Chapter 8

Cindy's turn:

It's almost moving time. I'm excited, very excited, in one way, but at the same time, I am sad. It's worse than when Dan's job finished and all the new friends I had out there just traipsed off to new jobs. Dan says that's part of life for construction workers, and that like he was with Mister Bill, they sometimes run into each other on other jobs.

This, though, is my home. Oh, gosh, the emotions. I hated living at this park because of Mom and the tiny trailer. And I love living in this park because of Dan and the tiny trailer. I told Dan that love makes any place a paradise. Dan calls me an engineer-poet.

I have friends and family here now. From life as the outside girl that was too close to trash to talk to at school when I lived with Mom, this past year I became something of a celebrity. I had friends at school, and I will miss seeing them. Dan says that's another passage that people go through in their lives. And he laughs when he says we'll come back for my ten-year high school reunion and I'll still be five years younger than everybody there.

I have Mizz Helen and Mister Charlie and the Hardesty bunch. "We'll be close enough to be able to come visit often, you know," I tell Mizz Helen.

"Don't you be one of those daughters who forgets her family," she said.

"I wont ever forget you, Mizz Helen," I said. "Or you, Mister Charlie. Y'all gave me Dan. You could've watched me livin' with Mom, or sent me into foster care. But you gave me Dan instead."

"You got Dan yourself, little angel. You two belong together," Mister Charlie said. "Everybody who knows you two knows this to be true."

And I'm moving away now. Dan's going to keep our house in Louisiana and he's keeping this trailer, although it will be in storage most likely, and we're moving to Auburn. We'll stay in our trailer there until we move into our new apartment, and Mizz Kathy and Susan and my sisters are going to help us decorate the place and make it a home for me and Dan, our first new one together.

And Nikki's already gotten her trailer up there in that park that Dan and I found, so in a day or two, we'll pull Dan's truck up to our trailer here, hitch up, and go on forward into a new chapter in the short but eventful story of Cynthia Susan Smith-Richards, proto-engineer-poet.

I made that announcement in an afternoon interlude when I was lying full length atop Dan.

He was laughing.

"Why are you laughing?" I asked.

"Because I'm staring at my favorite constellation in the whole universe."

That's my freckles. I hated them. I hated them even worse in the summer when I got a bit of sun and the freckles darkened twice as fast as the rest of me. The only makeup I ever wanted Mom to get me was something to cover up those freckles. And Dan came along and don't you know, he adores them? He does. I have had him start to kiss every single one of them. We never got near finishing before other things took priority.

"My freckles are funny now?" I said. I knew exactly where I was in this line of conversation.

"No, it's just that you're beautiful and I love you and I'm happy and I can tell from your expression that you're happy and you're going to tell me something."

I told him.

"Yep. Dan 2.0 and Nikki will be there a couple of days before we move our trailer. Depending on how fast things go, we might be able to move into the apartment at the end of June. I think that Susan and Jason will hang out up in Tennessee until their apartment is ready. So will Alan and Tina and Terri."

"But by the middle of July we'll all be there. In our own homes. And I'm already talking to Auburn about things. We need to go get me officially registered."

"Yes, we do," Dan said. "And yes, little one, it will be an adventure. I'm looking forward to it almost as much as you. You're not getting scared, are you?"

I kissed him on the nose. This time last summer, I would've been scared. The thought of yet another year of middle school was bad enough. Now, college? "I'm not scared. I know you love me. You loved me when I was just a middle-schooler. And it was as illegal as anything, and I loved you and you loved me and here we are. Me and my Dan." I smiled. "Having sisters is gonna be a blast. I already like being with them and talking, and it'll be a little more relaxed since we don't have to tiptoe around things with Susan."

"I have trouble imagining you tiptoeing around anybody," he laughed.

I wiggled. I was still lying on top of him and I know how to wiggle for maximum effect. I faked exasperation. "I am the very model of decorum, sir. I did not want to flaunt the almost uncontainable joys of our marriage." Another wiggle. "Especially this part."

He cupped my butt with his hands, accentuating the friction. "Very considerate of you," he said. "How about Nikki and Tina?"

"We all talked about it. But that's over now. You should hear some of the things sweet innocent Susan's come up with. Told me that she understood why I always seemed so serene."

"Serene." Dan said. "Yeah, I can see 'serene'. And self-assured, now. Last August, not so much."

"Did I change too much, baby?" I asked.

I know, but I like to hear it. I like to see his eyes soften when he thinks about me. His eyes tell me so much about how he feels. I watch him talking with people about technical things and I can see that he loves his work and he loves teaching and helping people understand their jobs. Dan does 'teacher' very well. I know. He taught me to fly and to program those controllers.

Oh, yeah. Programming. I think Nikki's a savant. It's funny. She talked Dan 2.0 into setting up one of the obsolescent controllers at their house in Louisiana and she connected it through a firewall to the Internet so we can both access it. My Dan walked in one time and I'm curled up on the sofa with my laptop, Skyping with Nikki while we're talking about functions and calls and remote data inputs and how to get that poor old controller to accept a data stream from the internet and treat it like a remote console.

"You know," he said, "Phil would be astounded. I know for a fact that he had to hold his top tech's hand to get him through the stuff you and Nikki are doing for fun."

"But it IS fun, Dan! And it might be just playing right now, but I saw what Mister Phil ended up with at the end of the project. We can be part of that. Beats the daylights out of a career stacking panties at WalMart."

"I can't see you doing that long, darlin'," he said.

"I did that paper, Dan. I looked at statistics and stories and anecdotes and there's more than a little foundation to the stereotypes about poor white trash. How about three kids by the age of twenty, high school drop-out..."

"I know, baby," he said. "And I feel bad about girls that get into that situation."

"I was scared of that," I said. "I was on that path..."

"You didn't buy into the 'boys are the answer to everything' deal," he said. "That's where it usually goes off track. Pre-teen slut-puppies..."

"Couldn't. Saw Mom. Just couldn't." And I hugged Dan as hard as I could. "Thank you for being here for me."

"Thank you for being here for me, too, little one," he said. "I needed rescuing as well, you know." He kissed me, starting on the farthest out freckle.

I came straight out of the funk I'd gotten into. "We don't have time for the freckle inventory now, Dan." And I kissed him and didn't stop. Neither of us did for a while. I could get used to Dan being unemployed.

He's not, though. His laptop has half a dozen projects going right now as he's working on engineering standards and documents. He makes pretty good money for this. I've told people that Dan makes a lot of money writing, like he's some best-selling author or something, but in reality you'll probably never see his name as author on anything. His work is the anonymous, faceless verbiage that makes companies work. People use his writings to run powerplants and put together projects, and what's really neat is that they look at some of his work and then he's on the phone picking up more work. And sending some of it to Alan. The business is taking a definite upturn and we haven't even hung a sign on the door of the new office yet.

So it's okay if I sidetrack us into an afternoon interlude.

And we were trying to decide on dinner when my phone rang. The tone was Tina's.

"Hey, Sis!" I said. "What's going on?"

"Me and you," she said. "Nikki's in the air and Susan won't be back until Friday. Terri's at her friend's apartment and himself is over at his desk tapping on his laptop."

I giggled. That's what my Dan was doing before I pulled him away from his work.

"You're not bored, are you?" I asked.

"No, I just thought I'd see what you had on your mind."

"Us and Nikki and Dan 2.0 in the same trailer park in a few days. Nikki's interviewing at Auburn next week. Has Mizz Patel talked to you?"

"Oh, yes," Tina said. "She sounds like a sweet lady. I love her accent. But she said that they may have to open a new program for us."

"Good!" I said. "She thinks you're special, too..."

Giggle. "Uh-huh. Got my own little rubber helmet."

I laughed. "You know, that's how Mister Hardesty got me off on this whole thing. They tested me and he decided to treat me as a special education student. Except most of 'em have trouble learning. You and I don't have trouble learning. We go in the other direction."

"I know," she said.

"I didn't," I replied. "Honestly, I just thought that anybody could sit in the classroom and be quiet and get that stuff."

"Really?"

"Yeah," I said. "And when they made us take those tests, you know, 'You have fifteen minutes to complete this section', and I was finished and everybody else was still working. Dan explained to me that most people don't finish all the problems. I guess I still didn't get it. And Mister Hardesty told me the same thing."

"You learn stuff fast."

"Kind of scary, though, you know," I said. "Sometimes I wake up at night and I have this stuff going on in my head and I get up and look at things on the Internet to see what I can find out. At first it bothered Dan, but now I don't think he worries. I just buzz off for a while and then I crawl back up against him."

"I do that sometimes, too, maybe once or twice a week. Alan understands. I explained to him the first couple of times, showed him what I was working on. You know, it didn't start until after we were a couple. You know, after..."

I giggled. "I didn't until after we were married," I said. "I wanted to make sure he was mine. And that he'd understand. He freed me, Tina. He really did." I looked up. Dan was listening from the kitchenette area. He smiled.

"God, I love him," I told my sister.

"We got good ones, sis," Tina said. "You have any idea how many losers there are out there?"

"I have some idea," I retorted. "Mom was working her way through the list."