Chapter 148: Back To Houston

Wednesday, June 13, 1984

We made it to Lake City by late afternoon. I’d wanted to make it to Tallahassee, and I could have, but it would’ve been pushing it. Some of the traffic had been bad, and Lake City was already a long drive with the RV plus a toad.

Driving when tired isn’t a great idea. Driving a behemoth while tired could potentially get many people killed.

We got ourselves settled pretty quickly. The girls voted to go out, so we did. While we were out, we picked up some wine and the fixings for the next couple of days’ meals.

I really had no idea what the ‘open container’ rules were for RVs, or if those even existed yet. Texas had no ‘open container’ law for passenger vehicles yet. The RV was weird, of course. Certainly, the driver couldn’t just get up and go to the fridge, but a passenger could stash an open bottle in the fridge if the RV was being pulled over.

Not that I was going to drink right before driving, much less during driving, but I probably should’ve paid better attention to the nuances of things.

Thursday, June 14, 1984

We decided to stop in Mobile today, which was shorter than we’d gone yesterday. The reason was simply that we were considering turning away from the coast and jogging inland up to perhaps Jackson, then traveling across the middle of Louisiana.

If we did that, the odds were reasonable that we would wind up in Nacogdoches before heading home. I had no particular desire to visit there again, but it would be interesting to see the park in daylight. Once the idea was mentioned, the girls all wanted to, and that settled that.

We made hamburgers, but wound up eating them outside. The RV park had a ‘camp sing-along’ night tonight, and we all decided that sounded like a lot of fun.

It was, too. If anyone found it amusing, weird, or scandalous that three teenage girls were traveling with one teenage boy, none of them showed it. We had fun singing all sorts of songs — mostly campfire songs, but they covered a lot of ‘oldies’ too — which included Elvis and the early Beatles.

Each of us also got to sing a show tune or two — ones we’d actually performed! A lot of the people — especially those who were a bit older — were quite pleased with that. Everyone knows ‘The Sound of Music’, and a lot of people knew ‘Brigadoon’ and ‘Bye Bye Birdie’, too.

Saturday, June 16, 1984

We spent yesterday getting halfway across Louisiana. Once we had realized that our chances for authentic Cajun food were dwindling, our pledge to cook in the RV had been temporarily abandoned.

That was a really good excuse, at least in my opinion!

Today we’d come through Texarkana and down to Nacogdoches. Once we got the RV settled, we piled in the Subaru and headed to the park.

It didn’t take me long to find it.

Jas said, “This is the place, then?”

“This is it,” I said.

Angie looked around. “Fuck! I would not want to be stuck here for hours, naked.”

“Hell, no!” Paige said.

Angie pointed off in the distance. “Is that the pay phone?”

“I ... don’t know,” I said. “We didn’t discuss that.”

Paige giggled. “You gotta call!”

Jas nodded. “You do.”

“You don’t think it would bring up bad memories?” I said.

“Nah,” Paige said. “Cammie will appreciate it. It’s kicking fate in the teeth, which is kinda what we’re all about.”

Angie giggled a bit, but nodded. “I like how you put that!”

So, I wound up calling Cammie from the pay phone. Hopefully, she was home.

It went five rings before the phone picked up.

“Hello?” Cammie said, breathless.

“Hey, Cammie,” I said.

“Steve!” she said, still panting. “Sorry! I had to run upstairs! The jackhammer is too loud downstairs. I barely heard the phone.”

“Sounds like they’re working hard.”

“Yeah. Someone canceled their job today, which made Mr. Finley really happy that he had this job to keep the crew busy.”

“Cool,” I said.

“What’s up?”

“So ... you’ll never guess where I’m calling from,” I said.

“I ... have no idea. Baton Rouge?”

“Nah. We went north, and now we’re coming back towards Houston.”

There was a brief silence, and then she said, “You’re not...”

“Paige said it counted as kicking fate in the teeth.”

There was another brief silence — which really worried me — and then Cammie broke out laughing.

“That ... is ... so true! At first, I was all ‘Oh, hell no!’ but when you put it that way ... yeah. Give that place a kick in the teeth. I bet it’s a really nice park in daylight.”

“It’s actually kinda charming.”

“So ... I’ll revise my opinion. That park gave me shelter and kept me safe. I’m good with it,” she said.

“Good!”

“So you’re in Houston tomorrow?”

“Either there or College Station. That’s another reason we called.”

“Don’t come here!” she said. “I mean, they’re not jackhammering on Sunday, but it’s a mess, and since they’re not here, I was gonna head down to Houston anyway.”

“Sounds good! We’ll be in by mid-afternoon. I suspect our parents will monopolize our time...”

“Mel’s going to be monopolizing mine,” she said, giggling. “We can still spend the night at the Richardsons’ house — they’re trying to sell it, but as long as we make the bed we’re good — and Mel’s allowed to slip her leash.”

“Cool,” I said. “I’m glad things are relaxing.”

“They know the horse left the barn so long ago there’s no point. Either they forbid Mel from going to A&M — and enforce it, which they can’t — or they accept it now while everyone’s still getting along.”

“Makes sense. Anyway, maybe we can all meet for lunch on Monday.”

“I’d love that!” she said.

I hung up and told the others about lunch on Monday. Everyone agreed that sounded like a good plan.

We called our parents, too, and let them know we’d be home tomorrow and approximately when.

Sunday, June 17, 1984

Getting settled in our (now former) homes was a multi-step process. Our first stop was at Paige’s. She unloaded her stuff (which had grown, thanks to souvenirs and the like) from the RV, hugged and kissed Angie, and headed into her house.

The process repeated at our (well, not so much ‘our’, anymore) house. Mom and Dad were very happy to see us, and happy to help unload. Once we had our things out, Jas and I headed to her house while Angie stayed at home.

We unloaded everything still in the RV into Jasmine’s house (with Camille and Francis’s help), then headed off to the RV place. After they’d checked it in, confirmed that it was in good working order, and given us a receipt, I drove the Subaru to my house. Jas and I said goodbye and she headed off to her house.

Trip done. Very successfully, too!

Dad insisted on taking us out to Red Lobster. Angie and I didn’t have a problem with that, of course.

“I’m glad your trip went well,” he said, repeating himself from earlier, once we’d gotten settled.

“It really did,” Angie said, repeating herself, too.

“Your...” he said, then stopped, gave Mom a look, blushed a bit, then started over. “Helen and I have been talking. We’re not ready to just jump into that yet, but we think it sounds like a lot of fun. Maybe we might do that for next year’s trip up north. This year’s is set, of course, for us, but ... well. Do you think we could handle it?”

The switch in names wasn’t lost on me. It’d taken another decade in my first life before ‘Your mother’ turned into ‘Helen’ on a regular basis. Another timetable moved up — or, of course, this universe was ‘just different.’ Either way, it was new.

I smiled. “You drive all day, every day. I’m certain you could handle it. Everything takes a bit of planning — you don’t want to try to take an abrupt turn in that thing — but it’s fine. The tow car wanted to fight with me on some turns, but that’s manageable. Not having a tow car would’ve been bad, though. There’s no way you’re parking an RV at Grandmother’s retirement community. I think for the family trip you could get away with it if Uncle Robert or Aunt Monica loaned you a car, or you rented one in the Chicago area, because you could park at Grandma’s, Aunt Helen’s, and Andrew’s houses. But that leaves all of the other stops. For a big grocery store you can park at the back of the lot, but restaurants, strip malls, and the like can be a problem, and it’s harder to just go sightsee in the RV.”

They nodded along with that.

Dad said, “We could almost certainly rent a smaller RV, too.”

Angie nodded. “Yeah. Heck, you could get to two-thirds as big, probably. Much less than that and you lose the nice bed or kitchenette, but you don’t need as much space in the middle at all. It was a bit tight for four, but really not a problem.”

Mom nodded, and said, “I think if we’re going to do this we would want at least an extra week so we could see some places we’ve either never been or haven’t visited in a long time. I’d like to see the Lake of the Ozarks area again. That’s where we went on our honeymoon. And then there’s Branson, and we might want to visit Memphis, and New Orleans isn’t bad if we jog over that far east.”

“Maybe we would drive up through Missouri, then down through Illinois, stopping in Memphis on the way to New Orleans,” Dad said.

“That sounds pretty cool,” I said. “I think we’re driving up through Missouri, though it’s not settled. But, if we do, we’ll give you some information about it.”

“Thanks!” they both said.

Mom sighed. “It was ... well. You were both gone for so long last summer, I should be used to it, but it felt awfully quiet. Different. Not bad — please don’t think I’m saying that — but different.”

Dad nodded. “It did. It’s a good sort of different, but also ... just ... well...”

“We’ve started to talk about what we want to do now that you’re moving out,” Mom said, “and this is one of the things that came up. You’ll see how this goes one day — I hope! — but, when you have kids, they just have to become a big focus. Or they should, anyway. Not all-consuming, and maybe we went overboard a bit...”

“We had our reasons,” Dad said, patting Mom on the hand.

“We did,” Mom said. “Anyway ... better for us to think about it now than be crying and feeling at loose ends in a few months. Which sounds silly after I’ve just said I hope you get the chance, but...”