Chapter 32

We men took advantage of the open day to spend the day at the range playing with firearms, and because we did that, when dinnertime rolled around, we were the (not too) loud table at the catfish joint, then it was all of us at Mike's house watching guy movies. No, that's not porn, at least not the sexual kind. We had Mike's stash of DVD's and we watched some classic 'guy' movies. We were getting close to the end of "The Wild Bunch" when we were informed of the impending return of our carload of ladies.

We were in the final scene, up to our eyeballs in hot brass machine gun fire and dead bodies when the door burst open and our bevy of mates charged in swinging shopping bags. Cindy bounced up to Dan and I got wrapped up in a combination of plastic bags and Tina. Susan kissed Jason on the lips and I noted that his hand went up to stroke her sleek blonde head. Mike didn't get left out, receiving a kiss from Kathy.

Susan announced, "We can each model ONE dress, but I'm NOT showing my wedding dress." She eyed Jason. "It's bad luck, ya know."

The herd disappeared upstairs and in a few minutes Cindy was the first one down. Dan was right. Deep green was HER color. Tina descended shortly after her in basic black, letting the subdued little sheath of a dress flow with her, her face radiant.

Susan and Kathy both chose light blue, and with their blonde heads, I saw it as an excellent choice.

Appropriate comments were made about the obvious attractiveness of the participants, then the bevy disappeared back up the stair and returned in their shopping togs and we convoyed out to the all-night diner for a late snack. Over pastries and coffee, plans were made for a communal breakfast the next morning, then we split to our separate destinations.

"So, how was a day of girlie overload?" I asked.

She giggled. "You just can't imagine how wonderful it is to have friends I can trust, baby. No judging, no reading things into my life, we just got to laugh and talk and enjoy the company. I had fun. LOTS of fun."

"How'd Cindy work out with Kathy?"

She looked at me, the smile taking over her eyes. "Seriously? How could anybody think a bad thought about Cindy? She and Mizz Kathy talked all the way there and back, right in with me an' Susan. I think Mizz Kathy sees Cindy as a chronological anomaly." Giggle. "That's Cindy's term. Besides, if Mizz Kathy can get over me and YOU, then it's not THAT big a step for Dan 'n' Cindy."

"I just worry. Cindy's your sister."

"So is Susan, and Mizz Kathy's Susan's mom, so that makes Mizz Kathy sort of like the mother to all three of us."

I chuckled. "Logical."

"It is, actually. Susan explained it. And you know, Cindy can take care of herself. And thinks that she and Dan are a binary star."

"So what does she say about Alan 'n' Tina?"

"Same thing, over the phone the other night." Tina hugged my arm. "She thinks like me. That's why we're sisters." She paused for a second. "Did you REALLY like that dress?"

"Yes I did, little one. Perfect! On you, anyway."

"I hope I didn't spend too much..."

"Less than a thousand?" I said.

"Oh, gosh, yes! Not even close..."

"Baby, I appreciate you being concerned, but I never worry about you, not one bit." I didn't, really. She had some credit cards with five-figure limits and we kept zero balances, and she had a debit card to our working account and that had around twenty thousand in it. And she was signatory to our joint savings accounts. I trusted my Tina. She knew it. Questions like this were one of the reasons.

"Get what you NEED, baby. And I want you to have nice things," I said.

"You ARE my nice thing, guy," she giggled. "And I really wanna..."

"Shower, then some power cuddling?"

"Might not wait until the shower for the first one," she giggled.

I loved her giggle. She was alive, energetic, intelligent, and in short, a bundle of everything I ever dreamed of in a mate.

"You have that look again, Alan," she said.

Add 'reads me like a book' to that list. "Just thinking about what I have sitting next to me, princess," I said.

"I do that, too, you know."

"Apparently you aren't as obvious as I am."

She squeezed my arm. "Maybe I just do it so much you think it's normal."

"That thought makes me happy. YOU make me happy."

"Good!" she said. "I have something I want you to do tomorrow."

"Tomorrow? What?"

"Oh, it won't interfere with your work. I was needing a light jacket for school, you know, in the morning when it's just a little chilly?"

"And how can I help you with that?"

Giggle. "I bought a flannel shirt in your size. I want you to wear it to work tomorrow. Then it's MINE! I can go to school wearing YOUR shirt for a jacket."

"Your idea?"

"Cindy's!" Giggle. "Susan's giving Jason a shirt, too."

"Speaking of Susan, has word gotten out about her engagement?"

"Oh yeah ... she's getting some of the same treatment that I got when I announced we were married."

"She's handling it okay?"

"You know how I said I'M different than I was at the beginning of the year? Well, so is Susan. She says a lot of it's MY fault, but she's more confident and a little more self-assured and she doesn't knuckle under to the peer pressure thing. And she doesn't take crap from people."

"She shouldn't have to take crap. Susan's a good girl."

Tina sighed. "Yeah, and you know, I feel like I'm kind of her anchor. Ever since that disaster of a party, we just sort of hang together and complement each other. And then we added Cindy."

I laughed. "And Kathy herded the whole bunch of you?"

"I dunno about 'herded'. She acted like one of us. Really nice, having a mom who CARES about her daughter. Well, daughters. Really nice." She leaned against me. "I wonder how life would've been if my family had been like that. But I got you, and that's all behind us."

"We both have stuff behind us now, angel," I said. "What's behind us makes us what we are today."

"I know," Tina said, "but some people get messed up from what they go through, and it's not good. If I'm messed up from what I went through, it's in a good way."

"You know, that's the way I feel, too. How come you match me so well?"

"Just an anomaly in the continuity of the universe, babe," she giggled as she punched through the selections on the truck's stereo. "Here! Music!" Mozart. She buried her face into my shoulder until we turned off the highway into the park.

Inside the trailer, we put away her acquisitions. I thought we were finished, but she reached into the bottom of a bag and retrieved a box. "For you," she said. "I hope you like it. I thought it smelled wonderful."

Cologne. My baby bought me a gift. I was going to like anything she wanted as long as it smelled slightly better than the anus of chancroid skunk. I kissed her. "Thank you, sweetness. I will use it tonight."

She smiled softly, those blue eyes drawing my soul forth. "Then I won't wear anything, so I can just smell you."

I don't know if she hurried through HER shower, but I hurried through mine. And yes, I did splash on a bit of that cologne and in the next hour we joyously assaulted one another to a happy peak.

We loped through the week like we were on autopilot.

Susan's mom, Kathy, was tracking down details of an apartment complex in the town of Auburn, Alabama and it looked like it might be what we were looking for. Kathy was doing the legwork for us and as a realtor, she'd catch the commission for part of the sale.

Evenings during the week, well, Tina and I reserved a couple of them for ourselves, but Susan's home became a meeting place for Tina and me and Susan and Jason, and Jason was pretty much 'son-in-law' to a very happy Mike, as in Susan whining, "Daa-aaad! Can I borrow my fiancée? He needs to take me to a movie this Saturday!"

And on Friday as I left work, I dialed up my wife on the cellphone and got an earful of "SQUEAL!"

"That's a happy sound," I said.

"Somebody I thought I lost. I found 'er," she squealed.

"Who?"

"This girl I went to school with. The last school before I dropped out. I'll talk about it when you get home!"

"This is a good thing?" I asked.

"I think so," she said. "I got an email. We'll talk!"

She knew that I didn't like yakking on the phone while I was driving through the four-thirty traffic. Of course, that left me to my own thoughts as I navigated the road to the park. I'm too analytical for my own good, sometimes. I'd welcomed Tina into my life, made her the center of my being. Her smile made me able to breathe. And now here comes this "somebody I thought I lost."

I pulled up beside her little gray Honda and climbed out of the truck. The trailer door flew open and the face that peered out was grinning broadly. "Come in! I got soup on. Lemme tell you who this is!"

I stopped at the door for a welcoming kiss. Mentally, I started uncoiling from previous apprehension. She tugged at my hand. "Sit down and let me get your shoes off," she said.

That was a pleasant thing that I never asked for but happily accepted.

She started her narrative. "At that last school, there was this one girl, Nikki Domingue. She was an outsider like me, and we sat in the same corner of the cafeteria, out of the way. Baby, we had a lot in common. Both of us had crappy moms who left us in the care of our grandmothers and both of our grandmothers were gone. She just couldn't stand thinking about doing the stuff that she thought she would have to do to try to fit in, so she didn't. she hung out with me at school. She was really my only friend there, and when I left school, we lost touch except for a couple of emails." Tina sighed and continued. "When we first got set up here, you remember when I checked my email and sent out a few. One of them was to HER. But she didn't answer. I thought that was it. I still checked that account every week, though, and she saw my email from last August and answered me on Wednesday."

"You're excited."

"Yes I am. I told her about the evacuation and me being rescued, and a couple of months later I wrote another one, in the blind, and told her that we were married and how happy I was and some of the things about us. I never got an answer." Little squeal. "Today I got an answer." She read me the answer.

"Tina - Sister! I hope you get this. I hadn't checked this email since I don't know when. I didn't evacuate for the hurricane. Mom left with one of her guys a couple of days before and they didn't come back for me. I was supposed to catch a ride with my neighbors, but they never showed up. I was in the apartment during the storm and the building blew over and trapped me inside. If my next door neighbor hadn't stayed and then came by the rubble and rescued me, I would have probably died there.

Tina, he's amazing. You know how we used to talk about REAL men? My Dan's one of those. He's smart and caring and decent and I fell in love with him. He's the most decent male I've ever met in my life and he loves me to pieces.

I'm back in high school, but you won't believe this! I skipped TWO grades. I'm graduating this year. Married and graduating from high school! I can't believe it.

I hope you get this. I want to hear from you.

Your sister,

Nikki D."

"Sounds like the real thing to me, baby," I said. "You gonna answer her?"

"Already wrote it, love," she said. She read her reply. It was pretty much a synopsis of our meeting and mating and marriage and a bit of our life since then. The way she wrote it, it sounded like something out of a fairy tale.

"You don't mind if I send it, do you?"

"Of course not." I heard a mouse click.

"Let's eat," she said.

We fixed bowls of soup from the pot simmering on the stove, and added some crusty bread to the meal. We chatted about the half day of school she had and my day, nearing the end of my project. After dinner, we shared in the domestic tasks, then I sat down at one end of the sofa and she sat at the other with her laptop. I had just fired up my Kindle when she split the air with a squeal.

"It's HER! With a phone number." The phone fairly leapt into her hand. She tapped in the number and held it to her ear for a few seconds, then another happy squeal and a giggle. "Nikki! I FOUND you! Oh, gosh, little sister! How ARE you doing?"

I watched, bemused, for the next half an hour. Tina's side of the conversation, the part I could hear, was excited, happy, ebullient.

It ended with, "Yeah, get Skype on your computer so we can see each other. And we'll keep in touch." Pause. "Definitely! We HAVE to get together." Pause. "Soon!" Pause! "Oh, yeah, Nikki! I am SOOO happy to hear from you. I love you, little sister!" And she closed her phone, smiling as she turned to me.

"Sounded like a good thing to me, baby. Another sister?"

"What's your phrase? Parallel development? It's almost like that." She smiled. "The difference was that her mom worked in a bar in the parish back home and got on Section Eight housing and they had an apartment. My mom shacked up with whoever she could tag."

"Baby, that's behind you," I said, seeing the cloud over her face.

"I know, my guy," she said, continuing, "Nikki's mom and boyfriend left her a few days before the hurricane and she was supposed to get a ride out for the evacuation with some neighbors, but they weren't letting anybody back into the parish when they tried to go get her. So they just let the issue drop. Nikki was THERE!" Tina caught her breath. "The storm blew her building down with her IN IT! She was trapped, and then this guy came over and rescued her. Cut her out of the building. He lived in the house next door and he stayed through the storm."

In my head, a little light blinked. "Did she say who the guy was?"

Giggle. "Yeah. You're NOT going to believe this..."

"Try me."

"He's an electrical engineer. Name's Dan Granger."

"I know 'im. We worked together out of college. He stayed back there with another company, and I moved on. I remember him and me talking after one of those big hurricanes, about how it wouldn't be hard to build a house to beat one."

Tina looked at me, somewhat bemused. "Oh, here we go again, Alan. Another one of those strange events that drop into our lives."

"So you've got another sister?"

"My first 'sister', baby. If you listened to our stories, you'd almost think we were carbon copies." Her computer dinged. Email. Squeal! "A picture!"

She opened it. Yep! A few years hadn't obscured Dan Granger. He was identifiable. Him and this delightfully smiling girl, whom I assumed was...

"That's Nikki!"

"And that's Dan. I know 'im!" I said.

I didn't make the weekend before I called Dan myself.

"Alan Addison! What have we gotten ourselves into THIS time?" he said.

"You tell me, buddy! It seems we're married to sisters."

"Yeah," I laughed. "And it's a big family. Let me tell you what's going on at this end." I told him about the plans for college for Tina and Susan and Cindy, and the business plans for me and Dan Richards and Jason. "Gonna be confusing with two Dans, though," I said. Assuming you're interested. You ARE interested, right?"

"I dunno," He said. "I got a good deal here. House, job. Nikki's graduating ... I could be here..."

"For how long?" I asked. "I know what you do and who you do it for. You could definitely take a step up. And with Nikki graduating..." Tina had told me about Nikki skipping two grades. That was a surprise, but when when I considered her hooking up with Dan Granger, it wasn't too big a surprise. He had a thing for smart girls.

"I know," he said. "I already got the 'We're going to Auburn' thing from, uhhh, Tina and Susan and Cindy. Miracle of modern technology, that Skype thing. Should've never let women use computers."

"Yeah, buddy, I listened in. You're telling me that Nikki would be a candidate for 'barefoot and pregnant'?"