Chapter 1

“No, Uncle Charlie, I was her stepdaughter. She kept me after Dad died in Iraq. That was what, about four years ago? It would have looked bad if she hadn’t. Not many people know, though. You didn’t, for example. Doug did, but he thought we were closer.” I looked at her in question. “He thought Sherri and I were closer. We weren’t, I guess. In any case, she gave me five grand out of the life insurance money your brother left her and told me to come find you. If you want to help me until I can get my feet on the ground, I would appreciate it, but knowing what you know now, I doubt you are going to want to do that.”

“Donna, are you telling me that not only are we not related, which I already knew, but that you were Sherri’s STEPdaughter? Seriously? You aren’t related to her either?”

She nodded then shook her head, acknowledging my recent education into her background.

I let my surprise just tumble out. “Well, shut the door. Who’da knowed? It’s probably been just a bit obvious, but you do know I’ve had a crush on you since you were like fourteen or fifteen, then, right?”

“I hoped so and yeah, I guess I did. Your brother told me when I graduated, not to invite you to the ceremony or you’d sweep me up in your arms and he and Sherri would never see me again.”

I snickered at that. “I’m not a dirty old man, but that sounds kinda fun. You know, I always wondered why you were such a beautiful little girl with pretty red locks and she was a mean looking woman with dishwater blonde hair.” I reached out and took some of her gorgeous hair in my fingers. She didn’t react, other than smiling. “I remember, though, you used to call her Mom,” I mentioned.

Donna shrugged. “That was back when I thought she cared whether I lived or died. I called her Mom, because I felt that we could be close. I thought we WERE close. I was obviously wrong. I’ll bet she never even called you to tell you about this. Me showing up here. That was another clue about how you felt, by the way. She gave me a two-year-old Christmas card envelope, a great big green one, addressed to me, not to them, and told me to put your address into the GPS in Dad’s old car. She signed the back of the title, handed it and a fat envelope to me, and then said, ‘Go have a nice life’. She did give me a chance to pack everything I could into the car.”

“Yeah, I remember sending that card. That was the Christmas before you turned sixteen. You just turned eighteen a few weeks ago. You got that card, too, right?”

“Yes, but there was no return address left on it. It was on the flap, and she ripped the flap off when she handed me the envelope with the card in it. I don’t think she liked you, Uncle Charlie.”

“Donna, just Charlie will be fine. Just call me Charlie, for now. OK? I think Uncle Charlie is a little bit below your age group as far as protocol goes. You’re an adult, for all intents and purposes. Evidently Sherri thought so. Maybe she looked it up. In this state, seventeen is the age of consent, and you are well past that. Anyway, I’m really happy to see you again, and welcome to Missouri. What’s it been now, six weeks?”

“Yeah, about that, anyway. The funeral was terrible. I wish I could have left with you then, but I thought Doug was just kidding with me. Sherri said he wasn’t, and that you were my last and best hope, and a chance at a real future. She evidently no longer wanted anything to do with me, and her new boyfriend...” I gasped. “You heard that right. I just found out she’s been seeing this guy for a year or so behind Doug’s back. What a tramp. Anyway, he told her to lose me or stay behind. Here I am.”

“Oh, Donna, how true. How right you are. A tramp indeed. I can’t believe she was cheating on Doug, but it makes sense. Doug told me about the box of letters he found.”

“Letters?” she questioned. I nodded. “Oh, yeah! The shoebox?” I nodded again. “Yeah, Robert. What a loser. I didn’t know any better at the time. If Dad would have known, things surely would have been different.”

“I’ll bet. Oh, and the thing about Sherri not liking me? Sadly, you are probably wrong! Doug actually told me once to stay away from her. Seriously. As if I’d want anything to do with her. She slipped one time and called him ‘Charlie’. Not good.”

“When did she do that?”

“When they were ... Uhmmm, when they were in bed? I’m trying to put that as delicately as possible.”

“Oh, my God. She called him by your name when they were making whoopee. Oh, what a gas. Maybe that was the night I heard him screaming at her, and after every door in the house slammed at least twice, they slept in separate rooms. How funny!”

“Looking back on it, yeah, I guess it was. OK, sweetheart, what’s your plan?”

“Somehow, I need to get you to want to keep me so I can finish school, then apply for scholarships and go to college somewhere. I want learn how to make stuff.”

“Just make ‘stuff’. Do you care what?”

“No, not really. I just want to make things. Machines, computers, cars. I don’t care. I just have an itch.”

“Not a bad itch to have, at all. So, you don’t mind that I have a thing for you?”

“Nope.”

“Then I think your plan may work. Chicken or fish?”

“What?”

“For dinner, doll. Chicken or fish. You get to help decide stuff now. Call Sherri and tell her I said, ‘her loss’.”

“Uncle...” I glared at her. “OK. Charlie! Charlie, I really don’t want to talk to her. I thought about her on the way up here, then I looked at the speedometer and I was doing eighty-five and grinding my teeth.”

“Not good. Teeth are hard to fix. Dial her number and hand me your phone.” She did. I waited until Sherri answered. “It’s Charlie. She’s safe. Probably safer than she has been for a long time. Your loss, by the way. Don’t say anything, you’d just ruin the moment.” I pushed the red phone button to hang up.

It rang a few seconds later then stopped after Donna pushed about six buttons. “Blocked. Such is life. She knows where you are if she needs us.”

“I like the way you think, little girl. Speaking of little girls, how are you set for stuff. Things. You know, clothes, soap, little girl stuff.”

“I’m good. I’ll have to hit a store this month, but I can last a while if you have a washer and dryer. Or a washboard, some soap, and some strong string.” She smiled at me.

I hugged her to me, kissed the top of her head and said, “Good. We’ll go shopping in the city this weekend. Welcome home, Donna. I’m glad you’re here. Really glad. Honestly happy you showed up. I’ve been mostly by myself and really feeling kind of lonely for quite a while. Don’t hurt me, please.”

“I have no plans of biting the hand, as it were. Thank you for taking me in, Unc ... Charlie.” She spared herself another glare. “Same here, by the way. Your little crush isn’t exactly one sided.”

“Pray tell, missy.”

“It’s been more than two years ago, now. At their wedding. You danced with me. Your hand was in the small of my back. I was wearing that nothing little dress I found in my mother’s things. It felt like I belonged in your arms. Your hand on my skin. That feeling never went away. I’ve never since felt like that dancing with any number of men, young or otherwise, or boys, your brother included. He was nice to me, though. I’ve always thought of him as a decent stepfather. Then there were the others. Yuck. You know most of your gender are pigs, right?” I chuckled and nodded. “You, though, I’ve always thought of as a possibility.”

“A possibility?”

“Yeah. Relationship wise. I always thought of you as a possibility. Don’t ask me why. Love is blind, but the dance, and the Christmas card, this last birthday card, with the letter you wrote inside, hoping I was doing OK and all, and my little girl fantasies pretty well set me up for some wild dreams. You’d be surprised what fifteen and sixteen-year-old girls think about.”

“I’ll bet I would. You ever wonder what thirty year old guys think about?”

“Hopefully the same things, if this is going to work. Charlie, can I kiss you?”

“Anytime, sweetheart. Anytime.”

We kissed a kiss of lovers, not relatives. I was pretty sure, right then, that my future had been written, and I was going to play the lead role to the best of my abilities.

“My, oh my, that was nice. I’ve never felt that, either. I’ve kissed a few frogs, Charlie, but nothing ever felt like that.”

“I agree. I’ve kissed a few snakes as well, and you’re right. That was different. I didn’t feel your hand in my pants, either.”

“Whoa!! Slow down, bucko!”

“I meant reaching for my wallet. You know, as in gold diggers?”

“Why would you have a gold digger problem?”

“Gold? Maybe? Ya’ think?” I smiled at her to keep her from thinking I was being mean.

“How much gold?”

“Enough to dig for.”

“Cool. I have forty-nine-hundred dollars and change, so I don’t need your gold. Chicken. I’m tired of fish. Fish sticks and fish patties with peas and carrots get old after a while. Martha Stewart, Sherri wasn’t. I started liking the peas more than the fish in no time.”

“Fish sticks? No problem. Not the way I normally serve fish. Trust me. So, you came here just for me? Really?”

“Well, Sherri sent me this way, hoping you’d have me, but yes, I came to you willingly, hoping you’d take me in. I didn’t know about any gold, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“It is. That’s nice to know. Really nice. Come help me with dinner after you get your stuff in the guest room.”

“Thanks, Charlie. I mean that. Thank you.” She hugged me, pressing her forehead into my chest as if trying to make an impression, an indentation, that is, and went out to her car.

She spent about half an hour putting her stuff in the guest room then came out and helped me around the kitchen, with a little guidance.

“Donna, do you have a debit card, or what? You said you had some money.”

“Cash. She handed me a stack of hundreds and bundle of twenties, the title, and shooed me out the door.”

“I’ll get you to the bank as soon as we can. Maybe tomorrow. That much cash laying around is dangerous.”

“I was planning on doing that, too. I should have bought a prepaid card or something on the way out of town, but I just wanted away from her, and there, and the whole idea of her not wanting me around anymore. Oh well, when she gets to hell maybe my father can give her some ‘what for’. He’d have to get a three day pass out of heaven, but she’d deserve it, so maybe...” She giggled. That made me think she’d be OK. I thought maybe we’d be OK, too.

I chuckled at the way she said it. I’d never heard a bad word about her father, a senior NCO in the Army assigned to an outfit in Iraq. They were ambushed by a massive ISIS force our satellites lost track of. When I checked up on it with some friends, I was shocked, but shit happens in wars, even if they aren’t called that. My grandfather and father both beat that into my head, Vietnam being the closest thing to a war you can have and still not call it one.

In any case, her father was a decorated soldier and deserved better than Sherri. That was for sure. Doug got drunk one night while I was visiting and told me he found the shoebox full of love letters from a guy named Robert addressed to Sherri at a post office box. They were all dated during the time she was married to Donna’s father whose name was Donald. Yeah, Donald. Not Robert. I felt that Donald and Douglas deserved ... Well, at least Donald deserved better. My brother, Doug, had his moments. He probably deserved exactly what he was dealt. Maybe not the truck hitting him broadside, killing him instantly, but the rest of it. The cheating wife, the loss of his job, all that was probably his own fault. I’m just glad they kept his life insurance paid up. At least his bills will be paid, and Sherri can start over with her new beau.

In case you were wondering, Doug and I weren’t very close. Not close at all, actually. We just never clicked the way brothers sometimes, or more so, usually do.

The chicken dish came out fine, as it always does, cooked in the oven with mushroom soup and rice. She liked it, anyway, and that was what mattered. Of course, I did, or I wouldn’t have made it in the first place. Nothing worse than bad food. Well, maybe bad family, but what’s a fellow to do.

We stayed up for quite a while that first night, supposedly watching a movie, but we never stopped talking. She wanted me to know about school, all the people there, girls and boys, and how she hoped where she went for her senior year was different. She made sure I knew, after every story about the boys, that nothing happened other than some kissing and a couple of boys showing they were from Eastern and Southern European descent. “You know, Russian hands and Roman fingers?” She made sure I knew she shut them all down.

“Donna, have you thought about private school? An all-girl school maybe?” She looked at me a bit funny. “Just wondering. I wasn’t making any judgments or anything.” That was probably when it dawned on me that she was just trying to make sure I knew she wasn’t giving it away or anything.

“No, I haven’t. Private schools are expensive. I have less than five thousand dollars to last me until I can get into college, so I need to make it all count. AP classes and all. College isn’t cheap anymore. Not like back in the olden days when you went through, anyway.” She giggled and grinned at me.

“I’ll have you know I worked my way through school as a military student. I had lots to do to make sure my scholarship didn’t get cut off. I had to make my bed and everything.” I smiled, causing her to break out in laughter.

“Right. Got it. No matter, you graduated. What happened next?”

“I went from the student Air Force into the real Air Force, learned how to fly, and evidently did a pretty good job of it. Then they had me fly an airplane no one talks about, but only for a few minutes until it fell apart, I got hurt really badly, recovered and had to leave the service and come back home. You see, Miss Donna, I have physical limitations that Air Force pilots can’t have. I got smashed up pretty badly. I spent a few months in intensive care, several more months in physical therapy, and with quite a little help from the good Lord, here I am.”

“OK, so where’d the gold come from?”

“One night, lying there in the intensive care unit, not being able to move anything below my sternum, and having my meals and fluids provided for me through tubes, I had a brainstorm. I had a nurse get me a pen and paper, took down some notes, had the same nurse get me an iPad and a Surface computer using my credit card, I won’t mention the huge bribe, then spent a month researching and putting together an idea that had quite literally never been thought of before. After they took the tubes out, I was ready to talk to someone about it, so I called my father’s old lawyer, he came and looked at what I had, made some phone calls, and we were both fairly wealthy a couple of weeks later. He made several million dollars off that deal taking six percent of what I got.”

“I’m doing the math, although quite slowly, as I’m looking at you, and am quite distracted while I’m doing it. If six percent was several million dollars, ninety-four percent was like a few more million than that. Correct?”

“Yes, sweetheart. Hence ... The gold.”

“I love it when you call me sweetheart.”

“I love being able to call you that without my brother, or your ... Your wicked stepmother correcting me or giving me the evil eye. If you are my sweetheart, I’ll do the dishes tonight, then show you where the washer and dryer are.”

“I am your sweetheart, Charlie, if you’ll have me. I’ve wanted to be since I ... I’ve wanted to be for a long time. I don’t want to share too awfully much personal information just yet. Just assume there were more trips to the female products aisle at the store after I wanted to be your sweetheart than there were before.” I looked at her with a question on my face. “That made no sense at all, did it?”

“I’m sorry, Donna, but it made perfect sense to me. You’re trying to tell me you felt like a wanton woman when you were pining for me.” I chuckled. She frowned. “Don’t be that way. I was a pretty bad man while I was pining away for my crush down south. I’m so glad you drove up from Atlanta to be with me, doll. I really am. Another kiss?”