Chapter 23: The Good Book

I walked out onto the pool deck. Carolyn was there, so was everyone else. I smiled again. They were having a lot of fun; there was a lot of water in the air and June and Carolyn seemed to be winning against Jamie and Susan, Toni and Sylvia. Whenever someone got in a major splash everyone laughed loudly, and there was a lot of laughter. Sherrie and Elena were hanging onto the edge of the pool at the deep end, talking.

This was what it's about, I thought: happy laughter.

I trembled. What's wrong with this picture?

The answer was simple: nothing.

This was what I wanted, wasn't it? The four-car garage at the prospective house had been intriguing because it could be better characterized as an eight-car garage, because there was enough space to park a huge RV in there. I knew that because there had been a huge RV on one side of the garage. The floor area, the real estate agent had told, me was nearly seventeen-hundred square feet.

A hard wood floor, some mats would make it a fine place to practice cheerleading or gymnastics.

But, I could get the same thing leasing sixteen-hundred feet of commercial space as well, and that would be a lot less than a huge house.

What really was I really trying to accomplish?

A bedroom for a foster child? I contemplated the garage attached to the house. I didn't like garages and didn't park my car in ours. It had a modest pile of boxes in one corner and was otherwise empty. When I was growing up, a next-door neighbor had killed his invalid wife and himself in their garage by simply closing the door and running his car for a while.

I could do all the things I wanted to do right here; I could convert the garage into at least one more bedroom, perhaps two and a bath.

Why spend the vast amount money that wonderful house would entail?

I realized that Sherrie and Elena had gotten out of the pool and were now standing in front of me. One of them had said something, but I didn't know who and I didn't know what she'd said.

I smiled at them and Sherrie smiled back. Elena, though, shook her head.

"You can't do that. You walked out on the deck; with the biggest grin on your face I've ever seen anyone have. Then it faded and I could see you were gone too. What's up?"

"Contemplating this and that," I told them. "I just realized that in the last couple of days my approach to problem solving has been to throw money at it."

"No one thinks you're trying to buy friends, Laura," Sherrie said loyally.

"No," I agreed, "I don't expect they are. But I've been making a lot of assumptions about how much happiness money can buy."

"I don't know if it can buy happiness," Elena said seriously. "I know it can smooth out a lot of bumps in the road."

"It just puts new ones in place of the old ones." I sighed. "For a long time, I let Roger deal with taking care of the money. It was his headache. He loved doing it, was a genius at it, why should I get involved? After he died, I fobbed it off on my father-in-law. If I want anything, I just pick up the phone and make a call."

I shook my head. I needed to start thinking about things a lot more. There was more than one way to skin a cat.

Then I thought about a huge Tudor house and my willpower started to seep away.

"You drifted away again," Elena said, laughing.

"Sherrie, do you have some studying to do tonight?" I asked.

"Big quiz coming up tomorrow, yeah."

"How about you gather up the others," I waved at the pool, "and get them started on studying. I want to take everyone out for ice cream later. Ice cream and a treat, and it's going to take a while."

"Sure, no problem." Sherrie turned and called to the Susan and the other girls; I was pleased to see that they had no trouble at all giving up what they had been doing for something less pleasant.

I turned to Elena. "Do you know a place around here that does delivers Chinese?"

"Flo's, at Frank Lloyd Wright and 94th Street." Elena laughed. "I like your cooking."

"There will be other times, I promise," I assured her.

She slapped her stomach. "I don't go to work tomorrow until one. Want to run up the mountain again tomorrow morning? To work off the ice cream and Chinese?"

"You could just do a few extra laps in the morning."

"You may have noticed my father is a little on the pudgy side; my mother was too. Ice cream and pasta, it heads for the thighs and tummy. I have to do double duty to keep it from nesting."

"Or," I said, "maybe we can think of some other exercise that will work as well."

Elena looked at me. "I thought sexual drive tapered off as you got older."

"Second childhood," I told her, my eyes on Carolyn and June. They were holding hands and staring at each other, like the way I looked at Elena.

In short order, Carolyn was studying with Susan and Jamie, Sherrie sitting a few feet away. I ordered up the Chinese and then Elena and I went back on the pool deck.

It was the hottest part of the afternoon, but it felt more like a sauna than an oven. I toyed with my ice tea glass while Elena sat watching me.

After I had a chance to think for a while, I looked at her. "You're very patient."

"And you are obviously thinking deep thoughts. You aren't very placid this afternoon."

"I saw a beautiful house this afternoon. That's what we're going to do this evening: we're going to check it out."

"Isn't that what you wanted?"

I met Elena's eyes. "There are times when what you want may not be the right choice. I offered to help with Terry and Carolyn's legal bills; I offered to pay the legal fees to get Amy adopted by the Bowden's. Why not?"

"Because those legal fees could run to thousands of dollars," Elena told me.

I chuckled, remembering long ago in college as an undergraduate living in the dorm. We had interminable bull sessions at times. One favorite topic had been the "obscene" profits fat cats made, and that no one should make more than a million dollars a year. How could you spend even that much?

"What?" Elena asked.

"In college, I used to take part in bull sessions, where one of the topics was capping salaries. That it wasn't right for some people to make millions of dollars a year. That was before some people started making hundreds of million. That was as an undergraduate; later I met Roger and stopped going to bull sessions." We traded grins.

"When Roger told me how much the salary offers he was getting were, I didn't know what to say. He started in six figures, with a signing bonus, performance bonus, expense account perks, benefits... Everything I'd thought of when I was younger as out of line.

"'Think of it as a percentage of what I make for other people, ' he told me. When he gave me the numbers, I was astounded, literally astounded. In the first year he was with the company, he added a billion and a half dollars to the stock portfolios he managed. Half a million dollars as a fee for that kind of performance was ridiculous, they doubled his pay and gave him a huge bonus.

"The same thing with athletes, movie stars and rock stars. If Sarah Brightman fills a three-thousand-seat concert hall, or puts ten thousand people in a stadium to hear her sing -- that's one to three million dollars she is pulling in for a performance only a few hours long. The same thing with sports stars who fill the seats of their stadium as well. They command large fees for their work."

"I don't see what this has to do with the spending lots of money paying other people's bills."

"Elena, it's about scale. Do you have a savings account?"

She grimaced. "That's what I do. I work; I put money away. My idea of an entertaining afternoon is running up a mountain or sitting in Costco, eating a polish sausage."

"How much is in it, if I can be nosey?"

She shrugged. "Twelve thousand and change. Dad thinks I'm saving for a house down payment. I guess. I started saving for college, but I got some scholarships and did well enough not to lose them. There is a lot of financial aid available when your last name is Bustamonte, even if you're not really that good a student."

"The house I looked at today is six bedrooms, nine baths in the main building; there's a three bedroom, two bath guest house and an 1800 square foot pool house with a rec room complete with fireplace. There are two tennis courts and an Olympic-sized pool. A four-car garage and a two-car garage. If someone offered to sell it to you for $350, would you take it?"

"I'd wonder what the catch is."

"Like I said, scale. The same fraction of my savings account as it would be of yours. Spend thirty or forty thousand on legal fees? Doesn't hardly show up." I gestured to her sandwich. "Less than a polish sausage on a bun."

Elena was silent for a second before she spoke. "I was going to say something glib and smart; except it wasn't really going to be very smart."

"Another variation on the word scale is perspective. If you've ever had to pound a nail and didn't have a hammer, you would be frustrated and looking for alternatives. A person with a hammer just drives the nail and doesn't think about it. Two or three nails? Wham, bam! Does those too!

"What's bothering me isn't spending the money, it's the reasons why I want to spend the money. I'm wondering if the right way to put in a screw is with my hammer," I concluded.

"Let's just say that you have an uncommon perspective," Elena said dryly.

I shrugged. "I never cared. Roger was a genius, Elena. There is no other word to describe it. In 1987 he had two million in a trust fund and his parents gave me a million when we got married. He put a million in treasury bonds and then played with the rest. From then on he roughly doubled what we had every two years. It was the dot com bubble, really that made a lot of the difference."

"And now that the bubble is burst?"

I shook my head, "Roger knew what was going up and on top of that, he knew what was going down. Halfway through 2000, he bailed out of the market, getting some nice bond positions. He made out like a bandit when the market tanked and people started to bail out by buying bonds."

Elena was silent for a long time. "I don't know what to say."

I patted her hand. "Trust me, I have a lot of experience being in your shoes. Close your eyes and think of the money talk like you think about sports scores."

"I don't think about sports scores," Elena said with a laugh.

"See there?" We both traded smiles.

Chinese arrived. Roger had shown me a science fiction story once about how hangers and socks were really alien life forms that pop in and out of our dimension. If I was writing the story, I'd have included Chinese. Terry, Carolyn's father, didn't show up to claim her until later, so she ate with us and he nibbled a bit after he arrived as well. Jamie said Linda was off "visiting a friend" and she too ate with us. Toni and Sylvia had gone home earlier, but June stuck to Carolyn like glue and ate with us.

We still had leftovers.

Terry and Carolyn went home, but not before I talked to him. "Carolyn said they're giving you problems about working nights."

"Your lawyer, Devin, fixed that today," Terry told me. "He's a very clever man, always ready with an argument. I'm supposed call to check on Carolyn first thing in the morning, there's a fire and burglar alarm going to be installed. I'll get beeped if there's a problem."

"Good!"

"I took Denise over to Marybeth's this afternoon. She wants to apologize to everyone for losing it. I'm going to take Carolyn over now to talk to her." He looked incredibly sad. "Nancy, Marybeth and her other friends have talked to Denise. Father Luis has talked to her, Devin has talked to her. Mostly, earlier, she stood in front of Carolyn's bedroom door, talking to herself."

I looked him right in the eye. "I hope you both know what you're doing, because not all the good will in the universe will save her the next time."

Then the real estate agent was there in his Mercedes, which was a roomier way to travel with five people than most cars. I introduced Andy Wright to everyone and it was Susan that said the obvious: "So, you found a house."

"I found a house. Sherrie said I should just go do it. So I did. It's about mile away from here, closer to the mountains."

"About seven-eighths of a mile," Andy said. "Because of the foothill nature of the area, it seems further."

Elena had been told what to expect, but even she had considerable disbelief when she saw it.

"Can we afford this?" Susan asked me, when we were standing next to the pool.

I chuckled. "I was thinking a little while ago that I've talked to Elena and Sherrie about our finances. Probably about time I talked with you too. But, in a word, yes. Yes, we can afford it."

"I thought you were going to do that school for the money," Susan told me.

I shook my head. "For the scrubs, just like I said."

"Scrubs..." her voice was filled with doubt.

"Scrubs. You know, people like Carolyn and June, Toni and Sylvia. Fred too, except for a lot of luck and a lot of hard work. Me, when I was your age. Yeah, those scrubs."

Sherrie appeared just as I was finishing my little speech. She looked at Susan seriously. "You're still new to cheerleading, you think everything is bright and wonderful. And it is. But a lot of the girls see only the glamorous parts of cheerleading. The short skirts, the guys drooling over you, the parties, and the events... it's very easy to get totally caught up in it. That's why we have people like Nancy, your mom, Marybeth and the others. To remind us that we're just people like everyone else. Special in that we're cheerleaders, special that we are part of something larger than ourselves. But still just people, not much different than everyone else."

Sherrie could see some lingering disbelief in Susan's face. "Susan, I was nearly a scrub. My sister nearly was. Amy had to fake it. Why was that?"

I could hear Andy coming, talking to Elena.

"Save the discussion for later," I told them.

Sherrie nodded, but the last comment about Sherry nearly being a scrub had told. Susan knew about that and knew why.

It was nearly nine when I drove us to get ice cream, and we sat outside on the warm evening, enjoying sampling each other's selections.

Then we were home and I dropped on the couch. It had been a long day.

I was a little surprised at what happened next. Susan and Elena were chatting, then I saw them kissing. Sherrie sat down next to me and leaned close, lightly blowing in my ear.

"I think I remember someone saying once," I told Sherrie, "'blow in my ear and I'll follow you anywhere.'"

"I'd settle for following you to bed," she told me.

"I'd like that."

Elena and Susan had quickly moved past the light kissing to the heavy kissing stage. Sherrie leaned close. "I went to see Elena before I came home."

I smiled at her. Sherrie's eyes were lit with some bright fire I didn't really understand. I kissed her and she kissed passionately back. "Come," Sherrie whispered.

I nodded at Elena and Susan. Elena was undoing Susan's blouse and Susan was working on Elena's. "And miss watching this?"

Sherrie looked, and seemed to focus on the other two for the first time since we sat down.

"Move to the hassock," I murmured to her, and Sherrie obliged, sitting facing Susan and Elena. I leaned close, kissing Sherrie on the back of the neck, my arms coming around her, undoing blouse buttons. A few moments later she was bare from the waist up and I was still nibbling her neck, but my hands were wrapped around her, cupping her breasts.

Elena was kissing Susan's small breasts, while her hands had shifted to Susan's jeans. Once they were undone, Elena slid down to the floor and pulled them off. She leaned close and started running her tongue along Susan's slit, the slurping sound loud in the stillness of the room.

Susan moaned with pleasure and I felt Sherrie's nipples tauten under my fingers. Goodness, Sherrie really got excited watching!

Elena used her thumbs to push apart Susan's lips, exposing the pink folds normally hidden. She was using her tongue and lips to lick, suck and probe, bringing more sighs of satisfaction from my daughter.

I heard the faint pop of a jean snap, and felt Sherrie tremble under my hands as she plunged her fingers inside her jeans and then inside herself.