Chapter 19: Preparations

During the evening meal on Monday we talked briefly to Cindy asking her what dances she would like to learn. "I don't know, she said. "I've never been to a school dance before. I suppose they just sort of shimmy and shake and that sort of thing."

I laughed. "In other words they don't really know how to dance so they just make things up as they go along."

"Oh Dad," she said. "It's not like that. I've been talking to some of the girls at school and they tell me it's sort of like they are having sex without actually doing it. They just let themselves go and, according to them, go into a kind of a trance."

"They are right of course," I told her. "Dancing is the nearest thing to sex that two people can do in public. And if I had to bet, I'd say that more girls get pregnant after a dance than at any other time."

"Speaking of being pregnant and babies and all that kind of thing," said Rachel. She looked directly at Cindy, "Your dad and I have been talking and we want your opinion. How would you feel about having a new little brother or sister?"

The look on Cindy's face was priceless. "Are you, ... you, ... I mean,..." she stuttered.

Rachel smiled, "Am I pregnant? Is that what you're asking?" Cindy nodded. "No, I'm not but your dad and I were thinking about it. How do you feel about it?"

"I'm not sure," she answered. "You hit me kind of cold with this, you know and I haven't had any time to think about it. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any downside to the idea, but that doesn't automatically mean there isn't one. What have you two come up with?"

I was once again amazed at how intelligent and thoughtful Cindy actually was. "Well, here's one thing we are concerned about Kitten," I said. "For sixteen, almost seventeen years you have been my pride and joy. You'll continue to be that until the day I die, but babies demand a lot of attention, so some days you may feel like you're being short changed. We have been best buds for as long as I can remember and I don't want that to change and it won't actually, but sometimes I may be short tempered with you, especially if I've been up all night with a colicky baby."

"Dad," she said. "You said it yourself. I'm almost seventeen. Don't you think I'm old enough to know that you will always love me and I don't think I'll feel even slightly short changed. Now that I think about it, it would be a good chance for me to get some experience. I want to have children of my own some day and this would give me a good chance to see what it's like and, in the long run, I think it would make me a better mother. The important thing for me is to know if you are good with it. Will it make you happy?"

Rachel interrupted. "I never thought of that. Do you know that your dad is the only one of us who has any experience at all in working with babies? Maybe you and I can work on it together if you are willing."

Cindy squealed. "YES! Do you know that things have gotten a lot better around here since my bitch mom left?"

"CINDY," I said crossly. "I know you aren't too happy with what your mom did but she is still your mother."

Cindy defended herself. "Well, she is a bitch Dad. She's been gone a long time and she hasn't even called to make sure we are okay."

I laughed out loud. "That isn't EXACTLY true. She called me at work a couple of weeks ago and wanted to know if I would send ten thousand dollars to Colorado so that she and her beau could bail themselves out of jail."

Cindy's eye went wide. "REALLY? What did she do? What did you tell her?"

"I don't know exactly what she did. I didn't ask. She said something about a gun and a liquor store but I don't know any details. And as to what I told her ... I told her to go to hell. God, did that ever feel good." I calmed down a bit. "Actually, I shouldn't feel that way. But when she left and the way she did, it hurt much more than I could ever tell you. I felt worse for you, Kitten than I did for myself."

I could Cindy's eyes starting to tear up. "But hey Baby," I said. "It's you and me and Rachel now and I think maybe it's better than ever."

"Yea, it is," she said. "But sometimes I just wish that mom had been, well you know, more like a mom and it makes me sad. So, mostly, I just try not to think about it."

"An excellent idea," I said. "Let's talk about dancing. Maybe we could show you a few basic steps tonight and that way you'll be able to help some when you and Brian are working together on Thursday."

We moved furniture around in the living room to create a miniature dance floor and showed her some basic steps ... the box step, the waltz, the foxtrot and talked about line dancing. She was confused when we told her that the waltz and the foxtrot were similar except the waltz was in three-four time while the foxtrot was in four-four. That meant we had to explain different music tempos. We worked for a couple of hours and called it a night.

While Cindy was at school, Rachel went to the local music store and picked up some CDs so that we'd have something to dance to.

Over my lunch hour I did some research on the internet and was appalled at what I found. There was a high school maybe two hundred miles away where the attitude was so bad that three girls had actually been raped at the prom. That set me to thinking and I called the high school and set up an appointment to talk with the principal after work the next day.

When I graduated from high school, Jeff Walker had been my math teacher. Now, at age fifty something, he was the principal. So it was with a sense of deja vu that I sat in his office with him on the business side of the desk and me on the other.

After shaking hands and a few pleasantries he grinned broadly, "So have you tried to blow up any more schools lately?" I grimaced, "You would have to bring that up wouldn't you?" He laughed, "Why not, that was more excitement than we've ever had in this little district."

I had a sudden flashback to that terribly embarrassing day. I was in the eleventh grade and John Miller and I were nerds before the word was even invented. Being nerds most of our teachers loved us and our classmates simply though we were weird. One of the perks of being nerds was that our chemistry teacher, Mr. Smyth, allowed us to use the lab during study halls to run some of the reactions outlined in the text. Unfortunately, we read texts way beyond what is normal for an eleventh grade chemistry class.

We were talking one night while lounging in the tree house we had built and one of us, I don't remember which, suggested it might be fun to try and make nitroglycerin in the high school lab. We were intelligent enough to know that it could be made by mixing glycerol with one part nitric acid and three parts sulfuric acid. We also knew that the reaction when it occurred would produce extremely high temperatures and would explode if not cooled immediately.