(Part 6 of 6)
Mike Charles arrived on Tuesday, as expected. Mom made a roast with salad and crusty bread, just as she did when I first came home for the summer. He turned out to be a professor at my school which explained why I thought the name was familiar... Dr. Michael Charles. He was older than I expected, his reddish-blond beard just starting to show some gray. I wanted to hate the guy. But the more time I spent with him the more I wanted him to like me. And seeing him with Heidi, how in love she was with him, I knew I never had a chance.
He came to work with me on Wednesday. I asked him if he wouldn't rather spend the day with her.
"There'll be time for that," he replied. "I'd like to get to know you, who she cares for so much."
I had to give him credit. He was not afraid to break a sweat. I work for a lawn and tree service and the boss allows walk-ons as long as they don't handle the power equipment. Mike threw himself into every task he was set and kept coming back for more. On Wednesday he raked and edged while we cut lawns. On Thursday we hauled and spread truckloads of dirt and gravel for a landscaping project. He seemed tireless and I had to insist he take his breaks.
Each night the three of us would have dinner together and Mike would animatedly tell Heidi about the day. You would have thought he invented lawn care the way she fawned on him. I didn't fuss about it though. It was okay to let him have his moments. I'd had mine, after all. Plus, he made my work seem way more interesting than it really was.
On Friday he and I were sent to take down a dead tree in a suburban back yard. I went up the ladder and Mike manned the rigging, lowering the limbs to the ground as I sawed them off. I cut and split the larger pieces into fireplace-sized logs while Mike fed the smaller ones into the chipper. Then I bent the boss's rule by coaching him in cutting down the trunk. He was pretty excited when he made the back cut and the tree fell exactly where we wanted it.
After work that day he invited me out for beers but I wasn't sure how well that would go. Bars near the school served people my age but beer around here came strictly out of coolers. Still, we stopped at a sketchy-looking dump named the Chapter 9 Lounge where Mike loudly ordered two pitchers as soon as he stepped into the darkened room. The bartender scowled at me suspiciously and Mike just shrugged and smiled. The guy shrugged back and started pouring.
On a dirty table in a yellow pool of light we shared the pitcher and had a heart to heart.
"Your mother was a junior in the Education program when we first got together," he began. "Your stepmother, I mean."
I nodded and scraped my cup on the chipped formica.
"I was about thirty at the time. Just made associate professor." He tossed back his last few drops and poured himself another. "I'm going to miss that life. But I'm looking forward to the new challenges ahead of me."
"I dig it," I said for lack of anything else to say.
"Obviously it was a breach of ethics for me to take up with a student like that. It wasn't the first time, either, if I must be honest. I was pretty dissolute back then. I used to make excuses to myself to justify it. But... facts."
"That's cool, I guess." The jukebox started playing by itself, something by David Allan Coe, and I was starting to buzz from the beer.
"I thought so too, when I was young. Then I met Heidi and everything changed. She wasn't the most beautiful or the smartest or even the sexiest. Don't tell her I said that. But she was the most... everything in one person. You know what I mean?"
"I do, yeah." And I did, actually and not just in theory. Because that was how I thought of her myself.
"She was delightfully inexperienced when we started getting intimate. But she had such a dirty mind." I wondered if he wasn't a little drunk already, telling me all this. "There was a long list of things she wanted to try. I was actually intimidated by her desires. But she was never intimidated, though there were some things we tried that she didn't care for. It made me curious, though, where she got her ideas."
"Hothouse magazine!" I interjected excitedly, nearly spilling my beer.
"Exactly," he replied, laughing, "Hothouse magazine. I used to read PartyBoy, of course, that being the socially acceptable smut option. I'm a Hothouse man now, though."
"Yeah, me too," I agreed.
"I bet you are." His eyes suddenly narrowed on me and I felt embarrassed about my enthusiasm for Mom's porn of choice.