Chapter 144: Going Home

Wednesday, May 30, 1984

We couldn’t sleep that late. Too much excitement, and too much to do.

Mom had breakfast ready when we both emerged, still wearing our PJs. She’d gone fairly all out, with eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, and grapefruit halves awaiting.

“I’m gaining weight just looking at that!” Angie said.

“You are not!” Mom said. “Don’t make me think you’re going to starve yourself at college!”

Angie giggled. “It’s the Freshman Fifteen, not the Freshman Negative Fifteen.”

“See if you can keep it the Freshman Five, but you can’t afford the Freshman Negative Five!” Mom said. “You’re fit as a fiddle right now. I’m totally jealous.”

“You’re doing just fine, Mom,” I said, sitting down with a plate of food. Not too full of a plate.

“I’m still heavier than I should be,” she said.

“You’re fit and healthy,” Angie said, filling her plate. “You walk, you bike. You’re good. Your cardiologist says so.”

Mom blushed. “I can still do better.”

“We all can,” I said. “We’ll have to be careful what we buy at the store. Too many pop-tarts and not enough oatmeal and we’ll wish it was just fifteen.”

“When’s the last time you had a pop-tart?” Angie said.

“Um ... that would be ... Michigan. Amit had some.”

“Sooner or later, Amit’s metabolism is going to let him down in a big way!” Angie said.

“Amit? He’s so thin!” Mom said.

“He eats the most of anyone in Debate, and I mean, that’s like by a factor of two,” Angie said.

“Three,” I said.

Mom blinked. “Seriously?”

“He’s got some super-metabolism,” Angie said. “Seriously! He’s amazing that way. He could win one of those eating contests.”

“We, however, had better not try,” I said.

“I feel better about sending you off since I know you can both cook,” Mom said.

“We’re going to, too. We’ll buy meal passes for a limited number of meals so we don’t have to hike back and forth for every meal, but we want to mostly eat at home,” Angie said. “Cheaper and healthier, both.”

“Plus it puts us in one place at one time, which I think could be a challenge for college,” I said.

Mom nodded. “Makes sense.”

“I mean, we’ll miss,” Angie said. “Someone’s going to have a class at dinnertime no matter when we put dinnertime. Same for lunch. But that’s not every day. It’ll all work out.”

Mom nodded again. “I guess I only partly understand how all that works.”

“College classes are mostly two or three days a week,” I said. “Usually three or four hours total. So you have maybe an hour a day three times a week, or an hour and a half or two hours twice a week, or whatever. They can be all over the day. Sometimes a class is offered at only one time, and if you need it, that means nothing else can go there. You fill out your schedule with the hardest-to-get classes first, then the easy ones. If you don’t get the hard-to-get class, you figure out plan B.”

“Yeah,” Angie said. “Sometimes there’s one session of a class, and it holds forty people. Maybe sixty people need it. Twenty of them aren’t getting in. They’ll have to take it the next semester. Maybe the university will add a session, though, if they see that it’s a bottleneck.”

“Sounds awful,” Mom said.

“I think it’ll be okay,” I said, “UT had a big problem with it last year.”

“Oh?” Mom said.

“They filled up every section of every class. Nothing left at all. You got what you got and that was it. If you didn’t get in a requirement, it might mean you’d have to spend an extra semester to graduate.”

“That’s awful!” Mom said.

“Only so many faculty, so many classrooms, so many hours in the day,” I said. “They’ve grown too much, too fast.”

“A&M’s got some of that,” Angie said, “But they’re managing better. You should have seen all of the construction cranes up there, though! They’re clearly trying to put up more buildings as fast as they can.”

“It’s amazing,” I said. “They’re really growing.”

“We’re going to go up and see, once you give us the green light,” Mom said.

“We’d love that,” I said.

“We’ll almost certainly have a spare bedroom,” Angie said. “You’ll be welcome to stay with us.”

“We might,” Mom said.

The conversation stuck to college and avoided the elephant in the room. After a while we were done and headed off to get dressed. Mom knew that meant we were soon to hit the road. I could tell it bothered her, but only a little.

Bittersweet, and that was inevitable, but I thought there was some real ‘sweet’ in there, too.

Once we got dressed, we started moving boxes to my and Angie’s cars. They could only hold so many, but we only needed them to hold so many. Jas and I were splitting the space in my car, and Angie and Paige were splitting the space in hers. Each of us was leaving some room for Cammie’s things, too, and all of the space in the Subaru would be available for Cammie’s things as well.

Angie and Paige would ride in Angie’s car, Jas and Cammie would ride in the Subaru, and I would drive my car. That made sense, since it let us pack the front passenger area of my car, which had a lot more room than the front passenger area of the Subaru.

Mom helped a bit, mostly to avoid just watching us move out. We didn’t have her move anything big, but it pointed out what we’d said in the conversation. It’s not like my first-life version of Mom had been sickly or morbidly obese or anything, but this version was in significantly better shape all around.

I wondered if it would change her life expectancy. If it did, it could even be a bad thing. It probably wouldn’t be, but — ironically — it was her heart issues that led to the discovery of her ulcers and Barrett’s Syndrome in that life. No heart issues, and maybe the cancer would have taken her.

Hopefully, stopping taking Tums a decade earlier would stop Barrett’s Syndrome from ever happening.

Only time would tell.

Once we’d packed up, we went in and said goodbye to Mom. She held things together pretty well, but then we’d see her (if only briefly) on Saturday.

Breaking things up a bit was likely a good thing. A lot of parents clung to ‘normalcy’ through the summer. Then, suddenly, there was a moving day, and their farewells were said outside the dorm or apartment, often with someone double-parked and everyone feeling the need to rush. After that, a long drive home in which the angst of sending one’s child off into the world hits.

That’s what first-life Mom and Dad had done. I’d heard later that the drive home was pretty rough for Mom in particular. Hopefully, this would work better. I might not actually know for years, though, and Mom’s reaction might still seem rough to Dad — just, perhaps, not as rough as it had been. He would have no context, after all.

Angie drove over to Jasmine’s house, where Jas was packed and ready. We hugged Camille, said our farewells, and Jas had me drive her car over to Paige’s.

Half an hour later, we’d loaded Paige’s stuff, said goodbye to Jean, and headed over to Gene’s to pick up Cammie.

Half an hour after that, we were ready to hit the road.

Everyone was hungry, so we decided to stop at Rico’s before leaving town. That didn’t take long, and by one we were on the road to College Station.

We had a key to the house, of course, so it was just a matter of parking and unloading. I already had a locksmith coming Friday to change out the locks. Who knew how many keys to this house were already in circulation? Besides, we wanted better locks, and changing the locks wouldn’t interfere with any of the remodeling. For now, we were planning to key the new basement entryway the same as the rest of the house. Doing that would require another visit, since there was no basement entryway now, but getting the main work done now was far better than leaving Cammie alone in a house with unknown security.

We parked the Subaru and Angie’s car on the street, with mine on the driveway. What to do about the driveway was still a question, but one we weren’t tackling today.

After that, we headed in to check the house. It was mostly as we remembered it, only stripped of anything except the furniture that came with the house.

The basement seemed better, though. It looked like the new sump pump, and the sealant work Paul had done, was making a difference. It should be a really nice space by the time we were done.

We had an immediate need for sheets and pillows. Those were gone, which wasn’t a surprise. The master bedroom bed would be fine for Jas and me until we got ours up here, and everyone else would make do with double beds for now. It wouldn’t be a problem for Cammie, of course, and by the time Mel visited, she would have the master bedroom bed.

The rest of the afternoon was a frenzy of moving boxes in, piling them in the master bedroom. Cammie, Paige, and Angie would be living out of suitcases for now, and Jas and I were only going to unpack a little. Once we left, Cammie would unpack into the master bedroom at least some, then move her things once her apartment was done.

After we’d gotten things out of the car, we inventoried the house for things that couldn’t wait. Inventory in hand, we headed off to the nearest department store for sheets, towels, and other house and kitchen essentials, then a grocery store for things for breakfast and lunch tomorrow, and longer-term for Cammie.

There was a lot that needed doing, but most of it would wait until we were back and really settling in. The curtains were serviceable, for instance, but everyone wanted to replace them.

No one wanted to cook tonight, so we went off to The Grapevine (which was nearly deserted — summer was a very quiet time around town) and had a fairly celebratory dinner. Wine was involved. Not too much wine, but Jas insisted, and we all thought it sounded like a good idea.