Chapter 8

It felt good to Roger to have Catalina in bed with him again. Although it had only been a couple nights they'd been apart, it seemed like weeks. Once again, they'd slept nude, cuddled up to each other, and although it wasn't quite light yet, they were both awake and ready to enjoy that fact with some sex.

This morning they went on for an hour or more before a vague thought crossed Roger's mind. "Hey, how about your mother?" he asked Catalina.

"She's probably still asleep." She smiled and added, "Now that we're thoroughly awake, I suppose I'd better go get her moving," she shrugged.

"Yeah, I guess," Roger said, sitting up to watch Catalina walk out the door still nude. That was a sight he thought he could never quite get tired of, as he watched her tattoo leave the room.

He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment yawning and farting, until he decided maybe he'd better bite the bullet and get dressed. Being a nudist is one thing, he thought, but this is Michigan and that's December out there. Once he was dressed he headed downstairs to wait for the women. He gave some thought to starting breakfast, but decided to wait for them to come down, since he'd learned a long time before that it was simpler to just head down to Becky's.

The women were up for breakfast at Becky's, especially since Roger was buying, so in a few minutes they were down at his regular morning hangout. However, instead of sitting around the big breakfast table, they got a table by themselves off in the corner. Becky was out in back doing whatever she was doing when they came in, but the regulars around the table were so surprised to see Roger come in with two good-looking women that there were some big eyes to be noticed. "Roger," Jason piped up, "What else did you do down on the Gulf coast that you didn't tell us about?"

"Oh, this and that," he laughed. "Guys, this is my girlfriend Catalina and her mother Bonnie."

"Wow, you must have been one busy little beaver down there," one of the other guys replied.

"Pretty busy," Roger agreed, feeling the tease being pointed at him, but brushing it off as if he hadn't noticed it. "There's a lot of work to be done down there."

"Jeez, I don't know why you want to come back to Michigan and all of this cold weather." Jason shook his head. "The weather guys were saying we're supposed to get dumped on in the next few days. I sure hate that digging-out stuff."

"I always thought the old folks who headed to Florida in the winter were sort of chickening out," another one of the guys around the table said. "But I'll tell you what, the older I get the better the idea seems."

"Well, it's not like Catalina and I are going down there to sit on our butts," Roger pointed out. "We're going to head back after the holidays."

"Did you get everything figured out on that land deal you called me about yesterday?" Jason asked.

"Not yet," Roger told him. "We're going to be meeting with Ralph Gerjevic in a little while. This shows signs of turning into one of those deals that's going to be a real mess before everything gets settled."

"Well, if there's anything I can do to help, let me know. Land has gotten to be so expensive around here that all sorts of funny stuff goes on."

"Yeah, I think we're beginning to figure that out."

They dragged breakfast out for a bit, and after a while the place emptied out as people went to work, and eventually they headed to Ralph Gerjevic's office. They only had to wait for a couple minutes before the legal secretary ushered them into Gerjevic's inner sanctum. It still looked like Roger remembered it -- the office of a well-established lawyer -- lots of dark wood, lots of leather, lots of law books, everything smelling expensive. "Well," Ralph began, "What can I do for you today?"

"You can fix this screw job that Catalina's uncle is trying to pull on her," Roger told him.

Among the three of them they told of the meeting in deBoer's office in Amherst the day before, the offer on the land from Delmer, and why they thought it was a screw job. Roger told him they'd taken a quick look at the land and didn't see anything too bad with it. "I talked to Jason," he added. "Without seeing it he figures the farm land is worth five grand an acre and the woods maybe three, depending. I thought about grabbing up John Castle and having him take a look at it to get an idea what it might be worth for logging, but from my eye it looks like there's some usable trees there."

"Well, I have to say you did the right thing in not signing the agreement," Ralph told them. "Not knowing the land or what it could be worth, a settlement of $90,000 sounds awfully low. The fact that your uncle was putting so much pressure on you pretty well tells me that there's something wrong with the offer, and I suspect Roger put his finger on most of it."

"Yeah," Catalina giggled, "Roger had them pretty well buffaloed. He was wearing a suit and tie, but didn't identify himself other than as our friend. Both this deBoer guy and Delmer took him as our own lawyer."

"Strictly out of school, I've had dealings with deBoer before, and he has been known to run fast and loose with a few things," Ralph told them. "To make a long story short, you're going to have to make a counteroffer that's a little more in touch with reality. I'd like to take a few days and investigate a few things so we have a better idea of what we're dealing with before we figure out what we want to make for a counteroffer. That's going to have to involve an independent appraisal of the land. I can get the ball rolling today, but that's not going to get done today, either."

"I told you there was no way this was going to get done quickly," Roger told the women.

"Roger, you really should have been a lawyer," Ralph laughed. "You've got things pretty well pegged."

"I sort of figured that," Bonnie frowned. "But now I'm stuck with Delmer bugging the hell out of Catalina and me. He was throwing a major tantrum at deBoer's office yesterday, and it was even worse on the phone messages. We're hiding out at Roger's for a while."

"If it gets to be a problem we can probably get a personal protection order, for what it's worth," Ralph replied. "But unless it gets to be something violent, we probably can't get it until the holidays are over. You're probably just as well off staying out of sight for a few days. It'll give him a while to cool off, or for whatever is pushing him to develop."

"Darn," Catalina said. "I hoped we could fix this thing so things could get back to normal."

"Well, I'll push it," Ralph replied, but warned, "The holidays are likely to louse things up, though. Do you have any idea why he's in such a big hurry about making this settlement?"

"He's got some kind of a trick up his sleeve, I know that for sure," Bonnie replied pointedly. "I have no idea what it could be, other than the fact that he obviously wants to screw Catalina over."

"That's pretty clear," he nodded. "Like I said in the beginning, don't sign anything until we have some idea of what's going on."

With Delmer and the land situation up in the air, they pretty well had to stay in Wychbold if they wanted to avoid the chance of running into him. On Saturday, Roger double-checked with Arlene about the invitation Max had made to have Catalina and Bonnie come out to the farm for the holiday dinner, and Arlene told him that it was fine with her, the more the merrier. He was glad he could treat the women to a nice Christmas dinner and all the socializing; he also knew it was going to be a mob scene, since his parents, two sisters, three brothers, and a bunch of their kids would be there. There were starting to be grandkids showing up now, and he was sure he didn't know all of them, or even how many there were. To top it off, there would be various and sundry in-laws, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and who knew what.

Christmas dawned a bright and clear winter day. As expected, and as usual, the extended family celebration was a madhouse, with Roger finding more people he had trouble remembering than ever before. He and Catalina got a little interest in the crowd for their work cleaning up after the hurricane, but there was actually a little more notice taken of the fact that he'd shown up with a girlfriend. With five years passing after Colleen's death, some of the relatives had begun throwing "confirmed bachelor" around when talking about him.

Max was a farmer, of course, as were several of the other relatives. One thing that farmers will talk about to no end is the weather. As Max himself had commented on more than one occasion, "A farmer is never more than ten days from bitching about not enough rain," and the little amount of snow they'd had so far that winter had the bitching going pretty solidly most of the afternoon. However, there was more than one comment about the storm about three days to the west that had been blasting everything in its path with a pretty good snowfall.

The food was good, and there was plenty of it. In addition to Arlene and her sister cooking enough food to feed a small army, most of the women brought two or three favorite dishes full of good stuff, and nobody wanted to take any leftovers home with them. That meant that everyone was urging everyone else to eat until they burst.

After dinner, many but not all of the men gathered around the TV set to nap and watch a football game, but there were several who went out to the machinery barn to have a cigarette or three and talk about farming, that idiot Bush, and other such topics. A number of the women gathered in the kitchen to do dishes, discuss kids, and grand kids and recipes, but there were several subsidiary conversations. Kids of all ages ran wild, raising hell like kids do. Late in the afternoon, there was a kind of general gift giving, mostly for the kids.

All in all, it was a great afternoon -- a chance to catch up with the family for Roger, and to meet new people for Catalina and Bonnie. After getting home, Roger was still so full that it was an effort to do much more than just lie in his living room recliner and hope to survive the night, but when Bonnie and Catalina got to hinting about the hot tub he wasn't about to turn them down.

The next morning Good Morning America was playing on the TV at Becky's as it often was. The national weather showed the big storm to the west of them, and the local weather had it hitting late the next day. They were talking a couple feet of snow, and the local TV weatherman was being very alarmist -- it sounded like he thought the glaciers were returning with this one. Roger discounted a lot of that since the local weathermen had to make a big deal about everything since they didn't have any real news to work with.

Catalina took it a little more seriously. "Tell me again why we're in Michigan in December," she snorted. "Hell, we could be down on the Gulf Coast where it's nice and where Delmer would never find us."

"I have to admit, that's a thought," Roger said. "Even if that half-ass is half right we could be seeing more white stuff than I want to shovel. I guess spending all that time down there thinned my blood, and I haven't had a chance to get used to winter."