Chapter 16

Anita approached me one day about a week after Tina and I had our morning conversation. The one where she tried to explain her plan for showing me that a sexual relationship with someone else didn't have to take anything away from how she felt about me.

I'd spent the whole week thinking about everything the two of us had said. I was trying to find some good justification for the hopefulness that had now edged its way into my thinking. I hadn't found anything definite yet, something that I could build on with any real confidence. I was beginning to believe I never would find that elusive, yet tangible, something.

"Whatever garbage you've been feeding Tina, and filling her head with, is working. You must be proud of yourself?"

"I'm not sure which garbage it is you're referring to. Care to provide me with some examples?"

"Tune up's. Why did you tell her she needed to stop again? It isn't healthy for her to keep feeling bad about everything you say to her. She's afraid to do anything now, because she isn't sure anymore what will offend you and what won't."

"I'll go have another talk with her. I never asked her to stop doing anything. If she went and stopped again, it was her that decided to, not me. Any other garbage of mine that you need me to explain, or to answer for?"

I could see that Anita probably believed what I'd told her. Her face now had an expression that seemed a cross between confused and worried. Apparently she didn't have anything else she wanted to either ask me or tell me. She just turned and started walking away. Before she got twenty feet away from me, she turned around and walked back to me again.

"What's going on with Connie and Rob? Why isn't she acting like you'd normally expect her to?"

"You need to go ask one of them that question, not me. Why are you going around asking all these questions and looking for conspiracies? You must be able to see that Rob and Connie are just real busy with each other right now? Why don't you just stay out of it, leave it alone, then see what happens if you do?"

"Easy for you to tell me that. You don't care that much what happens to any of us."

This time I was the one who turned away from her, leaving her standing there in place. She could be so damned annoying. She knew what she'd just accused me of was the farthest thing from the truth. She was still trying to get me mad, even if only to make herself feel better at having once again managed to.

I spent the rest of my morning thinking about what I wanted to say to Tina. I had already decided that her living in the tune up shop with Mike wasn't better for me. I think I'd known that even before I'd asked her to move there. It hadn't taken long for each of us to defeat the logistical hurdles I'd set up, or to find excuses to try to justify why we should be sleeping together again.

If it turned out to be true, that Tina had decided not to participate in doing tune up's with the other girls, then it was also probable that she was the one who wanted me to know about her decision. It stood to reason then, that it was her who had been using Anita as her messenger, sending me this information through her sister so I'd know. I'd received her message, and now I needed to respond to it.

In spite of everything that had happened, I didn't want to take anything that made her happier away from her. It wasn't her doing tune up's with the girls that had caused me such a problem, it was my believing that this was her preferred outlet for expressing her sexual and emotional energy. I hadn't wanted to be someone she was just using to provide the financing for her lifestyle, the same way Anita had tried, unsuccessfully, to use Tim to finance hers.

I needed to act, and I had to decide. Would I go with my fears, or trust her, in loving faith? It was obviously safer if I went with my fears. I'd been doing that for some time now though, and it hadn't yet brought me any closer to solving the situation I was now in. I, just as obviously, hadn't yet tried having faith, or just trusting in what Tina was telling me, taking it all at full face value. If I tried doing that, trusting and believing, and it turned out she was lying to me, I could definitely see where I'd end up being that much further harmed. I wasn't happy now though, and Tina seemed as unhappy as I was.

"Did you send Anita over to tell me you've stopped doing tune up's?" I had tried keeping a neutral tone with my voice as I asked her my question.

"Yes, I wanted you to know, in case it would make the difference with what you were going to decide to do."

"It won't make a difference, because it wasn't the tune up's that bothered me. It was all the other things I believed. I listened to what you told me before, and I've been thinking about that, and about other things too. Are you sure you could give up doing the tune up's, that you could still be happy?"

"I'm sure I could give them up easier than I could give you up, and that I'd be happier that way than this way. Mostly though, I'd be happier if it stopped you from feeling so bad about us like you do now."

"You aren't giving this up because that's what you really want, are you? You're only doing it because you think you have to, if there's any hope of saving our marriage?"

"I told you before that I could stop all of that, if it meant we could go back to how things were before. I know now I was being selfish by telling you that, making it sound like I'd be making some big sacrifice by behaving like most other married women do. Now I'd be doing it because I really want to be the kind of wife you hoped I'd be, when you first asked me to marry you."

"You'd still miss it though, and would either go back to doing it, or else blame me for taking all that away from you."

"I wouldn't. If I make up my mind about something, I can stick to it. You wouldn't have to worry about me ever doing that."

"If you give me your promise that you're done with all that, forever, then I'm willing to take a chance and try again with you."

"I do promise! You won't regret this, Kyle, I promise you that too."

We got a bit carried away with our hugging and kissing, but when we finally stopped all that, and moved a little ways apart, I started telling her what I had really come there to say.

"Tina, I never wanted or expected you to stop doing the tune up's. That was never the problem. By telling me that you would be willing to give all that up, for us, you've answered any lingering doubts I might have had, about us, about our marriage, and about our future together. I believe now that what we have is just as important to you as it is to me. That's all I ever wanted or needed. As for your promise, I'm letting you out of it, because I love you, and I don't want to have you be unhappy either, and you would be, if I held you to what you told me. After you and Mike get moved back into the house, I'm going to turn the tune up shop over to Anita. She'll be the only one actually living there, but all the rest of you women are free to use those other two bedrooms for doing tune up's, whenever you want to. I hope you can try to schedule most of yours for during the day. I love sleeping with you at night, even if sleeping is all that we end up doing sometimes. That doesn't mean I expect you to completely give up the occasional sleep over, but I'd prefer that you cut back on the number of nights you're away for those."

There were two immediate changes, right after Tina and Mike moved back home. The first was that she and I were much happier than we'd been for a long while. We might have been a bit nervous together, at first, both being extra careful to not say or do anything to stir up any past hurt feelings. Tina spent every night in bed with me, and I never said or did anything to indicate having any concerns at all with how she chose to fill her days. It was a bit nerve wracking, always feeling like you needed to be so careful around someone you were supposed to be so close to.

The other immediate change was my decision not to use any protection when she and I made love. I knew my doing that made an unmistakable statement to her about the level of my faith in our having a definite future together. Knowing we were "firing for effect", Rob's term for having unprotected sex, made the experience much more meaningful for both of us. As often as we made love that way, for the first month or two after we were back together again, we were both a bit surprised that Tina didn't conceive right away.

Sometime in the third month after we'd reconciled, Tina began taking a page from Rob and Connie's routine, by telling me about any tune up's she'd engaged in during the day. Only mentioning who she'd been with, rather than describing anything that had occurred. "Emay and I went into town today, to buy some new shirts for Miguel. He's out growing his clothes so quickly now. When we got back, since Miguel was already fed and sleeping again, we stopped off in the recreation room and tuned each other up. Emay is getting anxious about finding a man to teach her about the other ways."

From snips of conversations I'd been hearing, it started appearing that Anita had, indeed, begun making a play for Felipe, as she had once speculated she might do. Anita was twenty six years old now, and Felipe was somewhere in his very early forties. I knew he was dependable, very hard working, and frugal with his money. Raul assured me that he had never been married, and was related to Raul only through marriage, saying that Felipe and Anita also had no blood relationship. I knew that Raul, and Consuela, his wife, were encouraging Anita and Felipe both, hoping to see some romantic interest developing between the two.

Rob came to me and told me that he planned to go on a short driving vacation with Connie, confiding to me at the time, that he planned to propose to her at his first good opportunity along the way. Although their relationship hadn't yet been going on for long, it was obvious to everyone that they had become very close, very quickly. Rob was almost twenty nine years old, and he claimed it was time he married, and began his own family.

Rob and I had been working on some projected harvest numbers, predicated on forty new acres of production coming online over each of the next six years, starting after the current year's harvest. Using conservative harvest estimates of twenty five thousand pounds of salable nuts for every new forty acres being harvested, we both felt confident that the farm could easily support the two of us, any children we each might have, as well as a full complement of farm workers and their families to keep our farm workload manageable, except during harvest season. We had already managed to survive a few times that were leaner than we'd have liked, but with the new production we anticipated, our overall financial position should soon be much improved.

It was Lupe who first came up with the idea of us hiring a new farm worker. He wanted one that we would give a place on the farm to, but someone who'd know he was there as a possible future mate for Theresa. Lupe had given up on the hope of her ever finding a suitable mate on her own. Both Theresa's parents believed they had done her no favor by continuing to allow her the freedom to try to make her own match.

It was only later that I found out that Lupe planned on bringing someone up from the village in Old Mexico where he'd been raised. This new farm worker was the unmarried son of a boyhood friend of his. It wasn't the same as an arranged marriage, but the young man had already been warned, prior to leaving his village for the arduous trip North, that his long term employment prospects would be greatly enhanced, should he somehow find favor in Theresa's eyes.

Lupe seemed to think that it was a given that any young man from his home village would be no stranger to hard work, or that he could be counted on to place high value on the economic opportunity being offered to him. Raul, who had come from a different village, fifty kilometers from Lupe's, told me that men from his village laughed at what the people living in Lupe's village tried to pass off as hard work.

I learned that Raul also had one or two young men from his old village in mind as potential matches for his daughter, Elena. I'd never met any men who were harder working, or more competent at what they did, than these two men, so I had no objections to approving the hiring, sight unseen, of Lupe's hand picked choice.

Guillermo Trochas, was somewhere in his early thirties when Lupe brought him out to the farm for the first time. He was thin in body build, and about an inch taller than Lupe himself was, probably making him at least five feet three. His hair was black, and his skin a very dark shade of brown. He had prominent teeth which, because of his dark complexion, seemed very white by contrast. He smiled quite a bit, and seemed to have an incredible appetite for food, the first few months he was with us. I certainly had no complaints at all about his work habits. It seemed the more he ate, the harder he worked. I noticed his body filling out too, once he'd starting getting enough to eat.

Theresa seemed offended when she found out what Lupe had set up for her benefit. Guillermo just shook that right off, accepting her lack of immediate interest in him as just another hurdle he needed to overcome. To him, Theresa seemed a wonderful catch. She was younger than he, well educated by his standards, and was a native born United States citizen. If he could talk her into marriage, his future immigration status would be substantially improved. Illegal alien spouses of US citizens were almost assured of being granted resident alien status, once they went back across the border and made a new application, based on marital hardship. He had every reason to be an ardent suitor.

The fact that Elena started showing an immediate interest in Guillermo, after Theresa indicated her unhappiness at her parent's interference in her life, helped to galvanize Theresa's competitive juices. The last thing she wanted was to have a potential husband stolen right out from under her nose.

After being forced by Elena to abandon her posturing pose of being offended and not interested, Theresa quickly began changing her tune. Once she started to encourage the attention her erstwhile swain was paying to her, things started progressing at a satisfying pace for all concerned. Little Ricky Ricardo really took a liking to Guillermo, probably because he always had a kind word for Ricky, as well as a Snicker's bar to bribe the young boy with.

Things would probably have turned out well enough anyway, but when Theresa turned up pregnant again, a few months into the courtship, that sealed the deal for everyone. Two weeks after Theresa announced that she was pregnant, the happy couple were married in a small, hastily arranged, church ceremony. The bride and groom traveled back down to Guillermo's village, immediately after the ceremony. She needed to be presented to her husband's family, and Guillermo, needed to be back in Mexico again, so he could get all his papers in order for requesting a resident alien visa on compassionate grounds.

A week after Theresa's wedding, Tina announced that she was pregnant with our second child. Shortly after this, Connie too turned up in the family way, and she and Rob were compelled, mostly by Connie's mother, to hasten their own wedding plans. Three carloads of us drove over to a wedding chapel in Las Vegas, and witnessed my brother and Connie exchange their vows.

A month later, even though she wasn't pregnant, Felipe and Anita made their own trip to Las Vegas to get married. Tina and I went along with them, as witnesses. Maria and Emay watched Mike for us so that we could make the quick round trip.

After Theresa and Guillermo got back again, Guillermo having walked across the border, with Theresa driving and meeting up with him at some predetermined location, Emay and Alicia both surrendered their virginity to Guillermo, in a transaction negotiated between Theresa and the two sisters. Tina told me that Theresa had demanded, and received, promises of babysitting services from both girls in return for her temporary loan of her new husband. I also heard some rumors, never confirmed, that Elena too partook of Guillermo's talents on several occasions. It seemed that Theresa wasn't adverse to sharing the wealth, as long as she got some sort of compensation for doing so.

That year's harvest was bountiful, in the extreme. We managed to harvest more than fifteen hundred pounds of nuts per harvested acre, for the first time, and enjoyed forty percent tops, with less than four percent of the harvest being culls. Having four full time farm workers now, not counting me, our operating costs were considerably more than they'd been in other years. We were planning on hiring another farm worker, before the next year's harvest, which would add even more to our fixed overhead.

All the profits from that year's harvest were being saved, in order to carry us through next year's "off/off" cycle. We felt we had definitely turned the corner, in terms of now being adequately capitalized. I enjoyed two months of not having a financial care in the world.

It might have lasted far longer than that if Rob hadn't insisted that we buy yet another eighty acre parcel of land, directly South of the eighty acre Geary land. Because the economic news seemed improved, Rob said that land prices would soon be taking off again, and, mostly because of this, we absolutely needed to act right then, to avoid having to pay too much, at some later date, for additional expansion property.

Whether we acted quickly enough or not, I was still upset when I learned that we'd be paying twelve hundred dollars an acre for this new acquisition of ours. Once Rob made me aware of the fact that there was a twenty one hundred square foot house on this land, as well as several outbuildings, and two fully completed artesian wells, I felt much better about the amount of money we were paying. Rob was planning on moving his new bride and himself over to that new house, just as soon as we closed escrow on the deal.