Chapter 6

Tina's turn:

I have this 'flying' thing down pat. Well, maybe not exactly, but I'm comfortable with it. I haven't done it yet, but I would be quite comfortable flying from Tennessee to Louisiana all by myself. But this time, I had my Alan with me. And my daughter, step-daughter actually, was with her adopted grandmother for the night.

Mizz Kathy promised Terri a mall trip. Terri promised me that she'd write something. Alan just looked at the three of us girls and then turned to Mike. He just laughed.

"Buddy," Mike said to Alan, "you gave Kathy her first grand-daughter. I think it's hilarious." He and I had talked about Terri and her precocious ways. Mike's a good dad.

"Don't turn 'er into a tom-boy," I said.

"Like Susan?" he laughed.

"Jason doesn't think she's any kind of boy," Alan laughed. He hadn't talked to either of them, but I'd talked to Susan and Susan had talked to her mom. So we're winging our way to Alabama to pick up Nikki and her Dan. I call him 'Dan 2.0' because I met Cindy's Dan first. Nikki and Dan 2.0 were towing their travel trailer to Alabama as a part of the Great Migration.

'Great Migration' is my invention for the moving of four families to Auburn. It's a giggle. Me 'n' Susan, we're the dumb ones of the group where 'dumb' is an ACT of thirty or better and language is a tool wielded like an artist's brush one moment and a sledgehammer the next.

But today we're on the way to a little Alabama airfield to get Nikki and Dan. It's an hour and a half flight, actually a little more. I'm flying. Straight and level at cruise speed in smooth air, it's almost mindless. I scan the skies for traffic, but traffic is sparse. I haven't seen anything at our altitude. We're at seventy-five hundred feet, and Alan's hand is idly toying with the hair at the back of my neck.

"You make me crazy when you do that, you know," I told him over the intercom.

"Yeah, I do know," he laughed. "And when we're home this evening, you can't scream when..."

"I've gotten pretty good at chewing the pillow," I giggled. "Or that spot on your chest."

"I can live with that. Can you?"

"Terri's worth it, babe. I get to be a mommy and a big sister all at once. She's a neat kid. 'Course, with YOUR genes..." I smiled at him.

He smiled back. "Get through college and let's see what genes can do."

"Yours and mine," I replied. "I'll be twenty-one. You'll be forty-five. You sure you're not too old to be a daddy?"

"I'm a daddy now."

"But a baby from us?"

"You've talked about it more than once. I'm not saying you ... we have to, but if you want..."

I couldn't help the squeal. "A big part of me wants that, Alan. But we don't have to decide today. There's plenty of time to decide. And besides, reversals aren't a hundred percent. I know the numbers."

"I do too, little one," Alan said.

"Way, I see it," I said, "my senior year of college, you get the surgery, I'm off the Pill, and we let life rock along. And if it happens, it happens. Sort of like buying a lottery ticket."

"I love it when you're analytical," he laughed.

"Plane below us at two o'clock," I said, noting the traffic.

"Got it," he answered. "Of course you realize that we'll have to have lots and lots of sex."

I got a little tingle in my jeans at that thought. With Susan's marriage, our sisterhood could talk freely about sex, something we did before when Susan wasn't part of the conversation. I learned that contrary to the conventional idea in some circles that sex was a base urge that intelligence would suppress, our experience was that intelligence brought a new dimension to two loving partners. Of course, there's that 'age' thing. Susan's the only one of us to make it to a 'normal' age.

I was close, seventeen, but Cindy! She'd confided that she'd crawled into Dan's bed when she was still thirteen. And Nikki was fifteen with Dan 2.0. And I talk with both of them and I can't think of more monogamous couples. Except me and the guy in the seat beside me.

The guy in the seat beside me got a quick fondle, causing him to purr while he looked at me with a bit of a surprised expression. "What is that about?"

"I was thinking of how many ways I love you."

"You're the most beautiful pilot I know," he said.

"And you know some cuties, so that's a real compliment," I giggled in return.

When we sat down in Alabama, Nikki and Dan 2.0 were waiting on the ramp for us.

"Look at 'em shakin' hands," Nikki said. "I'm so glad we're girls. We can hug."

It's the first time that I ever flew in the BACK seat of our plane. Nikki and I gave the guys the front seats. Worse, the intercom system doesn't allow private conversation between just two of the users, so our sister to sister stuff was a little subdued.

We did get a giggle or two in when we compared phone calls from Susan on her honeymoon.

"She sounded almost like she was high," Nikki said.

"Do you remember YOUR first week?" I asked.

Nikki's got a cute smile, and it showed up when she thought about that statement. "Yeah ... yeah ... I do."

"I don't remember a thing," Dan 2.0 said. "I didn't have a blood supply to useful parts for days."

"That's 'cuz you're an old lech havin' your way with tender young girls," Nikki tossed to him.

"Nope! I'm just the happy recipient of a fold in the fabric of the universe," he said. "A place of beauty and poetry and melody."

"You married a bard, Nikki," Alan said. "I think the same way, but I lack Dan's artistic nature. All I can do is grunt and throw leaves in the air."

"Maybe I'm just the girl who loves to be showered in falling leaves," I countered.

Nikki looked at me, grinned, and presented a hand for a high five. "Yep! He's definitely yours," she said. "But speaking of poetry ... Cindy and Terri?"

"Oh, god," I laughed. "Terri calls Cindy or Skypes 'er and they READ to each other!"

"I know," Tina giggled. "Sometimes I think that my Terri just might be special."

"She is special," Alan said. "I seem to attract special people."

"And apparently it's a not uncommon affliction," Dan 2.0 added.

"I'm not special, Dan," Nikki said. "I'm just your Nikki."

But then there's Terri (with the able hand of Cindy for final edit and structure):

I'm Terri and I'm almost eight years old and my life is interesting. There are sad things. My mother and father are divorced. It happened when I was little, perhaps (perhaps is such a lovely word, isn't it?) four years old. Mommy had a boyfriend that she liked better than Daddy. She told me that one day I would understand all about that.

I still sort of don't. I know my daddy and I know Mister Martin. I like Daddy a lot better. Daddy is very smart. He's an engineer. That's not the guy at the front of the train, you know. He knows how electrical things are supposed to work and how to design them and put them together.

Daddy turns me loose in a bookstore and didn't look nearly as surprised when I was reading whole books when I was six.

Mommy moved to California with Mister Martin. The last time I saw Daddy before we left, he was crying, like he didn't want me to go. I believed him. I didn't believe Mommy when she said Mister Martin would be like a daddy to me. For the last year Mommy has had a hard time being a mommy to me. Mister Martin says she has bad mood swings. Some days she never gets out of bed and stays in a dark room and if I go in to try to talk to her she gets very angry, almost scary.

I got to meet Daddy's new wife, Tina, on the phone. The first time I talked to her, she was just NICE to me. (Cindy says that when I'm writing like I'm just talking, I can capitalize, use the big letters, to emphasize a thought.) Tina was so nice that we started talking a couple of times a week. I would get a phone call from Daddy twice a week, and I always ended up talking to Tina.

She said that even though she was Daddy's wife, our ages were too close for her to act like a mom, so she was more like a big sister. I can understand that. After we were all together for Christmas, I was a lot better with Tina as big sister or mom or anything than I was with Mister Martin. She just seemed to fit right in with me and my Daddy and I think she understands me a whole lot better than either Mommy or Daddy.

When I had to go back to California after Christmas, I guess I might have made too big a deal about my time with Tina and Daddy. I think Mommy didn't like me enjoying myself with them like I did. I couldn't help it, though. I felt like we made a nice group.

I still talked to Daddy and Tina at least twice a week.

Mommy was getting worse, though. Her mood swings were really bad. She had to go to doctors and I had to go to doctors too. They tried to explain to me that Mommy wasn't really angry, that she had some things wrong in her head. They gave her medicine and it sort of helped. She didn't get as angry, but she just seemed almost like I wasn't real. Or Mister Martin, either.

She stopped taking the medicine. She had a big fight with Mister Martin and started throwing things and the police came and they took her away to the hospital. It's a special hospital. I know that when adults say 'special' they can mean a lot of different things. Sometimes 'special' isn't good.

The next day Mister Martin put me on an airplane. When I landed in Tennessee for the first time in my life, there was Daddy and Tina waiting for me. On the way home I paid attention. You can look at people and see signs about what they're thinking, even when they don't come out and say what they think.

I didn't see any signs that anybody was upset that I was here. It would've been bad if they were. Dad and Tina's trailer was little. Dad says it's a travel trailer and that families go on vacations in some sort of like this, but he had his specially made for him to live in while he worked all over, and it only had one bed. I saw others that had beds all over the place.

"We'll only be in this thing for a few days until we swap with Jason for his apartment," Tina said.

Jason is my Aunt Susan's husband now. They weren't married then. And Susan? Of course she's my aunt. She's my mom Tina's adopted sister, so that makes her my aunt because I'm Tina's daughter, right? And I have a bunch of other aunts, Dad's sister, Aunt Elise, and Tina's other two adopted sisters, Cindy and Nikki. Can you picture all this? We have a big family.

"Blended," Tina says.

"We're a family milkshake," Nikki tells me. And I'm happy with that. I'm sorry, Mom, but in California, there was no family. And living in that apartment complex, I had a lot of friends, but they came and went, and there were people there that not only were not my friends, but they were just bad. Here, I'm with family. And Dad and Tina make me feel really secure. Tina feels like family in a way that I never felt with Mister Martin. (Cindy's note: Tina's gonna tear up when she reads this. I know I did. I know exactly what Terri means about family.)

I got to be in Susan's wedding. I have pretty sisters, you know, but on that one day, Susan was definitely the prettiest. Brides are supposed to be like that. It's the only wedding I've ever been in, besides Mom's. She and Mister Martin got married in front of a judge.

Susan got married in a Baptist church in Tennessee, in front of friends and family. When I get married, I think it's gonna be a guy like Jason or my dad or my sister's husbands, and I want my wedding to be about family, like Susan's. Forget that Disney stuff. I don't believe in fairy tales. They're interesting, but you have to filter (that's Dad's word) the truth from the things they put in to make it interesting.