To the reader: This novella contains three chapters, thirty pages, totaling 15,000 words. It describes an interracial relationship, so if this is not your thing, perhaps your time would be better spent elsewhere.
*****
Chapter 1
I'm going to tell you how I happened to get the best family a guy ever had, and a somewhat older wife so sexy—and hot blooded—I still can't believe she'd marry an ordinary guy like me. But this didn't start out looking that way.
First, here's a little background, told exactly the way writing experts tell a beginner he should never start his story:
I was a bachelor back then, four years out of electrical engineering college, and working for a local manufacturing company. My biggest monthly bill was the mortgage on my
starter-home
I'd bought two years before. Even with that, my wages covered my routine and toy expenses very well. And on the social side, I was still trying to decide what I wanted in the long run for a family situation. I dated girls more as friends than as bed partners, although there were a few who did quite well in both categories. I suppose you might say I wasn't ready for marriage, but these girls were, so each gave up on me after a few months and moved on to guys more matrimonially inclined.
My home, the seventy-five year old, ex-farmhouse on the corner lot of a forty acre, ex-truck farm, included a separate, three-plus car garage. This provided a great place for puttering with my toys: an eight foot plywood outboard hydroplane I built during early college, a fast but aging twenty-one foot, fiberglass sailboat, an unspectacular and mostly used-up
classic
car, and the El Camino pickup I drove daily. I spent most of my at-home time in this shop, its roll-up doors open during good weather, possible for all who might care to see my woodworking projects and my mechanical stuff in progress.
Our neighborhood was pretty quiet, except during those few months while one knucklehead down the street three blocks owned a beat-up, Camaro. But he soon finished it off in a drunken wreck, so after that, everything returned to normal. The neighborhood kids rode their bicycles everywhere: the paved street, across everyone's driveways and yards (and sometimes through their flowers), with little concern for the proprieties of ownership and property lines. But none of us minded much.
Of course their bicycles suffered the effects of child ownership. Every week or so one of the kids came down the street pushing his crippled bicycle, asking if I'd fix it. Usually the repair was simple and quick, the derailleur speed-shifter mechanism being the most common culprit and easily corrected if you merely understood how it worked and how to get everything back on track. As a particular kid aged, I'd see him begin fixing his own bike, or he'd stop by and ask advice or to borrow a wrench so he could fix it himself—usually in my driveway. I enjoyed watching these kids grow up, learning self-sufficiency as they did so.
You might say I inherited a reputation of
substitute
daddy
. Before long I discovered my clientele included kids from beyond our street, but what the heck. Lots of these kids had
marginal fathers.
If they had a father at all, he either worked all day then did little with the kids when he was home, or he was a weekend, divorce-custody father. Kids need more than that, and some of that duty fell onto me.
And these kids weren't all just boys.
One cool summer evening a tiny young girl herded her pink kiddie bicycle up to the open door of my shop. I'd often seen her playing on the lawn in front of the divorcee's half of the duplex across the street, so I knew where she belonged. Cute kid, always cheerful, and the kind you'd want if you were going to have kids.
"Mr. Simmons?" she called into the building.
"Yes?" I said, turning from the piece of wood I was converting to sawdust and shavings in my attempt to convert it into something useful.
"Will you fix my bicycle? Please?"
"Sure. What seems to be the problem?"
"It keeps falling over."
"Okay, wheel it in here and we'll have a look."
As she wheeled, right off I recognized her bicycle was not the problem, it was her. Even rolling alongside her while she held it up, it kept falling over.
I gave it a quick check anyway, and everything seemed fine. This kid just hadn't learned to ride yet, that was all. She was so young, I wondered if she was too young for this; but oh, well, I'd give it a try.
"Okay," I said, pushing her bike out the door and toward my driveway. "Now show me what happens."
She climbed onto the bike, steadied only partially by those cruel jokes the bicycle industry calls
training wheels
. Immediately she sought the bike's pedals, tried to pedal, and fell over. I barely caught her before she hit the driveway and got skinned up.
"Okay, I see the problem."
She looked up at me. That was worship on her face as she scrambled off the bike onto solid pavement.
"So? Let's talk about how bicycles work, shall we?"
She nodded.
"Okay, now, watch this." I held the bike straight up, turned loose, and it quickly fell over. Simple laws of physics and gravity.
Her look said,
so?
"It will always try to do that. With you on it, it will, too. That's what is happening to you now."
She nodded again.
"The trick is this: As you ride, you gotta keep steering the bicycle back under yourself so you stay balanced on top of it."
Her nod turned to puzzlement.
"Yeah, that's what's wrong. You probably haven't noticed, but all the time anyone is riding a bicycle, he keeps steering the front wheel so the bike stays under him instead of getting off-center and falling over. When someone gets real good at riding, their balance steering is so slight you might never notice it. But it's there, just the same. Make sense?"
Her look said it didn't.
"So, let's try this. First we'll take
these
damned things off. In a minute you'll wish you'd never seen them anyway, so let's get them out of your way right now." A moment with a wrench eliminated the training wheels' contribution to her problem.
"Okay, now we're ready.
