Chapter 38

Tina's turn:

MY graduation. My HIGH SCHOOL graduation! Across the country there are a few MILLION people who are looking forward to this night in their lives, and mine was upon me.

Okay. Let me tell you about this, because mine's NOT exactly standard. First, I'm a year ahead of my age group. Got lucky, even though Alan tells me that luck had little to do with it, and parlayed an unfortunate episode as a high school dropout into a 'skip a year of high school' thing.

Second thing is, of course, Alan Dean Addison, BSEE, fine human being, father and most wonderfully, my husband. Yes, I do indeed think of him in those terms. I've even told him.

Third thing. I'm a mom. No, not one of those poor unfortunate teen moms living with her parents trying to raise an infant and struggling through high school or living in a run down rental trailer with a loser husband. I became a step-mom by virtue of my husband's first wife's horrible mistake of divorcing him, and between them they had Terri, almost eight. She loves when I give her age like that. A year means so much more when you're seven. And what a doll. We started off loving each other, just like her dad and I started off loving each other. And Terri's, well, I never really got a handle on her mom's intelligence, but Terri's definitely got her dad's intelligence. And she's a cutie, little blonde, blue-eyed imp with a smile that must be imbedded in her genes.

So that's what I will be when I graduate. I have a story. And so far, it's got a wonderfully happy ending.

The day was a blur. We started out with breakfast that somebody else cooked at our customary restaurant. Later in the day, we went to the airport to meet the remote parts of our family.

I was not the least surprised to see the Cessna 180 taxi up with Cindy's red head peering out the corner of the windscreen as she S-turned her way to the tie-downs. Nikki and her Dan's Mooney is another story. Nikki's not quite as adventurous as Cindy when it comes to flying and so her Dan was in the left seat, but Nikki was grinning.

Naturally, we end up at Susan's house before the Big Event. That's a good thing. Susan's mom and dad are good people and they accept me and Alan completely now. I know it was a bit of a step for Mizz Kathy at first, but then we hauled Cindy and her Dan in, and when you look at Cindy and learn SHE'S married, makes me and Alan look positively normal. They even took a shine (good Tennessee phraseology, there) to Terri. Of course, it's hard NOT to just melt when you meet Terri.

My step-daughter's precocious. If she had an evil mind, she'd be the formative stages of one frightening evil overlord, but she's sweet as she can be. Analytical, calculating, measured. Behind those blue eyes there's a mind going, in computer terms, parallel processing in the high gigahertz range, but when she knows the answers, she just choses to make people smile. She's only as manipulative as you'd EXPECT a seven-year-old to be with her dad, but her DAD is MY husband, and I manipulate him, too, and he absolutely loves it. Today, for graduation, she's wearing this little dress with simple lines and a solid royal blue color that makes her blonde hair stand out.

I remember her and me and Susan buying that dress. "I have one this color," Susan said. "I like it."

Terri smiled and sidled up against Susan. I swear, if Susan had a seven year old daughter, Terri would be IT. Okay, Susan's blonde hair, and Jason's sandy hair, and I'm looking forward to the result of that union. Alan and I won't likely have our own baby, but we have Terri and we'll have Susan and Jason's.

So we're at Susan's house, all sitting around talking. Each of us girls are perched on the knee of our guys. Terri's squeezed in beside Alan, well within reach of my hand. Grandma used to touch me a lot, a stroke of her hand on my shoulder, my face, my hair, and I always thought of those little touches as constant reminders that I was loved and I was important to her.

Alan's like that. Before we were, well, US, he occasionally put a hand on the small of my back, guiding me somewhere, or something appropriate. He tells me that he almost had spasms NOT touching me, because he was afraid I'd think it inappropriate. After we finally recognized the obvious, that fate had thrown us together because we BELONGED together, he started touching me more, but he asked me if he was touching me too much. You won't believe how I answered that question. Words were part of the answer.

When it got time to get ready, we all disappeared into Susan's bedroom, at least us girls. Alan and the other guys came dressed well for a Tennessee high school graduation. Susan told her mom and dad what Mizz Helen had said about Cindy's graduation: "Dressing up for a lot of these people means buttoning the top button of your overalls." Alan, in his words, 'cleans up pretty well' for things. I know he's worn a suit a time or two in his life. I've seen the pictures of his army days, too, and I know he's done presentations on projects in the big boardrooms over the years.

All cleaned up and dressed up and ready, we assembled the crowd on the front steps of Susan's porch in front of Dan's (Cindy's Dan) camera and after he focused, he stepped into the crowd behind Cindy and using a remote, snapped pictures. Yes, Susan and I were front and center, all gowned up and ready to go. I will have that picture for the rest of my life. It's a rung on a ladder, a ladder that went down into the pit when I lived with Mom, and the first rung out of the pit was the day he pulled a pistol to protect me that bad day in Louisiana ahead of the hurricane.

I didn't get to sit on the stage at graduation. I only had this one year at this school, and before I got here I was a dropout. But I was smiling. One of the sweetest girls in the world was up there on the stage, Susan, and she was glowing, part of it because she was a salutatorian, part because in a week from today, she'd be on her way to a honeymoon with her new husband. I was in the thundering herd. I looked carefully across the crowd. It's easy searching for our group. Just look for the redheads. There aren't that many, and there's certainly gonna only be ONE Cindy, and she's gonna be in the middle of our group. Found 'em. Just a little tiny anchor to my life, that bunch. Nice to have anchors, it is.

If you've seen one high school graduation, you've seen 'em all. We had the Invocation, the National Anthem, the Alma Mater, the three hundred unruly students, their rowdy families and friends, and the principal and the high school staff did their level best to keep the ceremony somewhat stately and civil and solemn. Tried hard. Succeeded only slightly. After the speech by the local congressman and the valedictory speech, they distributed awards to the honors students and to those who had scholarships. My sister Susan was one of those. Glowing.

Then it was time for the 'cattle call', as Alan termed it, where each of us dutifully trooped onto the stage to receive our diplomas. All I can say is that the nation won't be suffering a clown shortage in the coming decades because I saw several aspirants to the trade up there on stage as they received diplomas. You have to understand that tonight was as far in education as a lot of them were going, and with a few of my classmates, I knew that they were the first in their families to graduate from high school.

Finally I shuffled forward to get my certificate. As I reached for it, I remembered Cindy telling me that her knees got weak. Cindy. Little Miss I Don't Know Where I Am in College. Weak-kneed over a high school diploma. And now I know why. I smiled, shook the principal's hand. Got a wink. That was for me. Special. "Mizz Tina, I wish we'd had you longer," he'd told me in the hall a week ago. "You've pushed Susan to new heights, and I really think if you two had collaborated a couple of years, you'd have to do the valedictory speech as a duet."

I told Alan that, next year on the first day of school, we're sending a gift basket to the office.

And the graduation is OVER!

We're in the parking lot, me, Alan, Terri, Susan's bunch, including some extended family we know, Nikki and her Dan, Cindy and her Dan, and I actually had tears running down my cheeks. Yes, Susan and I were going off to college together, but there are a bunch of other kids that I'm gonna miss. Email. Thank God for email. And cellphones and Skype.

The next day we stood at the airport and watched Nikki and Cindy and their respective Dans take off, headed for their homes. "I'm flying more of it this time," Nikki said. "Dan watches really close." She giggled.

"Dan still does that sometimes," Cindy said. "He worries about my feet slipping off the pedals."

I'm thinking that when the first starship is designed, either it's not gonna HAVE pedals, or the seat is going to adjust down to fit five foot three redheads.