Chapter 5

Ben’s turn:

The rest of the trip home was uneventful. At the home marina, I pumped fifteen gallons of diesel into our tanks. I’ve seen some cruisers make the same trip for a hundred and fifty gallons of gas. Of course, they made the trip in one day. Hurrying is costly.

Monday I was back at work and Mandy was back in school. I sat down in my office, mug of fresh coffee at hand. A series of heads peered in the door, many of whom had attended the memorial. Kind words and wishes were spoken.

I was putting some documents together for an active project when the phone rang. The attorney’s office.

“We’re emailing you a document from the people who managed your parents’ retirement fund. Different deal. Will says it all goes to you.”

I got a ping from my computer. Opened a PDF and sat back in my chair. Mom and Dad had been thrifty, very thrifty, all our lives. Here’s a payout. Another little seven figures.

“You’ll need to go by there and sign some paperwork, whether you elect to leave the funds there or if you wish to move them.”

“Thank you. I’ll give them a call.”

I hung up. Looked at the numbers on the screen, then back at my stack of project documentation, then back at the screen, and I’m wondering why I’m working now.

Too much. I could feel the warning signs. Hadn’t felt one in a while, was surprised that the last ten days hadn’t found me in a ball in the corner of a dark room, something that happened a few times when I was a kid, over events that were nowhere as serious as anything going on now. I kept my eyes closed for a minute, centering myself. It’s my coping mechanism, lets me be an adult in the real world.

I had a new task. I stood, walked out of my office and up the hall. The door said ‘Bruce Crandall, Engineering Supervisor’. It was open. Bruce is the guy who stepped in when Denny took retirement. I knocked lightly to get his attention. “Got a minute?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

“Probably bad news. This is all too much. I’m turning in my two weeks’ notice.”

“Wow! You sure? I mean, take vacation. Hell, I’ll help you get a sabbatical. I don’t wanna lose you.”

“How’s that sabbatical thing work here?”

“No pay. You stay on the roster. You can keep your insurance but you have to foot the company’s portion of the bill while you’re out.”

“That might work.”

“If you don’t come back before the year’s up, they drop you off the rolls.”

“I oughta have things under control by then.” Or I will have determined a path where I don’t need to work at all. Proper investment, a bit of frugality, I am tossing numbers in my head.

“You’re gonna tie up the loose ends on your projects before you go?”

“Yeah. You need to decide who picks up. Send ‘em to me, and I’ll bring them up to speed.”

I went back to my office and started counting down how long before news got out.

Thirty minutes later another engineer was in my office, ostensibly to pick up a project.

“You’re quitting?”

“Bruce says ‘sabbatical’, but it looks about the same except for some HR bullshit.”

“Why?”

“Major stuff in my life, Mike. You know what just happened to me...”

“Yeah, but, still...”

“Detail. I’m now the guardian to a teenaged niece. The sister and brother-in-law that died with Mom and Dad were HER parents.”

“Ouch. No other options for her?”

“Nope.”

“Lots of people do that single parent thing. And teenaged? I mean, she can take care of herself...”

“Mostly. But she’s got Asperger’s. Needs a little more attention than the normal teen.”

“Special ed?”

“No, she’s in regular classes, but every now and then she has issues.”

Mandy’s turn:

Math class is first thing on my schedule after home room. My usual level of participation is to raise my hand and say “Here” when roll is called, then to sit in my desk quietly next to a window and stay out of the way while Mister Benson explains order of operations or the reciprocal rule for the zillionth time to kids who may want to understand, and he usually has to do this over disruptive kids who could hardly care less.

Today he’s trying to work on time-speed-distance problems. As Paw-paw used to say, “peel me a grape.” Soooo simple. I think I learned this beside Uncle Ben on his little sailboat when he said, “Five knots,” and prodded me to take a guess as to the length of the windy course we were taking to a goal site twenty miles away.

Of course, he tossed in necessities such as statute miles versus nautical miles and speed through the water versus speed made good because we were bucking an incoming tide pushing against the outgoing current and that’s why the boat’s knotmeter and the gps’s speed number don’t match.

So I was reading. Mark Twain was explaining the social niceties of dueling in 19^th century Paris and I was trying not to snicker when my attention was broken by a slightly higher tone in the classroom.

“Miss Sharmekia, explain how you’d solve the problem?”

Sharmekia was not going to be a Rhodes scholar, that is, unless they opened up the applications to aspiring backup hoochy dancers in a rap video. At fourteen, she affected as much ghetto style as she could get away with and still get in through the front door of school.

Of itself, I have no problem with how somebody wants to present an image. Heaven knows, we have a spectrum from Sharmekia through aspiring pole dancers to cheerleaders to the proverbial all-American Girl, and on the male side we have the male counterparts to Sharmekia’s rap video, we have cowboys and wiggers and jocks and nerds. We have all of them.

But Sharmekia, as part of her persona, is LOUD. I won’t characterize her as stupid, but whatever mental ability she might have is not being spent in math class.

“Doan’ know. How come you don’t axe HER?” she replied, pointing to me.

“Because she knows, and I want to see if YOU know...”

“You doan’ know if she knows. She be sittin’ over there readin’ an’ you never axe her nuffin.”

By this point, not only am I paying attention, but Mister Benson can see that I’m paying attention. I can see that Mister Benson is already exasperated. I couldn’t do his job, spectrum or no, and by now, the whole class is looking at me.

‘Get a handle on yourself, Amanda’ I say inside my head. ‘This is NOT time for a meltdown.’

I raise my hand.

“Miss Amanda?” he says, recognizing me.

“I got this, Mister Benson. D’ya want explanation from here, or should I go to the board?” The poor guy actually looked relieved. I could knock out a few minutes of an interminable hour, getting out of this class and into the next one.

“Can you go to the board?”

“Yessir.” I stood up, shook my hair into place and walked to the front of the class and started.

“Time-speed-distance. Three variables. You get two, the third is easy to find. Let me show you a trick.” I drew a big ‘T’ on the board, wrote ‘D’ on top of the crossbar, then ‘S’ and ‘T’ on either side of the vertical.

“Now all you have to do is cover up the one you’re looking for. This problem, you have time and distance and you want to know the speed. All you do is cover up the ‘S’ and it tells you that you need to divide T into D. Since D is a hundred twenty miles and T is two hours, you can do this one in your head and come up with sixty miles an hour.”

I looked around the class, saw a few kids actually getting it. “Now, this problem, we know our speed and how far we’re going and we want to know how long we have to travel, so we cover up the T, and...”

A girl on the front row blurted, “Yeah! That makes it EASY!”

I shrugged and looked at Mister Benson.

“Thank you, Miss Amanda.”

I went back to my seat.

“Just curious, Miss Amanda,” Mister Benson said. “Next week’s chapter covers problems with two vehicles meeting. Are you familiar?”

“Yessir. I can solve those in several different ways.”

“Thank you.”

“Yessir.” And I turned my book back over.

Exiting the classroom after the bell rang, I usually wait until the rush for the door subsides.

“Why are you in my class? Miss Amanda?” he asked.

I smiled. “I’m an eighth grade student. This is eighth grade math.”

“You find it easy.”

“Yessir. I read the book. I know how it ends.” And a wry smile. He’s a nice man doing a tough job.

“It’s math. It doesn’t end.”

“Oh, you know that in May, school ends and so does math.” Another smile. “For some students.”

I made my way up the crowded halls toward my next class, not paying particular attention. Three feet from the wall, that gave people room to work with their lockers, yet didn’t cross the center line into opposing traffic. Routine.

Then POW! I was shoved into the wall lockers. I hit pretty hard, but I turned in time to have a slap miss.

“Ho! You make me look stoopud!”

Sharmekia. This is new. She’s not a bully. That would take concentration. She’s more of an equal opportunity intimidator, using her size and her aggressiveness to lord her way through the day. Apparently I crossed a line.

“I’ onna kick yo ass,” she announced.

She’s got probably fifty pounds and several inches in height and I’m not a fighter, but – backpack. The shove knocked it off my shoulder. It slid down my arm to my hand and dangled. Only moves I had were to fold and get the snot beat out of me, or ... Swing.

She was hauling back to take another punch. I went for overhead, big loop, three periods of textbooks, notebooks, and a Mark Twain anthology. Caught her right on top of her weave. Her fashion statement might’ve saved her from real damage, but she went down and I went nuts.

New me. I’ve never actually fought before, but there’s this thing about kicking and stomping that I guess is primal programming. Somebody tried to hold me back, and in wrestling free, I fell. Okay, while I’m down here ... My fists are small, but I used them as best I could, other students trying to get me to back away, an adult voice yelling “Stop!” then stronger arms wrapping me from behind. Last move, I dug my fingers deep in her weave and was yanking when I was pulled away. The stupid plastic mess came loose in my hands.

By this time several teachers and the school ‘resource’ officer, an old guy who was a commissioned deputy sheriff, were there. A couple of them picked up Sharmekia. She was kind of floppy. I was still enraged. “She HIT me!”