Chapter 52

Cindy's turn:

I'm sitting here looking at this email and giggling. Tina's in class. I'm not, and neither is Terri, so she and I are at the lab and I'm showing her some hardware things. That's what I was doing when my iPhone buzzed. I pulled it out of my jeans and looked.

"It's from Johanna."

Terri has the cutest squeal. "Open it. I hope it's what I'm thinking."

"Me, too." I punched at the screen and brought it up.

Dear family in Alabama-

You have to know that we miss you all. Skype and email don't do it. We're coming in on Wednesday. I hope we won't be disruptive to your routine.

"We don't have a routine," Terri said. "Tina says it's a subdued chaos."

"Tina is right, you know," I answered.

We're going to do that hotel thing, I think. We'll see. Maybe a week, maybe longer. We're playing that by ear.

Terri giggled. "My Aunt Johanna. A musical reference."

You're going to love this. We're FLYING in. We haven't bought a plane (yet) but Stoney wanted to get qualified for a tail-dragger to keep our options open. Remember a while back when I said something about a Pitts S-2? Yeah, we worked a deal out for insurance and the guy that owns it is loaning it to us for the trip. It's actually an S-2A. I may regret it later, but that's what I wanted to do now and Stoney didn't work really hard to talk me out of it. We have the canopy on it for the trip.

Okay, now I'm a little bit jealous. Of course, Terri...

"What's a Pitts S-2?" She looked at me as her fingers flew over the face of the iPad that was almost a body part to her. Then "Ohhhhhhh, wow! That's gotta be FUN!" Of course there's the 'quick' side of Terri, too. "Max range 277 miles. That means TWO stops on the way here. Maybe three."

If Kara hasn't already told you, we're set up for a fun concert on Friday night – her, me, Stoney.

I already knew. Kara can't keep a secret. That's one of the ways she's shown herself to be part of the bunch here. Besides, there are posters up around campus.

Phone rang. I answered it. "Hey, Nikki. Yeah, I'm reading it with Terri right now!"

"Are you jealous? That Pitts biplane?"

"Yeah, you gotta believe. Just a little bit."

"And a concert?"

"Riches, Sis. We have riches."

"'Kay! Just wanted to check with you. I have two lit instructors coming up the hall. Seeya!"

"'Kay, Nik!"

Terri smiled. "News spreads fast!"

"Jo shotgunned the email to all of us."

"That's good news," I told Terri.

"Oh, yes! She promised she'd play her flute with us."

I smiled. "Terri, me playing my recorder with Johanna is like putting a tricycle on a NASCAR track."

"I know," the little blonde thing said. "But we ARE getting better."

"I wish my fingers learned as fast as my brain did," I said.

"It's like that," Terri affirmed. "One of the reasons Dad thinks it's good that I learn to play."

"That's what Mizz Beck says too," I added. "You, me and Rache after dinner tonight? Half an hour?"

"Get your Dan to play with us. We need some real world stuff."

"That's my Dan. Real world."

"Yeah, cuz we'd be a fairy tale, otherwise," Terri said. She pushed the soldering pencil with her fingertip. "Now, let's see how you said we use this transistor for a switch."

And I have an eight year old girl who wants to know about saturation bias on a transistor. What's worse, I know about saturation bias on transistors because Nikki and Susan and Tina and I had used them in some pretty hefty power applications.

"Signal generator," I said. "What can we do with this?"

Those blue eyes almost (but not quite) looked exasperated. "A train of pulses of specific waveform and magnitude and frequency."

"And if we source current through this transistor then gate it?"

"We turn it on and off really fast, letting controlled amounts of energy flow." She laughed that little titter thing that I love to hear. "And with this setup, we have a very ugly and expensive light dimmer."

"Uh-huh," I laughed. "And why do we pulse instead of just biasing to raise the resistance of the transistor?" And she explained it to me.

"You wanna know what else is on my mind?" Terri asked.

"Always do," I replied. "You're a happy dimension in my multidimensional universe. So what's up?"

"Sex."

Okay, I gulped and swallowed hard. I'm not supposed to be an expert. In the eyes of most sane people, I'm fifteen, and half or more girls my age are sexually active to one degree or another, and I've been sexually active since I was thirteen, but it's ONE guy and we got married as soon as we could.

And Terri's not my daughter and by all rights, these talks should be taking place between her and her loving parents, and I know for a fact that she's got several of those and if I can't trust Alan and Tina to do this right, there's nobody on the planet that I can trust.

So that's what I said. "You probably should talk with your dad or Tina, baby."

"I do. And Tina said that I might learn something from talking with you." Serious blue eyes. Now my mind's running through files at top speed. Where's this going?

"Okay. So if Tina knows, I guess I will try, up until I get uncomfortable. Okay?"

Blonde hair bounced with her affirmative nod. "I know it's a sensitive topic, but I need people that I trust."

"Okay. Thank you for considering me to be somebody you trust."

"I trust everybody here. You're closest to my age."

"I ... your life and my life have been a lot different, sweetie. When I was your age, it was just me and Mom in an apartment and I never had a dad that lasted more than a couple of months."

"I thought about that," she said. "But then I look at you and your husband and I know there's something..."

"Sex isn't just sex, Terri. If it's just a mechanical thing, then it's not good. People are spiritual creatures."

Her eyes watched me closely. "Some people don't seem to think so."

"Where'd you get this idea?" I asked.

"I pay attention to things, don't I? It would be pretty hard to miss how much sex there is out there."

"I know that, puh-Terri," I said. "The world is a messy place. Sex is just one thing they mess up beyond belief."

"It's good, though? Sex? I mean, if people are so interested in it."

"Or it's very bad. You probably never saw the parts I saw. Mom showed me the bad side of sex, using it for herself, men using her for themselves. Miscommunication about what it was about between one partner and another." I sighed. "I watched that for years. I guess I was your age when it started dawning on me what I was seeing..."

"So you're saying that I'm starting to ask the same questions you asked?"

"And I didn't have anybody I could trust to answer them."

She stared at me. I knew there were questions. "Terri, let me tell you this. I had NO sexual experience before I met Dan. As far as I was concerned, there was supposed to be only one. Him."

"Tina said the same thing."

"Nikki and Susan won't tell you anything different."

"I know. Nikki an' her Dan go visit her mom in prison. That's not a good sign." She sighed. "I guess there are things worse than having your natural mom in and out of treatments and hospitals all the time."

"I suppose, sweetie," I said. "Your mom didn't make bad choices to end up where she's at. And I think she'd much rather not have those episodes."

"I know," Terri said. "It's sad, but I was going to ask to live with Dad and Tina anyway. I think you knew that."

"I understand. You told me."

"This is a better place for me. I don't think I could've found anybody to talk to me about sex like you. Or anybody else here."

"I can't think of anybody I would've found who would be as good a fit in our bunch as you. You're a natural."

"You'd've had Rachel."

"Maybe not. I know that YOU were a big part of the reason that Sim and Beck moved here."

"Mizz Beck says that sex is a gift from God."

Surprised me. "You asked Mizz Beck? About sex, I mean?"

"Yes. Some of the other kids in our home-school group, the subject came up." She sighed. "Everybody's family lives are not as stable or conventional as ours, apparently."

"Terri," I replied, "people would look at me and Dan or Nikki and her Dan or your dad and Tina and think that we're not conventional either."

"Just your age thing, you know. Other than that..." she paused. "Your social studies project. The nuclear family. It's less and less the norm."

"You're perceptive," I noted.

"It's a blessing and a curse, Mizz Beck says. You don't know how good you have it unless you can understand how bad others have it."

"Maybe that's why I'm so stuck on Dan," I said. "I know what a woman with a bunch of guys coming and going looks like, and it's not pretty."

"I know what kids in broken homes go through," Terri said. "Some of my friends in California. Bad. Shara in Tennessee. Not so bad. Her mom loved her, at least. But it's so neat having a dad."

I guess she caught the change in my eyes. "I'm sorry, Cindy," she said. "I didn't mean..."

I scooped her into my arms. "You make me realize how good we both have it now. I didn't really have a reference before. I wasn't really communicative with others in school. Just empty, me, I guess. Can't miss what you never had."

"But here, you're in the middle of everything. Dad and Tina both laugh whenever I say 'Cindy says... '"

"It's like I - I transported to another universe, Terri. Like something happened two summers ago in Alabama that let me out of one universe and into another one."

"I think I understand. It's like the difference between living in that apartment complex in California and this one. Everybody here..."

"Is part of this community because they want to be. You know how Mister Sim and Mizz Beck were concerned when they first visited."

Terri smiled. "Yeah. You're only a few years older than Rachel and me and it bothered her. I think she's used to it now." Blue eyes smiled. "You know she told Rachel not to get ideas, huh?"

"Yeah, she told me ... Mizz Beck. I have to be careful. What Dan and I did, it's rare that it works. It's got 'exploitation' written all over it."

"Don't get nervous, Cindy. I mean, this talk, it's just gathering data. I'm curious."

"No! YOU?!? Curious?"

"Well, not about what Tina calls the 'Tab A – Slot B' thing. People. I'm curious about how people work together."