Trapped

WHEN I GOT HOME Sunday afternoon, Beca’d been in the kitchen making a casserole for dinner. Mom was standing beside her giving her instructions. I just stood there for a while watching them. It was sweet. Pey came to take my hand and whisper, “Mom’s teaching my other big sister how to cook.”

“I’ve been learning from everyone this summer,” Beca said. “One of the things I learned is that when the man of the house enters the kitchen, he’s supposed to encourage the woman by giving her a little kiss.” Mom’s shoulders were shaking with laughter. I quickly went to the stove where Beca was browning hamburger and she turned her face up to me for a little kiss.

“Honey, I’m home. What’s for dinner?” I asked in the best rendition of a fifties sitcom I could remember.

“I don’t know what this is called,” Beca said. “Mom just keeps calling it ‘Almost Dinner.’ I guess when we serve it, it is dinner.”

V1 had a jolt. One of Uncle Dave’s wives worked for a food packager in Chicago back in the fifties. That was a tumultuous time for labor relations at Studebaker where Dad worked. Seemed like they were always on strike or laid off. We ate a lot of government surplus food and Aunt ... The name escapes me ... Anyway, she was determined to help. It seemed that sometimes cans came off the packaging line without labels. Employees could gather up a case of random cans of food and take it home. Talk about potluck! Every month, she gave us two or three cases of unlabeled food to help supplement the government surplus.

Mom, never the most creative cook in the world, would simply fry up a pound of hamburger and onions, boil some noodles, and toss it together with three to five cans of random food. She called it ‘Almost Dinner.’ Sometimes we had casseroles that had three cans of green beans in them. Sometime, creamy soup. A couple of times, Mom had the good sense to serve the cans of fruit cocktail in a separate bowl.

Whatever was served, we sat and ate.

I found tears running down my cheeks. It was stupid how a memory could blindside me like that. I could see there was a list of ingredients in a recipe book Mom was using. Even if it reminded me of the old family tradition, someone sometime had formalized it and put it in a church cookbook.

Like I did whenever I was overwhelmed like this, I took my guitar into my room and started to play.

“You’re sad, J,” Pey said. She plopped onto the beanbag next to me and cuddled against me while I continued to mindlessly let my fingers find chords and notes. “Whatever it is that makes you sad, I’m here to share it with you.”

“Do you ever get sad for no reason at all, Pey?” I asked softly. She was such a sweetie and I don’t think she’d taken the talisman I bought her for her birthday off since I gave it to her. It was just a little bronze medallion a guy at the fair was making. It was a stylized symbol of a howling wolf and was supposed to be a protection talisman.

“Sometimes. Mostly I get sad when I’m lonely.”

“Do I help you not feel lonely?”

“Silly. That’s why I come to listen to you play. I don’t feel lonely when I can hear your guitar.”

“I don’t feel as sad when I hear your voice,” I chuckled. “Maybe we should send a music message to Em so she doesn’t feel lonely. What do you think?”

We quickly agreed and I recorded five minutes of lively tunes while Pey danced around. We sent it off to Em with a message that said ‘Cheer up! We love you!’

“I’m going to go see Joan,” Beca said to me. Much to my surprise, after dinner and family games and a movie, she’d simply joined me in brushing her teeth and came to bed with me. I wrapped her in my arms and held her as we settled for sleep.

“Can you do that? Don’t they, like, lock them in during training?” I asked.

“Only during basic. We talked a lot the weekend she was here before going to NSO training. You were in San Diego. She was very disappointed she missed you.”

“I’m sorry I missed her, too. She’s in Chicago now, right?”

“Yes. I think NSO screwed up, not realizing her father lives there. She’s actually living at home with him and her stepmom, almost like any summer. Her training is about the same as having a full-time job. She reports for work at eight and goes home at five. Most of it is in a classroom or an office.”

“That’s really different from Em’s training.”

“Different specialties. Who knew the government needed so many people to create graphics and websites? They’ve already started her on advanced animation training,” Beca said.

“Cool. Just make sure she doesn’t sign that stupid service extension in order to get into management.”

“They’ve already tried,” Beca said. “It’s part of a professional career path. Mostly, though, they’re trying to get programmers into it. They didn’t put much pressure on Joan.”

“So how are you getting to Chicago?” I asked. Beca rolled to face me, pressing her soft breasts into my chest and my perpetually hard cock into her stomach.

“You’re taking me, silly,” she said. She kissed me deeply and squirmed against me. “Maybe we should relieve some of the pressure down here so you can get some sleep,” she whispered as she began stroking my cock. It didn’t take long to relieve the pressure against her stomach and chest. She kissed me again and produced a washcloth. Ever prepared.

I had to show up at school early Monday morning, so my run with Nanette and Livy was truncated. Beca rode with me to school and I went directly to Mr. Gieseke’s office with the form he’d emailed me over the weekend. He’d sent me a listing of classes available during the period I wouldn’t be taking Calculus. I really wanted in the Constitutional Government class but I wasn’t willing to fight for it and get a reputation for being even more difficult than I was.

His top suggestion was that I rearrange my schedule and move Chemistry to fourth period and take Finite Mathematics during seventh period. The dude just wasn’t giving up on me taking higher-level math. His list of choices for just filling fourth period were lame. He suggested Technical Theater or Applied Guitar. They were both veiled insults as one was considered a class for techies who were uninterested in academics and the Applied Guitar was an introductory class where students learned chords. Down at the bottom of the list, though, beneath two or three that would require me to leave school and go over to Ivy Tech for a dual credit class, was a class that struck a chord with me: Photography: Filmmaking.

I got online for a complete course description and discovered this was the first of a series and the advanced course could be repeated for credit. What got me was that we’d produce a public service announcement, a music video, and short live action subjects. And we’d learn Adobe Premiere Pro. I’d been using a shareware video editing program to make the simple cuts I used in my morning concerts and add titles. But learning a professional tool would be great. And I was sure Cindy and I would be doing more music videos. This class could really be helpful.

Gieseke signed the transfer slip and handed it to me without a comment. It looked like he was too disgusted with me to even acknowledge my choice. I checked the transfer slip to make sure it was for the class I wanted.

Latin was Latin. We were working on translating passages of Cicero’s Paradoxa Stoicorum as an exercise. Miss Lustig—yes, the same old librarian who had been my proctor when I first got back to school—taught Latin. There were fewer of us in the second-year class than there had been in first year. I’d heard a rumor that there was no first-year class this year because Miss Lustig planned to retire after my class had completed its third year. The school didn’t consider Latin to be important enough to bring in a new teacher to overlap with her. That was too bad.

Most of the texts we were working on were pretty boring, though the last section we’d been challenged with last year was a segment of Julius Caesar’s The Conquest of Gaul. It wasn’t a long segment but you could hear the general’s voice in his writing.

Anyway. We were just starting our work on Cicero. It involved a lot of reading the Latin aloud and then selecting a student to translate it. At the end of class, Miss Lustig handed out a simple sheet and told the class that she would award bonus credit for anyone who could translate it by the end of the semester.

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