Chapter 2

Back when they'd first started living together almost five years before, with a little bit of luck Tanisha had been able to make a respectable grilled cheese sandwich, at least most of the time. Jon could usually, but not always, manage to open a can of soup and heat it without burning it. Both of them had gotten better over the years, although they often ate out or microwaved a prepared freezer meal. That seemed like the lap of luxury to them; when they'd lived together near the Georgia Tech campus their junior and senior years, their tiny walkup apartment only had a dorm-room-sized refrigerator without a freezer, and a simple, old-fashioned hot plate. They'd been on a really, really tight budget, especially their junior year, and only an intense exercise program in bed and out had managed to keep the cheap starchy food they'd been eating from overwhelming them.

Both Jon and Tanisha were cursed with the type of body that will run to a weight problem unless they really worked to control it, which they had. Both of them had been frankly pudgy when they first started hanging out together in the dorm at Georgia Tech, but now they were each close to forty pounds lighter and much happier about it. They'd discovered early on that getting in shape improved their sex lives, and they didn't need more motivation than that.

The lean years were behind them now, and had been for a while. They were well paid at Lambdatron to begin with, and bonuses and company dividends had more than doubled their incomes. The habits of frugality learned in their early years together had stuck with them, which was part of why they still lived in the cramped, cheap townhouse apartment they'd moved into when they'd first gone to work for Lambdatron full time a few months less than three years before. With the exception of the bed, the apartment was furnished with discount furniture store specials, some of which were close to being worn out when they were brand new.

They actually had a kitchen with a real microwave in their apartment, also a big step up from their memories of Atlanta and Georgia Tech. They hadn't eaten since a light lunch much earlier in the day, and didn't feel like going to much trouble cooking this evening, so the microwave was humming away at warming some kind of generic tray meal. That was the alternative to a trip to a nearby restaurant, which would have involved getting dressed.

They had actually gotten dressed, at least a little, shorts and T-shirts. It was clear that playtime was over for today. That was fine; Jon was out of the mood, and that meant Tanisha was out of the mood, too. There wasn't any big discussion why; it had been a fact of life for them since they'd been going together, and Tanisha felt his pain the same way he felt hers.

"You think there's a chance he might not be there?" she asked.

"Hell, Tanisha, I don't know," he shook his head. "The last time we talked about it he said he'd only been to one NSME convention in the previous five years because he thought it was all getting to be the same stuff over and over. But that was five years ago, and who knows what's changed since he's been alone? I mean, the last word anyone has had from him was when Mom talked to him at the divorce hearing, and they might have exchanged three sentences. Things have to have changed for him since the last time I was home, but how, I don't have any idea."

"Maybe he's gotten better," Tanisha suggested, without much hope.

"And they could have gotten worse," Jon snorted. "If I had to bet, I'd guess worse, if he's even still alive."

Again, Tanisha knew the story: back when Jon had been in high school at his home in suburban Chicago, he'd been close to his father and had shared a lot of interests with him. Pete Chladek lived for his work at a machine tool company called Hadley-Monroe, Inc., and didn't have much interest in anything else. Jon, like his father, had planned on going into engineering, and in high school he'd already been an exceptionally good technical draftsman. He had become an expert with a computer drafting program called AutoCAD -- his father had managed to come up with a slightly outdated (and not entirely legal) version, and after school his job was doing bootleg drafting for Hadley-Monroe at home. He'd made good money at it for a high school kid and had saved a lot of it, which had proved important to him in later years.

Jon could remember when the Chladek family had been close and warm, nearly an ideal family, but slowly things went bad; his father got grumpier, and his temper got worse. Most of Pete's anger had been directed at Jon's older sister, Crystal, who was not a particularly good student in high school but was a real physical fitness and outdoor enthusiast, something Pete could neither understand nor appreciate. As his temper deteriorated, the portion directed at Crystal stopped short of getting physical as she neared her test for a black belt in karate. Pete's temper flared when Crystal announced she was going to college with the idea of becoming a physical education teacher, as that was something totally beneath his contempt.

Things went from bad to worse when Jon's younger sister, Nanci, decided to go to the same college as Crystal. That wouldn't have been so bad in itself, but what Nanci wanted to do was be a party girl. Needless to say, Nanci got into trouble, and Pete blamed Crystal for letting her run wild more than he blamed Nanci for doing so.

What had once been a pretty good family went to hell in short order the day Crystal returned home after being a mid-year graduate from college the same day that Jon arrived home on winter break from Georgia Tech. He walked in the door not realizing the fuse had burned short and was close to reaching the dynamite. The end result was that Crystal stormed out the door, never to return, and for the next several weeks Pete blamed her for everything that had gone wrong in his life, and expected Jon to agree with him. What Jon learned over the next few days, at least when his father wasn't around, was there was plenty of blame to spread around, and while Crystal may have been responsible for some of it, the majority fell elsewhere.

With things as bad around the Chladek household as they were right after Christmas, when one of Jon's friends suggested a quick trip to Florida to get out of the Chicago winter cold, Jon took him up on it. They came through Atlanta on the way back, and Jon, not wanting to put up with any more of the tension and squabbling around home, reasoned that he might as well just stay there at Tech. While he was waiting for school to start up again, he got friendly with Tanisha, who he found had family troubles of her own and was back at school early because of them. It was later that term when each admitted to the other that they didn't want to go home and face the family troubles over the summer, and when a professor suggested a possible internship opening for them at Lambdatron, it appealed to both of them.

That proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back with Jon's father. Pete had been expecting Jon to work at Hadley-Monroe again that summer, on a dull drafting job at very low pay; Lambdatron, on the other hand, seemed more interesting, more rewarding, and had more of a future than listening to his father gripe every day at Hadley-Monroe. Tanisha had only been a small part of Jon's decision to sneak out of the house for the job, but in short order he and Tanisha became much closer, lovers rather just than friends. Jon knew from painful experience that his father would no more accept his son falling in love with a black girl than ... well, anything. Jon dreaded the day his father found out the truth, with good reason.

For the next two and a half years Jon and Tanisha were alone in the world, except for each other and their work friends at Lambdatron. During that time they'd evolved their exceptional closeness, mostly because they only had each other. They'd thought no one in either of their families knew where they were, but it proved that Jon's mother Karin had a slim clue. One memorable day, Crystal and Karin appeared at their door without warning, bearing the news that Karin had finally had enough of Pete and his temper and had left him. Karin and Crystal announced they were living together in Flagstaff, a hundred miles to the north, where Crystal was a raft guide in the Grand Canyon. Then, to make things complete, the previous spring Nanci had shown up out of nowhere, using the last of her money and the last of the gas in her car to escape an abusive boyfriend and show up at Flagstaff just as Karin was getting set to marry again. Now, the family was more or less reunited in Arizona, except for his father, and everyone figured Pete knew nothing about it.

No one in the family had heard from Pete in over a year, since Karin's divorce hearing -- but of all people, Jennlynn had! Thanks to a sales lead from Jon, Lambdatron had worked out a contract to do some work for Hadley-Monroe; Pete was the Hadley-Monroe contact person. Since Jon was slightly familiar with the laser controller that needed to be redesigned, he and Tanisha were the logical ones to do the work. They were still interns at the time the project was started, and Jon didn't want anyone from Hadley-Monroe to know that he was involved at all, so Jennlynn got tagged to be the contact person from Lambdatron. However, this hadn't produced any real information, other than Jennlynn's report that Pete was all business, sour as hell otherwise, but knew the old controller like no one else. No personal issues had ever been discussed on either side, and even Jennlynn hadn't talked with Pete in more than a year; the contact person for Hadley-Monroe had since changed, and Jennlynn had figured it would be best not to be too snoopy.

That fact meant Jon had reason to wonder if his father was indeed still alive. He'd done a little Internet searching, but hadn't been able to uncover anything either way. It seemed like the only way to find out was to go to Chicago and find out. This could well prove to be the chance -- if he really wanted to know.

"Maybe if we run into someone from Hadley-Monroe at the convention, we might be able to learn something," Tanisha suggested.

"Yeah, that's a possibility," Jon admitted as the microwave dinged. "I still remember several people who probably ought to be there. I'm not sure how it's going to work, and about all I can say is we're going to have to play it however it happens."

"You're not going to tell him about Crystal and Al, I suppose," Tanisha said as neutrally as possible while she headed for the microwave.

"Hell, no," Jon snorted, "Not even if everything else works out right and all is forgiven, which I don't think is going to happen. I mean, it's no secret around here, but it's going to have to be up to Mom if he's going to be told. There's no way in hell that I'm getting in the middle of that one. That still burns my butt just a little when I think about it."

"I know," Tanisha sighed as she pulled the plastic trays out of the microwave onto plastic plates, "And I don't blame you one bit." She paused a second looking for a way to change the touchy subject, wishing she hadn't brought it up -- she should have known better. The best she could come up with was, "Hey, while I'm thinking about it, we ought to call Ben and Joy to cancel tomorrow night."