Charlie and Mindy Bk. 04 Ch. 03

We tried to keep up with our studies. It was slow going, I thought, without anyone to suggest ways to answer the deeper questions that occurred to us.

And it surprised me to find that I'd phrased the difficulty that way. Less than a year ago, I realized, I would've thought I needed a teacher, whom I'd have expected to tell me what all the questions were—and then to give me the answers. My promise to Mom and Dad regarding Mindy and MOLS had finally forced me to begin growing up as a scholar. If hadn't been experiencing it, I would never have thought it possible.

We continued, slowly, day by day, to go through the house—dealing with the personal possessions, Mom and Dad's things, that we found everywhere. We made the same divisions we'd made with the belongings from their bedroom. We found it distasteful, not only because it brought back the deep sorrow, but also because, we agreed, it felt like a last invasion of their privacy.

The first of the checks from our trusts, one for each of us, arrived in the mail on the last day of the month. Each was for just over $4,000. We stared blankly at them. And then we stared blankly at each other. Neither of us had the least idea what we'd do with so much money. But we were sharp enough to open bank accounts for ourselves, both checking and savings. We put most of the money in the latter, a smaller part of the money into the former, and each of us put several hundred in cash into a pocket (or a purse, as the case may be).

And then, the next morning, we tried to make the necessary airplane reservations to get back to school. But neither of us had a credit card, so the airline wouldn't accept phone reservations. We thought about imposing on Quent to complete the transactions with his. But then Mindy suggested that we should take Mom's car instead of flying. The college had a rule (Of course!) against students having cars, but I didn't live on campus. I could park it near my house, and—provided we were a little bit careful about using it—the college authorities wouldn't catch on.

"An excellent solution to a vexing problem!" I said. And I kissed my little sister firmly and lovingly. She kissed me back the same way.

We spent the next few afternoons shopping for clothing. We even drove down to Denver on Thursday, and again on Friday. Neither of us much wanted anything fancy or expensive, but I was still growing and Mindy was still a girl. So both of us needed some new clothes. (And, I learned, I needed an elbow in the ribs for making that observation about girls and clothes.)

We surprised ourselves. Without trying consciously, we found that we'd kept our spending within bounds, neither parsimonious nor lavish, that our parents might well have imposed on us. And we were both pleased with what we'd gotten.

But, I have to confess, we did get ourselves up to a little hanky-panky in a couple of the dressing rooms in Denver—where we could be pretty sure that no one would know we were anything but a pair of random young people who liked each other a lot. (But I think that some of those salespeople did guess that we liked each other—a lot.)

Mindy's period arrived, a day later than usual, and we both looked at each other and breathed a little more easily. It ended a few days later, and we both looked at each other and breathed a little more heavily.

One day that week, we went to Quent and Amanda's office. Amanda was in a meeting with a client, but Quent was free to talk to us. We proudly wrote checks of $300 each to repay the $600 loan he'd made us. He made us promise to have mail to our house forwarded to his office when we left for school. We gave him a copy of the house key and told him where Dad had hidden another outdoors; he promised to look after the house for the two months we'd be away to finish the spring semester. We realized then that, come the end of summer, we should have other arrangements in place before we went away to begin the next year's term.

We didn't yet know just when our final exams would be that spring, but we knew that they would be scheduled during the second week of May. We thought we'd want to decompress some after that, so we promised Quent that we would be back in Fort Collins on the evening of the fourth Monday of May, and that we would get in touch with him the following day.

Late in the afternoon of that second Saturday of April, we began preparing to leave the next morning. We found that we'd need to take, in addition to the two suitcases we'd brought with us, still another to accommodate our new clothes. We had just finished packing things into those suitcases, when the doorbell rang. Puzzled, we answered it together.

We found a woman, in the uniform of a delivery service, with a pair of battered suitcases and a couple of packages—one about as big as a medium-sized book, and the other about the size of a pair of footballs stuffed, side-by-side, into a box. I signed for them, and as I did, I saw that they were from a Colombian airline. I told Mindy as much as the woman departed and we brought them inside.

"They must be Mom and Dad's belongings," she said in a subdued voice. She looked at me, and, again, tears formed in her eyes. I looked back at her; the lump was back in my throat. We both looked at what had just come, and then looked again at each other. Neither of us wanted to deal with those things. It would, we knew, bring back the deep sorrow that was still so near the surface, and it would be another intrusion on the privacy of the departed.

"Can we go out and get some supper, and take care of them after that?" Mindy asked me plaintively. We'd cleaned out the refrigerator in anticipation that the house would be unoccupied for just over two months, and we had planned to go out and get a pizza.

Knowing a good reason to postpone the chore when I heard one, I said, "Sure."

I moved them over into a corner near the door, where they wouldn't trip us the next time we used the door. We put on our jackets and went out the back door to the car.

An hour-and-a-half later, we got back home, full of the largest pizza we'd been able to find. (It had to be big. We weren't old enough to buy beer, and something had to take up the space I would have filled with beer.) We'd forgotten to turn on the light over the back door, and, as I fumbled with my key ring in the dark, my horny little sister rubbed her little body against me.

Once I got the door open, I turned and lifted her into my arms. As I backed into the room, she pushed the door closed. Then she threw her arms around my neck and pulled herself up for a pizza-flavored kiss.

Less than a minute later, I'd carried her upstairs to our bedroom, set her on the bed, and we were enthusiastically stripping the clothing off of each other. And it wasn't much later that we found ourselves Doing the Nasty.

When we finished, we lay together in the middle of the bed, bodies against each other as usual. It was early, but we knew we had to get up early the next morning. And we'd finished our packing so that everything was ready to go. So we both got up, peed out the giant cokes we'd drunk, got back in bed, and went quietly to sleep in each other's arms. I still remember how much I liked the feel of her naked body against me.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We were still in each other's arms when we woke up the next morning. We got up, went to the bathrooms again, and got back in bed to snuggle. Naturally, that led to our usual morning exercises, and it wasn't until we'd enjoyed those that one of us looked at a clock. In spite of the early hour at which we'd gone to bed, it was nearly nine o'clock.

Mindy didn't like to drive, and we'd planned that I would drive us to the college. I wasn't too fond of driving in the dark, though, so I wanted to get back to school before it had been dark for long. We'd get meals on the way.

Finding that it was later than we'd thought, we hurriedly got our clothes on. I turned off the thermostat timer and set the temperature at 50° again, thinking that even though we now had plenty of money there was no good reason to give a lot of it to the gas company. Then we picked up our suitcases and headed down the stairs to leave.

Mindy was ahead of me, and when her eyes descended below the level of the floor we'd just left, she gave a little gasp. She turned to me, and said, "Mom and Dad's things! We forgot all about them."

Hurriedly, we decided that now wasn't the time to deal with them. We ran them upstairs and left them in what had been Mom's walk-in closet. They'd be safe and out of Quent's way there. And Mindy planned to move things into that closet when we returned at the beginning of the summer vacation—so even if we forgot about them again, we'd get a reminder when she found them there.

We locked Dad's car in the garage, put our suitcases in Mom's car, and got in the front seat together. I backed out of the driveway, and we began the long drive back to school.

When we were safely out of town and on an open highway, where traffic was light and the driving was easy, I placed my hand on Mindy's thigh. Briefly, I looked away from the road and at her face. She looked back and smiled at me. I had time to smile back before I had to return my eyes to the road. I squeezed her thigh gently. She put her little hand on mine and squeezed back.

There was still deep sorrow in our hearts, and we knew that it would always be there. But we had each other, and we were together. My sister and I were very young, very alive, and very much in love. And we were just beginning to understand that we had more money than we had any idea what to do with.

Most of all, we knew that true friends were waiting for us.

With each other's support, we had come safely through the darkest time in our experiences. We were going to be all right.

(To be continued)

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—CarlusMagnus