The nice thing about the town house layout turned out to be the multi-level aspect to it. Our room was upstairs, and I made Dum-Dum sleep down in the kitchen, walled off by a baby gate. She whined, but you couldn’t hear her upstairs. Charlie just loved his new buddy, and they chased each other all around the place. Once she was housebroken, and we let her have free run of the place at night, she mostly slept in Charlie’s bedroom, which was just fine with Marilyn and me! On my first trip, we once had a dog that slept in bed with us, between and perpendicular to us! It made for difficulties in the romance department.
We moved into the new house the week after the Chippendales episode, and if Marilyn was still feeling under the weather, she had only herself to blame. Strangely, she didn’t appreciate my informing her of her own culpability in this state of affairs. In fact, every time I laughed at her, she extended her middle finger and said words that an impressionable young lad shouldn’t hear his mother saying!
The night after we moved in, the lights went out. We had a county-wide blackout. The next day I ordered up an emergency generator. What a pain in the balls!
I hate moving! This was the second time in a year we had done this, and both Marilyn and I vowed not to move again until they put us into pine boxes. I had a local moving company handle it, and it went smoothly, even if the entire process is a clusterfuck.
Everything in the house was muddy by the time we were done. One thing I had learned over the years is that all those beautiful construction site pictures had grass magically edited in. A real construction site is a muddy disaster! We had grass seed planted, and some hay blown around as cover, but it would take several months for anything to look like something other than raw construction.
By April Charlie’s language skills had developed to the point where he was speaking in complete sentences. “Dum-Dum poop!” is a sentence, right?
In April I took a couple of weeks off and made some arrangements with Taylor for another nice vacation. First we drove up to Utica in the Town Car, since it was the only thing big enough for the three of us plus Dum-Dum in a car cage. That was a long trip; by the end of the trip I was wishing we had Dum-Dum in the seat and Charlie in the cage! We stayed a few days with the Lefleurs, with Charlie and Dum-Dum living at the house, while Marilyn and I stayed at the Sheraton. Then we got a lift over to the Oneida County Airport, where Taylor had a Cessna Citation II waiting for us.
Our vacation was going to be in the Caymans, which was a place we had been to several times in a previous lifetime. The Citation II wasn’t as big as the G-II I had ridden in from Hawaii to Bellevue and back. It was a bit larger than the Learjet we had last year, with a longer range. I teased Marilyn about rejoining the Mile High Club, but she refused, pointing at the open doorway to the cockpit. I laughed and told her they could put their headphones on, and Marilyn’s eyes opened wide and she stared at me until I broke down and laughed at her. That wasn’t on my list of fetishes.
Taylor had rented us a villa on Grand Cayman, on the inner North Sound side of Seven Mile Beach. It wasn’t quite as large and as private as the estate on Eleuthera had been, but it was still private. Marilyn managed to work on her all over tan around our pool. I liked the place, but then I had always liked the Caymans. It consists of three islands, Grand Cayman, Little Cayman, and Cayman Brac, but almost the entire population lives on Grand Cayman, around 50,000 or more. The place is clean and civilized and modern, and simply very nice. There are a lot of restaurants and places to go and things to see and do.
I got Marilyn to talk about what she might want in a vacation home. “You’re serious?!”
“Sure, why not?”
“I thought you were joking.”
“I’m always serious about goofing off,” I said with as straight a face as I could muster.
My wife snorted at that. “That’s true enough. So you’re serious about this? We can buy a place somewhere?”
I nodded. “Yeah, why not? I don’t want to do it until we’re worth about $100 mill, but I figure that’s only another year or two, tops. Also, we’re only talking one place. I’m not going to buy a place on a half dozen different islands. So, what do you want in a vacation spot?”
Marilyn shook her head in mystification. “I have no idea!”
“Well, compare this place to last year, in Eleuthera. That was a lot smaller island, lower population, but the place we stayed was larger and had a much bigger beach and was more private.”
“Oh.” Marilyn gave it some thought and shrugged. “Maybe something in between. La Valencia was simply gorgeous, and it was so private, but there wasn’t anything to do there. Maybe something like that on a bigger island?”
I nodded and smiled. “Okay, that’s a good start. For our next trip, let’s ask Taylor about that. I want something that we can take the kids to for family vacations, but also come to by ourselves for an adult vacation.”
“Just how adult did you have planned?”
I smiled at her. We were just back from lunch, and we were both wearing t-shirts and shorts. Well, I was wearing shorts, and Marilyn had on a denim skirt, and I knew she had nothing else on. I crooked my finger at her and said, “Let’s talk about that,” and we spent the next few hours discussing in detail just what kind of adult vacations would be planned.
Both Dum-Dum and Charlie were growing like weeds. Dum-Dum was a bit of an odd looking mutt. She looked sort of like a small boxer, at least in shape and form, with bow legs and a barrel chest, and both parents had been short haired, but her head and face looked like her beagle mother, although a bit wrinkly. She was putting on about a pound or two a week all through the spring, but then leveled out at around 35 pounds. Charlie didn’t grow that fast, but he seemed to take after his mother’s family, with the blond hair of his uncles and a stocky build. He sure didn’t look like any Buckman I’d ever met!
During May, a date occurred that I was simply dreading. Suzie was graduating from the University of Delaware, with both her Bachelor’s in Nursing and her Registered Nurse credentials. I had missed it the first time around, but I couldn’t say that I was too busy now. In fact, Suzie really wanted me to come, and Marilyn was pushing for me to go.
Hamilton had loomed over the graduation on the first time through, with his failure to finish college. I had felt unbelievable pressure to succeed from my parents, to graduate, to marry, to have children, and to be successful. In later years, after talking to Suzie, she had told me the same had occurred with her. I remember how I felt so incredibly relieved when she graduated from college, simply so she could carry the burden of the family name along with me.
Now, things were even worse. My much greater success and independence had driven my brother over the edge, along with Mom, and Suzie found the pressures intolerable. She already had a job lined up at Johns Hopkins, and an apartment, and didn’t plan on moving back home.
We argued several times in the weeks leading up to the graduation. “This is simply a lousy idea, honey,” I told Marilyn. “There is no good reason for me to go, or you for that matter, and many good reasons not to. Suzie will understand. We can take her to dinner or have her out to the house.”
Marilyn looked at me in a manner to scare me! “Your sister loves you dearly and has specifically invited you to be there. You are going to her graduation. If you die along the way, I am to drag your corpse to the show! You will be there!”
“This is you and Suzie trying to get me and my family back together, and it won’t work. Why can’t you just accept this?”