Charlie found this all quite amusing. He was a happy child. Parker was much more reserved and sober, even as a little boy. I still thought about Parker, how he had been and what he had grown into. He was a son any father could be proud of, but now he was gone, off in a time and a place I couldn’t fathom. I occasionally felt the pain of a loss that never existed in the here and now.
Which did not mean that I wasn’t very happy with Charlie. If nothing else, he was hilarious to be around. All kids get into everything, but Charlie outdid them all. Even worse, he was impossibly clumsy and ungainly, not in any kind of neurological sense, but in the sense that you could trust him to be a disaster! He would crawl everywhere, and if he brushed against a pile of books or magazines or Marilyn’s knitting, he would just go through, spreading chaos all around. Once he figured out standing and walking, the entire town house would be at risk!
By July, he had figured out how to squirm his way out of his seat. This was discovered one morning at the gym. It was the first Wednesday in July, the week after we set up the Buckman Group. I was over in the section with the Nautilus machines while Marilyn was around the corner on the treadmills. Suddenly, around the corner, came Charlie, crawling for all he was worth, with one of the gym attendants, smiling, in semi-hot pursuit. He saw me and came over, in high speed four wheel drive. I sat upright and laughed as he got closer, and then scrambled after him myself. The little bastard had closed on me and then scooted off in another direction! I grabbed him and tucked him under my arm and went in search of his mother.
Marilyn was still churning away on the treadmill, watching a television tuned to the Today Show, the baby seat at her feet and off to the side. She had been totally oblivious! I came around to her front, between her and the television, and held up our son. He was gurgling and happy, and grinning at the world. “Lose something?”
Marilyn stared at us, so startled she stopped walking. The treadmill was still running, so her feet slid out from underneath her and she had to grab the rails and hold herself up. She slammed the STOP button. “Where did you find him?! How did he get loose!?”
“I found him around the corner, making a break for it. As for how he got loose, you’ll need to ask him. He isn’t talking much, but give him some time, maybe you can wear him down.” I thrust him at her, and she took him from me.
“It’s baby handcuffs and manacles for you, Charlie!” she told him. Then she handed him back to me. “Keep him. I’m going to shower and dress, and then it’s your turn.” I took our son and Marilyn headed off to the locker room.
I knelt down and strapped Charlie into his seat. “We’re not waiting,” I told my son. I carried him into the men’s locker room. I set his seat on the bench and kept an eye on him as I pulled off my sweaty crap and grabbed my towel and toilet kit. And Charlie in his seat! I set him on a counter across from the shower and left the curtain open as I showered quickly. I managed to shower, shave, and dress, and pack Charlie and me up and get out to the lobby, long before Marilyn did it just for herself!
She started at seeing us. “How did you get out here before I did!?”
“I live a clean and efficient life, and am filled with a wondrous and righteous need to live better than my fellow man. Or woman, in your case.”
“I think you’re full of shit!”
I covered our son’s ears. “You use that mouth to kiss your son!?” I picked him up and smiled at him. “Mommy says bad things!” I told him, earning a happy gurgle.
Mommy took him away. “Daddy’s going to sleep alone tonight!” I grabbed our bags and followed Mommy and Charlie to the car and kept my mouth shut. Daddy preferred sleeping with Mommy.
My trips to the dojo were normally by myself. Marilyn never really cottoned to watching me practicing martial arts. It mostly seemed like weird exercise to her, and then after seeing me in the bar fight, just made her very uncomfortable. It was a part of my makeup at odds with her view of me.
Usually every other day I would drive out to the property on Mount Carmel Road to check on the progress of the house building. Things had started, but it was a maddeningly slow process building a house using conventional construction techniques.
By the Nineties Lefleur Homes had begun selling modular homes as well as trailers. The pace is vastly quicker than with conventional ‘stick building’. In a stick built house, you have to build the basement first. Then you build a floor, and then you build the walls. Only at that point can you build the roof. With modulars, at the same time as the basement is being dug and built, in a factory hundreds of miles away the walls, floor, and roof are all being built at the same time. When the pieces are finished, they are craned into place and bolted together, all inside a closed factory. Bathrooms and kitchens are installed, and then the whole kit and caboodle are freighted away. A house might spend only a week or two in a factory, versus months or more being built in the field.
In 1982, modular construction was still in its infancy. Oh, there were companies that did it, but it was for relatively small and simple rectangular boxes, not for what we were doing. Here, too, the computer revolution would change things. Over the next twenty years technology as applied to design and construction would make modulars a high end method for building million dollar mansions.
But that was for the future. No, I didn’t make myself a nuisance. I stayed out of the men’s ways and didn’t ask a million damn fool questions. I knew what they were doing, and it was obvious to me that they knew as well. I did make sure the foremen knew my name and number, so if they had any questions, they could call. It seemed obvious that I would be able to move in sometime during the decade. It wouldn’t go beyond that.
I studiously avoided going over to Tusk Cycle. I might have been a part owner, but I wasn’t an employee and didn’t know the business. I did go over once a month to review the books with them, but that was it. Well, that wasn’t exactly all. Right after we closed on the deal with them, Andrea had a crew out to the new site, fixing the roof. The owners wouldn’t reduce their price, but they did agree to pay to have the leak in the back fixed. After that was fixed, they had a big weekend planned. They shut down the old shop and their employees and everybody and their brother pitched in to move everything from one place to the other. We even invited everybody at the Buckman Group in to help. Marilyn, Tessa, and Missy handled baby duties, while the rest of us cleaned and scrubbed and sorted and arranged and then cleaned some more. By Sunday evening they were back in business and the rest of us were wiped out.
There was also work with the new company. We all agreed to meet every Monday morning to discuss the business and plans. The first few weeks were in John’s office, but after that, Jake Junior had us begin visiting some offices to see if we liked them. We were trying to compromise on location. Everybody else lived in the Timonium and Lutherville areas, but Marilyn and I lived west of Hereford. Jake found us a nice office park a few miles south of Hereford on York Road, and we leased half of one floor. Then we divvied up the offices. There was a front lobby area, with four separate and equal offices branching off it, and then a hallway towards the rear. The hallway had a conference room on one side and a fifth office and a storeroom on the other side. I took the fifth office, across from the conference room and the others took the front offices. Jake Junior was then assigned to make the place habitable and get some furniture and office equipment going.