Chapter 142: A Long Goodbye

Sunday, May 27, 1984

When we woke up, it was to roll back to the other side of the bed and spend a while being very, very appreciative of each other.

Nothing wrong with that!

We were still showered, ready, and down in the lobby at eleven-thirty when our parents were scheduled to arrive. Angie and Paige made it on time, too, so the teasing was (relatively) minimal.

Mom and Dad arrived first. As everyone was hugging them, Tony and Jean came in, with Camille and Francis following shortly after.

I had no idea how many high school kids would be having a post-graduation brunch with ‘the in-laws,’ as we were, but it probably wasn’t that many. Oh, we didn’t use that phrase here, but most likely everyone was thinking it. These were probably all people I would see off and on for the rest of my life (or theirs). It wasn’t at all unlikely that the ten of us, plus grandchildren, might be at Disneyland or Disney World or a host of other places together in a decade or two. Perhaps somewhere in Europe, or Alaska, or Hawaii, or ... anywhere, really, if things worked out financially the way I hoped they would.

It was a very good thing that these were all people I would want on those trips. Many people didn’t have that.

It also mattered a great deal that Angie and I were in the same grade. So much of what had happened had stemmed from that, and that was possible only because of a lucky decision to skip a grade.

Or, of course, the universe putting the pieces together in just the right way.

Still, if we hadn’t, nearly nothing that had happened would have happened. Even a single grade difference would’ve broken everything.

Brunch was, as expected, great. I pigged out a bit, though I was very restrained by first-life standards. I’d have to be careful about exercise in college (and later in life), but I honestly wasn’t worried. We’d be biking and walking a great deal, and Angie and I were strongly considering restarting karate. Paige and Jas both thought it sounded like fun. We likely wouldn’t be all that serious, but it was a good thing to know.

Who knows what would’ve happened with Max if I hadn’t had those skills? Or even Joseph? Neither was really in line with what one was supposed to do as a practitioner of karate, but I could justify both, at least to myself.

Many of the questions were about our summer trip, and we still had fairly vague answers. A lot of it was ‘drive for three or four hundred miles a day — or maybe fewer — and see what there is to see.’ Oh, we had some ideas — Yellowstone would be nice, and Yosemite, and plenty of other national parks. Disneyland and/or Disney World seemed likely. New York City? Entirely possible. The Smithsonian (or, rather, several of them)? Everyone wanted that.

And so on, and so forth. We had too many ideas even for the time we had, especially at RV speed. Some days would simply be about the journey, and that was fine.

I think all of the parents got that. I could also see them marveling at the luxury of time that we had, and thinking that we might not understand it. Jas and Paige might not — though we’d given them some pointers — but I did.

Angie did, too, though in a very different way. For her, it was the luxury of freedom. She’d had all the time in the world, in one sense, but little freedom in what to do with it. Meanwhile, the longest single vacation I’d ever taken in my first life had been fourteen days, and it’d been a long time before I exceeded a month of time spent away from home on vacation over a year. We were planning somewhere between one and a half and two months on the road. It was definitely a luxury.

Things would change as we got busier. College, and then graduate school, would impose their limits. Having an active business would make it impossible to get away that long, at least without heavy reliance on pagers and being in range of payphones. Cell phones and portable computers might help, even with the current state of the art — but would they help enough?

And then there was the likelihood of children. Not all trips are good for children, though I was very much a believer in taking the kids along whenever possible. My first life kids had gone hither and yon with us, and I truly believed that it’d made them better-rounded adults. People who see the world, or even their own country, are different from those who stick close to home.

Jas and I both going on a vacation and leaving the children would probably happen, but sparingly. Mom and Dad would love to play grandparents for a while. So would Camille and Francis. I was certain we would have kids much earlier than my ex-wife and I had, so they would be younger and better able to do so.

Still ... sparingly.

Here, at this table, was — I hoped — the core of that new life. Four of us knew what that meant. The other six didn’t. They had high hopes for us, I knew that, but our own aspirations dwarfed what they were hoping in many ways.

In the most important, though, they didn’t. They all wanted us to be good people, to enjoy life, and to make the most of things. We all wanted that, too. We just knew that ‘the most of things’ might be far more than what they were currently envisioning.

It was the same with Michael. He’d be having a conversation with his parents soon that I never intended to have, but totally supported for him. They unquestionably wanted the best for him. They simply had no idea that his best was going to be as a captain of industry, not as a physician. I’m sure he could’ve been a great doctor, but (at least in my first universe), Michael Dell made many times more people’s health better through his medical charitable donations than he would have as a doctor.

I dropped off Paige first, then Jasmine. The drop-offs were quick, with hugs and kisses. We’d had a lot of time together, and we would have more tomorrow. And the day after that, and the day after that...

Angie grinned once we were heading home.

“They’re trying. All of them — Paige and Jas and the parents and in-laws. They can’t totally get it, though.”

“The parents don’t know what there is to not get.”

“Yeah,” she said, “And Paige and Jas don’t either, exactly. And that’s fine. That part is for us.”

“They’ll get their parts. Enough to share what it means to us, but not so much that it turns into a burden or costs them their chance to grow.”

“We’re going to be doing that one day,” she said. “Sitting around with our kids, and maybe their girlfriends and boyfriends, as they graduate and move out into the world.”

“I’d say that I can’t wait, but I can. I definitely can. The years between now and kids will be magical. The years after they’re born will be magical, too. If the last four years have taught me anything, it’s that everything can be special, and racing through it is silly.”

She bit her lip, then nodded, firmly. “Had to think about that, but ... yeah. And I mean, hell yeah! When I got back ... well, if you’d offered thirteen-year-old Angie a fast-forward button that’d take her to eighteen, with Mom and Dad happy and Steve just better, and no stupid high school crap, not addicted, all that ... hell yes I’d have taken it! Life has all sorts of ways to suck. I’d have missed so much!”

“Kids are ... it’s ... there are so many points where it feels like they’ll be like this forever. And then like that. And then some other thing. It’s slow and steady and it feels like there’s all this time. And then, suddenly, it’s not all this time. It’s faster, and it’s more, and they’re more and more independent, and you wonder if you did enough, taught them enough, showed them enough. Are they ready? Can they possibly be ready? And ... well ... then they’re ready, and you have to figure out how to be their friend and not the person in charge. Except they’re still maybe not ready, but they have to get to try to be ready before they can find that out.”

Angie nodded hard. “God, yes! That’s so much me, before. I thought I was so ready, and I was so not ready!”

“Whereas I wasn’t sure if I was ready, and I was completely ready, at least for the sort of limited life I wanted to be ready for.”

“We’re ready now, at least.”

“Definitely!”

We just hung around the house for the rest of the day, mostly playing games and talking with Mom and Dad. Very little of it had to do with us, or with college, or anything big like that. We talked about politics, sports, or whatever else came to mind.

It was, in my mind, very much like some of the visits home I’d had in later years. Once we’d caught up, we simply talked about whatever was on our minds. It’s not like we hadn’t before — this wasn’t completely new — but it felt like another step into the transition for me, likely because I’d lived it before.

I’m sure Mom and Dad knew that the entire point of our being home was to be home. We would be gone very soon. This was the last quiet Sunday at home before the trip, the last quiet Sunday at home when this was our unquestioned home. After this, the house in College Station would start to compete, and soon it would be ‘home.’ Not that this wouldn’t — it’d always also felt like ‘home’ in my old life, even after Mom and Dad were gone — but not our first, primary home.

Mom made dinner, with no help or input from us kids, and it was really good. Basic, but I think that’s what she wanted. Her cooking had notably improved over the past few years, and I thought she was already starting to lean into the transition she’d made after I left home in my first life. She was ever more into ‘Prevention’ magazine and starting to cook new recipes with healthier ingredients.

This was a traditional hamburger, mashed potato, and green bean dinner though. The differences from ‘old Mom’ were that the hamburgers weren’t overdone and were carefully seasoned, the mashed potatoes were from scratch and also carefully seasoned, and the green beans were frozen, not canned. Not all that big a change, and also an enormous change, perhaps.

Everyone went to bed early, even though we didn’t particularly have to. Dad had tomorrow off, of course. He and Mom were going out shopping and perhaps to a movie, or to dinner, or both, while we were going to Gene’s party.

Tuesday we had our last ‘official’ visit with Jane under Mom and Dad’s umbrella. Our next visit would be after Angie turned eighteen. Either at that visit or before, we would make new agreements with Jane, making ourselves the patients. That would end Jane’s reporting to Mom over whether we were ‘behaving,’ but it would also end her obligation to report it to someone, and Mom ... well, I certainly wouldn’t say that Mom didn’t care, because I’m sure she did, but I think she’d long since accepted that, once we were eighteen and out of the house, it would become our business (and that of our significant others, of course) and not hers.

Two years ago — perhaps even one — Angie and I getting together that way might have devastated her. Now? I doubted that it would. Not that we would ever share it (if it happened at all) but still. We’d grown up and become the adults she’d hoped for, and that was what mattered.

Monday, May 28, 1984

I slept pretty late. That wasn’t something I planned on doing a lot of, but it felt good today. The last two months had been very stressful. Since the morning I’d gotten that 1am call from Cammie, it felt like a nonstop series of events with not that much in the way of breaks. Oh, we stole a night here, an afternoon there, but there was always something big right around the corner.

There was now, too, but it was the move, and the house, and the trip, none of which were quite the sort of stress that tournaments, musicals, and finals were.

After breakfast, I started packing things. The goal was to take about a quarter of my clothing, some of the books that I might want but didn’t use day-to-day, some of my audio cassettes, and so forth. Enough so that living at the house would be functional with what we had and where we would be ready to move everything else up.

I was also going to pull all of the money out of the house. Much was gone, but I’d kept about forty thousand on hand (some in my closet, some in other hiding places) for emergencies. Having some in the house was good, but for now it was all going into a safe deposit box, from whence it would be deposited bit by bit into an account. I planned on getting a safe deposit box up in College Station and opening a second account up there. A local account with local checks would be a priority for a college town. Perhaps we would put a safe in the house, too. That would likely be a good move.

Getting everything packed by tomorrow would be easy, and it wasn’t so much stuff that I couldn’t bring it in the car. We’d ditched the idea of taking the RV on this trip. It was better to just come back to Houston for that. Angie was taking her car, bringing Paige, and either I or Jas would be driving her new car. I got the feeling she wanted me to drive. It was her car, though — she should get some of the fun!