Community — Still Here
Copyright© 2022 by oyster50
Chapter 17
Cindy’s turn:
Most of OUR people know about airplanes and checklists so it’s no surprise that I’m not out the door with everybody else, and when I DO exit I’m carrying the bad with all the covers and plugs to put my plane to sleep properly. I get help with that. Haley’s right there, Deena close behind.
“Where’s she at?” Deena asked.
“With Dan,” I replied. “Didn’t want to [put too much of a load on her all at once.”
“I’ll keep ‘er with me,” returned Deena.
“Oh, nice,” I answered. “I’ll get you introduced.”
Haley snorted. “She’s got an ulterior motive...”
I flicked my eyes back to Deena.
“No, no, no, I’m not selling redheads on the black market. With me ‘n’ Kelly, I won’t be accosted...”
“With this crowd, somebody’s accosting you?”
“Matthew Saucier. He’s my age. His dad leases the land around our runway. HE’s useful. His son? Less so.”
“Don’t get Kelly in some kind of situation,” I stated.
“Oh, he’s mostly harmless. Drools a lot over Deena, though,” Haley snickered. “ ... And Kelly’s too young to provide a distraction. But she might attenuate the signals he’s sending.”
“That’s my daughter you have there,” I said.
“I shall care for her like she’s my sister,” Deena replied.
Kelly’s turn:
I can trust Deena. Truthfully, Cindy-mom says I can ‘trust’ just about everybody we know in this crowd. It’s a pretty big crowd, and I know a lot of people. And there’s nobody my age. I told Deena this fact.
She answered “I see that, but that’s only what my eyes see. I’ve heard about you. You’re not even your own age.”
“People don’t notice that. They see a little kid and their minds stop right there.” She paused. “But that’s OTHER people. This is us. At least half the people here are used to what looks like kids doing amazing things.” She smiled. “And they won’t eat you...”
“Not as long as we have crawfish,” Cindy laughed, walking up to us. “Is Deena being mean to you?”
“No, Mom. She’s being a big sister to me. I’m the only kid my age in this place.”
“I thought about that when we got the invitation. You’re young but you’re MY kind of young – smart beyond your calendar age.”
“You and Dad keep telling me that. So do a lot of other people back home.”
“I know those people and I trust what they say,” Deena asserted. “We’re going around introducing your new baby.”
“There’s no way I’m going to remember all these names and faces,” Kelly said.
“Smile and act happy...”
“No act, Mom. Deena’ s gonna take care of me.”
“Just so you keep crawfish on your mind,” I laughed.
“I’m looking for Hanna,” Deena told me. “Kelly’s interested in the pretty little red airplane. I’m gonna get her a ride.”
“Honey,” I told Kelly, “I know that you and I played with aerobatics in our Stearman. Hanna’s Extra is a lot more capable and it responds faster. Make sure you tell her about your experience before he takes off.”
“You’ve done it, though, right, Mom?”
Cindy’s turn:
‘Mom’ from Kelly melts my heart. “I’ve done it. Got Hanna to show me the limits.”
“We’ll talk with Hanna. She hasn’t killed anybody yet,” Deena inserted. “And the first crawfish come out of the pot at one, so we have time. If Hanna’s not tired yet.”
Hanna wasn’t tired yet. The lady loves to fly and that little red airplane is a great platform if your version of flying gets confused by up and down and G-force and silly things like that.
Yes, I realize that this isn’t a work day, but work is always somewhere in my mind, mainly because work is fun to me, at least for the most part. Nobody is surprised when I head over to their office with Haley and Carlita and Mila.
One must realize that we get video clips and videoconferences so I really wasn’t surprised at the work they were contributing to our robotics business. I heard noise behind me. I turned. Kelly.
“I came looking for you, Mom,” she said.
“I thought you were with Deena.”
“When I saw you sneaking in here I decided to follow.”
“I guess I took an opportunity to nose around their lab.”
“‘S okay, Mom. I would’ve ended up here sooner or later.” MY daughter, indeed.
Ruth Bentley’s turn:
In my own mind I cannot remember having contact with one of my ‘clients’ after I’d placed them in a home. That’s okay. Sitting in church with my family I learned about gratitude. Sitting in this office I learned that there’s a sizable part of the population at large who have no grasp of that concept, and an overwhelming section of my daily work puts me in contact with those people
And then there’s Kelly who treats me as an aunt, maybe. Make that a beloved aunt who helped her in life and now she wants to keep me apprised of her new life. Sometimes what she tells me is, to my mind, bordering on fantasy.
I would’ve written her reports off as containing a lot of embellishment, but ten days into her new life I took Dan and Cindy (Her new parents) up on their offer for a visit that I can, in clear conscience, claim as relating to my job.
The spot on this fantasy sequence got really deep. I was still reeling from my initial introduction into her new ‘family’, up front as foster parents, but all parties involved on THEIR side (and that’s a LOT of people, from a sitting district attorney to a retired judge on out to this and a HERD of people, engineers, teachers, every one of them acting like this is normal).
“Normal”? No. Satisfactory? Very much yes. That’s why, one, Kelly has my cellphone number, two, I get a lot of joy to hear her happy, and three, I’m getting a bureaucratic bulldozer to shove obstacles aside, obstacles that may impede her permanent adoption into her new surroundings.
So I’m in my office working on paperwork that the state and federal government use to see that we’re doing our jobs.
Saturday afternoon. Series of beeps on my cell phone — pics of Kelly standing on the wing of a biplane, pics of Kelly eating crawfish, Kelly in the front cockpit of some idiot red airplane with arms raised in triumph. Lord, this kid thinks she’s in an amusement park.
“Hello, Kelly darlin’, how’re you doing?”
Excited little girl voice - “Didja get my pictures?”
“I did. Crawfish. THAT way.” I’d been down to Louisiana to visit some of the old folks and we did a crawfish boil – big pots of boiling water, red, spicy, delicious. They don’t do that around here. You can get crawfish, in season, expensive, not a meal for the ‘white tablecloth’ types. “Where’d you find that?”
“We flew to Louisiana. It’s OUR airfield. Meeting with friends and family, and I think we have some clients here, an’ maybe somebody just smelled us and turned in to see what’s going on. An’ some of the people flew in with their own planes. That red one – that belongs to Hanna Bertrand. She’s got TROPHIES, her husband says. She gave me a ride in that cute little plane. It can do THINGS.” All in one happy breath. “And I learned to peel my own crawfish.”
“You flew that red airplane?”
Kelly said, “No ma’am, I wasn’t flying it — Mizz Hanna was. The pilot uses the rear seat, just like in a Stearman, since they’re both tail-draggers. Better visibility for the pilot, especially on the ground.”
And I’m thinking: I didn’t know that. I wonder how many people DO know? Not many, I’ll bet, but SHE does. Don’t have to think very hard to figure out who taught her. I have to call Mr. Charlie and Mizz Helen — after all, the next question is whether Cindy was like Kelly at age 10?
“So you’re telling me everything is going well?”
A sigh. “Mizz Ruth, this algebra stuff is getting weird. Aunt Nikki has been working with me, and now she’s talking about polynomials! Sometimes you get two or three equations in a problem, and you sorta solve one and plug the results into another one! Who knew? And it works! She says there’s a different branch of algebra to work with this — it’s called Linear Algebra. I had no idea, but now I sorta do. I always thought home-school would be easier, but it’s not! But it’s more fun.”
“Fun? Algebra?”
“Mom takes me to work with her. Robotics lab. And somebody shows me some of the math involved and the programming and the hardware. And I’ve been copilot with her in a jet and in a platypus. Technical stuff boosts my vocabulary, Cindy-mom says.”
“So you’re telling me it’s good? You’re not being abused?”
“Sometimes I guess I could call it abuse, but it’s kinda like cooking – lot of work up front, then you get to deal with the result.”
“So you’re still...”
“Mizz Ruth, it’s like I won the lottery, and YOU gave me the winning ticket.”
“Thank you, Kelly,” I said. Her words meant more to me than my government paycheck.
“Anyways,” she finished, “I just wanted to call you and tell you that you can stop worrying about me.”
We chatted a bit more and she hung up, leaving me holding a secret that would really impact her life if it worked as I expected. After several legal shenanigans, the final papers were sent to a judge for his signature.
Yes, the original mom of Kelly was willing to sign off parental rights to her daughter. I understand it was a bit of dealing, but ultimately her mom’s crimes were bartered down from a possible twenty-year sentence on multiple charges to two years for one charge, the remainder being shelved, in trade for her relinquishing any rights or access to her daughter.