I ended up going out of town the next day and when I got back; I took some much needed comp time. I spent a couple of days with my folks, and then took off for the weekend with my brother, Frank, and a few buddies who wanted to go ice fishing. Translate that to, wanted to get away from their wives and girlfriends, get shit faced and play cards.
But for all their bitching about getting away from all the women, guess what was basically the only topic of discussion? You guessed it. Jesus, a couple of times I thought I was at a taping of Sally Jesse Raphael show. I didn't have much to contribute myself and since the sound of my voice is one of my favorite things I was sort of disappointed in the weekend. Oh well, the beer was free.
I got back in town Monday morning, so I went straight to work. That afternoon, we got a call from one of our customer's and an hour later I was on a plane headed for Albuquerque.
I didn't see home again until Thursday afternoon. I was beat. Nobody was there when I got in and that mildly depressed me. I was sort of curious about what kind of changes Amy had decided to make and if she'd gotten Miriam, from work, to help. On second thought, it might be better not knowing. I had a feeling things were not going to go according to plan.
I went to bed and slept for 13 hours.
Usually, I'm not someone who remembers much of their dreams. A dwarf here, a talking dog there, that's pretty much about it. But that night was an exception. I woke up to the image of little Charlie encased in the hot, tight tunnel of someone who started out looking a lot like Winona Ryder until I got a good look at her face and saw an eyebrow that stretched across her entire forehead.
Shit.
I sat up and tried to stop my heart from pounding. I was covered in sweat and... Oh Christ, it had been years since I'd had a wet dream. That did it, I had to go out and find a girlfriend, or at least someone who was willing to play that role for an hour or two.
I got up and went to the shower to get rid of the remains of my relapse into puberty. I didn't even want to think of who that was that I'd been having those dreams about. It wasn't like it meant anything after all. Dreams meant shit. Hell, one time I'd got off on one with Olive Oyl. Granted, I'd been twelve at the time and more familiar with cartoons than Playboy, but still it figured as one of the weirder sexual fantasies of my horny youth. So the fact that I'd placed Amy in a sex dream was nothing, right?
Anyway that was my take on it. I got dressed and by the time I got to work, I'd managed to forget the whole strange interlude.
Mostly.
I work for a company that develops medical software, the kind that's used by doctor's offices and small clinics. We're a little fish, but getting bigger all time because our programs are really user friendly. Unfortunately though, they are not idiot proof. And there are a lot of idiots out there.
That's where I come in. I'm the guy who fixes the mess that your nineteen-year-old temp makes when she fucks up your entire patient reference base and old Mrs. Marshall is showing up for an appointment for an ekg and you have her down for a barium enema, while Mr. Lanzerotti is still sitting in his chair trying to figure out why he has to wait for the results on his pregnancy test.
Some of the time I get lucky and there's someone in the office who actually knows something about computers and we can handle things over the phone, but most of the time it doesn't work that nice. That's when I have to do my Superman imitation and fly out to Podunk, Iowa to flip the right switches and reformat the software. For this I make a not obscene, but fairly inflated, salary while fulfilling the apparent dream of my employers to have me intimately familiar with the location of the ice machine in every Motel Six west of the Mississippi.
When I'm not jetting off to exotic Peoria, I occupy a cubicle in a ratty old warehouse that's supposed to be chic, but instead comes off looking like the set for a slasher movie with it's poor lighting, dark corners and the worst work stations that money can buy. Add to that the fact that there are enough computer cables on the cracked linoleum floor to stretch across the Mackinac Bridge, putting everyone in the place in imminent danger of giving themselves a couple of dislocations and a concussion if they aren't careful where they walk, and you can see why I wanted the travel job in the first place.
Since my promotion, I actually have very little in-house work and as my bosses are used to lunatic behavior as they've been working in the software field for most of their adult lives (and for that matter aren't exactly the picture of mental health themselves) I'm pretty free to do as I please. This translates to lots of computer games and possibly the largest collection of porn downloads in the free world.
Of course you can guess which is my favorite of the two.
The rest of the staff is mainly comprised of a bunch of idiot savants, excuse me - PROGRAMMERS - who would fit right in with the folks on most sitcoms except they might be too odd for that format. Think Andy Dick and French Stewart on acid.
Two of them, Leroy Sykes and Clement Forrester (it's like their parents just knew how they were going to turn out) had taken up the slack of John's leaving to become my best friends in town. Actually, they're pretty nice guys if you can overlook the Grateful dead tee's and black nail polish that Leroy sports and the pocket protector that's apparently Clem's security blanket since he never leaves home without it. But like I said they're sort of cool in a surreal way and I hang with them on a fairly regular basis.
That day was no exception. After a spirited spitball battle we went out to an early lunch and annoyed our waitress by ordering in pig latin. (Okay, I know, but there is something about these guys that make me regress to the third grade.)
We got back to the office at two and I sat around for a while and pretended I was interested in some 80 page memo about a coding problem the engineers were having with the new Medicare system. That lasted about five minutes and then my eyes stopped focusing and I settled in for an open-eyed nap, something I'd perfected in college during my lecture class on Renaissance and it's effects on modern thought.
So it had been a long day and I was dragging by the time I got home. Amy's car was out front and I felt my chest sort of seize when I thought about seeing her, but I shouldn't have worried. One look at that droopy little frame convinced me that whatever my dreams had been about, the reality was that this little bit of a girl did nothing for me.
In fact, I was glad to see her again. Mostly this was because she really wasn't a bad kid but also because I was still looking forward to seeing the changes the mysterious Miriam had wrought in her.
But in this, I was doomed to disappointment. It was the same old Amy. Same oversized clothes, same limp hair, and same eyebrow. I couldn't see her ears, but I imagined they were still pointy.
I felt let down. Hey, I didn't think it would work, but that didn't mean I wasn't hoping there'd be an improvement. And it's not like it could get much worse.
"Charlie," Amy smiled shyly at me. At least her smile was okay, kind of sweet, really.
"Hey Amy, how's it going?"