From my seat at the computer, I could move my head a little to the left and see the middle of the back yard. That's where the lounge chair was laid out flat, and that's where Samantha was laid out flat on top of it. But there was nothing flat about Sam. I took a quick peek, and noted the little bumps in the skimpy bra, where her dainty nipples were standing up gradually straighter as a capricious breeze played over them.
I yelled out, "Hey Sam, watch out you don't get dehydrated." She was carefully tanning the places where her swimsuit had left light patches when she went to the water park. Before she went out she applied sunscreen to the tan places and oil to the light spots and explained, "When I get back to Boston, I want everybody to look at me and wish they had an uncle in Arizona. It snowed right after I left, but I was here in the desert sweating and soaking up rays! All my friends look pale and sickly. Let 'em look at my tan and eat their hearts out!"
At times like this, I considered the six foot high brick wall enclosing my backyard to be one of the best features of my house, maybe tied for first place with the eight feet of glass in the back wall of my office. I pulled my head back to focus on the monitor and type another paragraph, then looked up as the sliding door opened and Sam came in. "Time for a nice, cold bottle of water," she explained. "It gets hot out there. Forty degrees back home today! Hah!"
"While you're at the fridge, how about bringing me a beer?"
"Okay, but you'll have to twist the top off. Those things tear up my hands."
"Not a prob. How's the sun worship going?"
"Great! I wish I could do this in April back home. March and April are completely unpredictable. The TV says partly cloudy and we get six inches of snow. Try to plan a ski weekend and we get warm rain. One week we're worrying about a flood and next week they've got the snowplows out. We've got a nice big cedar closet in the attic, and I'd like to be able to take the winter clothes out of my bedroom closet and put 'em away up there, and get my spring clothes sorted out and hung in my bedroom closet. But no, I have to have clothes laid over the chair in my room so I can get up in the morning and put on whatever matches the weather forecast. Winter stuff in the closet, spring stuff on the chair. And it'll be like that on into May. You must remember that blizzard we had on Memorial Day. What a drag!"
"I sure do remember. I don't miss any of it. It's all the Pilgrims' fault, you know."
"What'd they have to do with it?"
"They came across the north Atlantic late in the season on the Mayflower, a dumpy little sailing ship that bobbed like a cork in the big waves. The Pilgrims were seasick and had to stay on deck, in the fresh air. They built cooking fires right on the wooden deck, and they tore the ship's boat apart for firewood. They were supposed to be going to Virginia, but they got forced north by storms, and by the time they landed at Plymouth the ship was a total mess. The crew had their work cut out for them making repairs, just so they could get back to England before the fierce winter storms set in. The Pilgrims thought they'd seen severe winters in Holland, but that first winter here they lost a lot of their members. Between pneumonia and starvation, they were dying faster than they were reproducing, and their population didn't stabilize for years. When it finally did they decided it was a sign from God for them to stay on, but that was just spin doctoring. The truth was, they had no choice. They had no way to go anywhere. They didn't have a boat and couldn't have sailed it if they did. They were stuck in New England.
"Of course, things are different now, and you and your family could escape, but you don't. What's that about, inertia? I'm sure glad I bailed out when I did, but you'd rather stay there and complain than move to a place with a decent climate."
"But I have my job there. If I quit and move out, how can I make a living?"
"Open your eyes. You work in an insurance office. You have years of experience, and you could run the place all by yourself. All over the world there are insurance offices. They're staffed by young women, who are always getting married and moving away or having babies, so there's constant turnover. Pick a place where you'd like to live. Go there and look it over. If you like it, check the help wanted ads. Do interviews, nail down a job, arrange to start in two weeks, go home and quit your old job, pack up, and move. If you go about it right you'll get a better job, a better place to live, and a chance to start your life over."
"Sounds like a lot of work."
"Everything worth doing takes some work. But it's not rocket science. If you're not willing to put out a little effort, then you can stay in your same old rut the rest of your life and be miserable. You'll complain to everybody you know and make them feel miserable, too. Then your friends will stop being friendly and instead of being just plain miserable you'll be miserable and friendless, a bitter old maid. But it's your life. You can make it better. You, as in Sam. The one standing here with the well tanned body. It's a free country, and you can do whatever you want to do, wherever you want to do it, but the only one who can make it happen is you."
"Well, I like it here."
"It gets hot in the summer. Really hot."
"I know. I've been here in July, remember. It was hot, but I found summer in the desert a lot easier to take than winter in the northeast. So how do I get a job here?"
"The way I just told you. Grab the newspaper off the coffee table. Find the classified ads. Pull that section out. Then take the rest of the paper and lay it out on the sofa before you sit your oily butt down, and look through the ads. Mark the ones that look good to you. Telephone to make appointments for interviews. You're not risking anything by going to talk with somebody."
That afternoon Sam made phone calls, and the next morning she took my car to go from one interview to another, with all the addresses carefully entered in my GPS. By the time she strode into the house in the afternoon, she was smiling and confident.
"Hey, Unk, this is a piece of cake. The first two interviews were rough because I was nervous and I didn't know what to expect. But from the third one on, it was more like me interviewing them. I've got more experience than most of the people who were talking with me, and they never asked me a single question that I couldn't answer. This is going to come down to getting a bunch of offers and picking the best one. I bet I'll have a job by the end of the week. Tomorrow morning I'm gonna call up and arrange to take my second week of vacation now. Can I stay here for a while?"
"Long as you want. There's plenty of room. You'll need a car, but I don't think that'll be much of a problem. Your car in Boston is a pile of rust, as I recall. Give it to your sister and I'll start looking for something around here for you. Here in God's country there's no snow, no salt, no rust, so cars last forever."
And so it went. Inside of a week Sam had a job, and all that was left was a trip home to Boston to tie up loose ends and escape. Moving was simple. Most of what she moved were clothes, and her life's possessions arrived on my doorstep in four big boxes, transported by UPS for a couple hundred bucks. She used my car to commute the first week, and after that drove her own wheels, a little Dodge sedan with low mileage, previously owned by a middle-aged lady who died prematurely at age eighty-three.
Making my house over from a bachelor pad to a family home was fairly painless. I had to make some hard decisions and toss out some junk that had been taking up space for years, but I didn't miss it. I started to eat home cooked meals several times a week. Sam was a good cook by my standards, and she didn't leave the kitchen a mess the way I did. I was eating more salads and fewer corndogs, and gradually the improved diet seemed to make a difference in how I looked and felt. I started to do more and sit less, and by three months after Sam moved in I'd replaced twenty pounds of fat with ten pounds of muscle. I was no body builder, but I had a waistline again and I was moving a lot better.
Our relationship was easy and laid back. I made no attempt to hide my appreciation of her looks. I wasn't about to do any serious hitting on my late wife's niece, but it would have been impossible to deny that she was a joy to look at. On her part, she appreciated the fact that I was providing a roof over her head, and she understood that I wanted her to be happy in her new home state. So all in all, life was good for both of us.
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