"What's wrong with her?" She asked.
"Too much to drink." Jack explained.
"I tried to get her to slow down." I offered weakly. My arm muscles were starting to cry out as I stood there. I wondered if we were going to end right back up at step one again because of this?
"And you?" Jack asked me. "Have you had too much to drink too?"
I shook my head. "No." I replied. "I only had three beers all night, and those were when we first got there. I told you I take driving very seriously."
He nodded. "You seem sober enough." He pointed out. "Well don't just stand there. Go put her in her room. Mary, can you take care of her once she's there?"
"Of course." Mary said, shaking her head sadly and looking at her intoxicated daughter with something that looked almost like affection. Strange.
"C'mon." Mary told me, leading the way.
"Aren't you guys mad about this?" I finally had to ask.
They both stopped and looked at me. "Mad?" Jack asked. "Why would we be mad? You got her home safely just like you said."
"Yeah." I stammered. "But…"
"You mean because she's drunk?" Mary asked next.
I nodded.
They looked at each other for a moment and chuckled knowingly.
"Bill." Jack told me. "We'd be about the biggest hypocrites in the world if we got mad over this. Why back in our day I drug Mary home many a time carrying her just like you're carrying Nina there."
"And I've dragged Jack into the house more than my share too." She added.
My mouth was agape as I tried to picture what they were saying.
"Drinking is a part of every young person's life." Mary said, reaching out to stroke Nina's hair. "She's free and eighteen and if she wants to drink until she vomits, that's her prerogative. Did she vomit?"
"Uh, yeah." I nodded.
"You were a lot more responsible than we used to be." Jack told me. "Why we used to go out to parties and when it was time to go we decided who would drive by whoever had to carry the other. A couple times we woke up the next morning and the car was in the garage and we had no idea how we'd gotten home."
They looked at each other affectionately again. "It's a wonder we didn't kill ourselves back then." Mary said nostalgically. She turned to Jack. "Remember that time we woke up in someone's house in the morning and we didn't know where we were?"
Jack laughed fondly. "Oh yeah." He nodded, turning to me. "It was back in the late fifties or thereabouts. We went to this Christmas party and got drunk out of our minds. The next thing we know, we're waking up the next morning in chairs at someone's dining room table. Never seen the house before in our lives."
Mary actually giggled, to my astonishment. "And the kid!" She said. "Remember the kid!"
"Oh yeah." He repeated. "There was this kid eating breakfast at the table. A bowl of cereal. We'd never seen him before, had no idea who he was. He just kind of looked at us and said hi and then went back to eating. Were we hungover? Oh boy I guess we were. Our car was out front so we got into and tried to drive home but we had no idea what part of town we were in or anything."
"It took us about twenty minutes to find a street we were familiar with." Mary laughed.
That this story would be one of their fond marital memories seemed strange at first but I finally realized I was dealing with the alcohol generation here. In their youths alcohol use did not have the stigma it would develop in mine. Drinking was a part of every social function and was seen as a rite of passage almost. The Blackmores seemed almost proud of their daughter for having her first vomitus trip through the land of intoxication.
"This is very weird." I couldn't help commenting.
They offered no comment to that. Mary led me to Nina's bedroom where I gently laid her down on her bed. She shoed me out and closed the door while she began attending to her comatose daughter. When I returned to the living room, Jack was holding two bottles of beer in his hands. He handed one to me.
"Since you didn't get to drink at the party tonight," He said. "I thought you might like a cold one before you headed home."
I took it and looked at him, at the surgical scar on his chest.
"You're not supposed to drink, are you?" I asked lightly.
"Screw those doctors." He told me. "If the beer knocks five years off my life than I consider it five years I wouldn't have wanted to live anyway. Drink with me."
"I won't insult you by saying no." I said, borrowing a line from Fiddler on The Roof. I popped open my beer.
Nina spent the majority of the next day in bed, leaving it only to throw up in the nearest convenient toilet. I did not go over to see her, only talked to her on the phone. She sounded miserable and she vowed she would never drink again. I believe everyone has made such a vow a time or two in their lives, usually a few days before breaking it. The following day I visited briefly but she still wasn't quite right. I could sympathize. Two-day hangovers are the pits.
Instead of coming home for the summer, Tracy elected to enroll in summer classes to knock out a few more general education requirements. She told us on the phone that she knew there wasn't a lot of money for a plane ticket anyway and besides, summer was the most pleasant time of year in the Bay Area. No sense coming back to sultry, hot Spokane when she could be basking in 80 degree days and furthering her degree. Mom and Dad were somewhat disappointed, going so far as to assure her that they had the money for a plane ticket, but Tracy was undaunted. She wanted to stay.
The testing process for the Spokane Fire Department began. On June 12 Mike went down to the Spokane Community Center to take the written test. It was this portion of the process that I worried about since I knew that Mike was not the strongest person when it came to written material. But my worries turned out to be unfounded. He'd picked up study guides at the bookstore and had gone over them obsessively in the weeks proceeding the test. He called me shortly after he returned that day and told me it was in the bag. Though the results wouldn't be mailed to him for a week, he KNEW that he'd passed. I couldn't doubt the confidence he displayed and I was right not to. When he got the letter the first word on it was "Congratulations". His score was ninety-one percent. He was scheduled to take the combat challenge at two o'clock the afternoon of June 20.
I didn't believe he would have any problems with the combat challenge. As I've mentioned, the majority of the test was leg muscles and endurance. The exercise regime that Mike had been following had strengthened both of these attributes to a level that I could only dream of. His thighs and his calves bulged with runner's muscle. He had worked his endurance to the point where he could go full out at a run for nearly five minutes. He could carry sixty pounds of weight up the library stairs at a jog and barely break a sweat. His resting heart rate hovered at around fifty. He not only intended to pass the test but to threaten the record time while doing it. I had every confidence that he would do so.
The day of the test came. It was about as pleasant as it gets in Spokane during the summer that day; the heat and humidity approaching a record low. Mike had called me the moment he'd gotten home from the written test so I knew, when I still had not received a phone call by five o'clock, that something was wrong.
It was the next day before I found out. He came over to my house about ten in the morning and we took a walk over to the elementary school. He told me the story on the way.
"I didn't pass dude." He told me bitterly, almost biting back tears.
"What happened?" I asked, feeling his pain to some degree. I'd failed the same test before of course but I hadn't wanted it as badly as he did.
He sighed, shaking his head. "My legs and my endurance were fuckin' top rate." He said. "I lit into that course like you wouldn't believe. The guys at my station helped me practice putting on the turnouts and the tank so I did it in less than ten seconds. I pulled out the hose in nothing flat, it didn't even hurt my legs. I was a little slow on the sledge hammer part. It kind of hurt my arms, but I got it done and picked up a lot of time on the ladder climb and carrying the hose up the stairs of the tower. When I got to the top I wasn't even winded and my time was pushing the record." He gave me a bitter look.