My initial thought had been to confide in Tracy. But I wondered if that was so wise. Tracy was after all, a teenager full of teenage stupidity as my earlier discovery graphically pointed out. I no longer thought that she could be trusted with a secret of this magnitude. But at the same time I needed to make sure that she did not get in the car with that college student on her graduation night. I had vowed to myself that I would prevent her death even if I could change nothing else on my return trip. That conviction was as strong in me as ever. Tracy would NOT die that night. One way or another I would see to it.
But that brought me back to the one night theory. If I couldn't tell her my secret, but if I was only allowed one night here, how could I make sure of her survival? I thought about that one for a while and finally I came up with something.
That left me to ponder the other questions in my mind. Suppose I was here for good. What else could I change? And how could I better myself and my family? I certainly did not want to end up right back where I was in seventeen years. I wanted to do things differently this time. But how? What could I do?
I reluctantly admitted to myself that I would lose Becky, my daughter in the process. This thought hurt me more than anything ever had before, but it was simply inevitable. Becky had been a very pleasant side effect of a brutal mistake that I'd made in my previous life. I simply could not, no matter how much I loved my daughter, repeat that mistake. I couldn't. I told myself that I wasn't killing her. She would just never exist in the first place. My mind was able to draw a distinction between those two things; a shaky one, but a distinction.
I lay there for more than two hours, until my mother called me down for dinner. I had a rough plan of sorts in mind by then. It was a plan that would be extensively modified and revised, but it was a plan. I felt better just having one.
Dinner was my mom's tacos. They were fried in grease and would be politically incorrect by today's standards. Each one had to have at least a hundred grams of fat. But God they were delicious. I chowed down five of them, shoveling in mounds of rice and beans as accompaniment and then washing the mess down with two Coke's from the refrigerator. The only thing that would have made them better would have been a pitcher of margaritas but I figured mom probably wouldn't whip up a batch for me.
She seemed gratified to see me eat so much. It probably put her worries about drugs aside for the moment. I remembered that I was living in the midst of Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" era and that my mom had had her drug worries fueled by the little pamphlets that this era produced. The pamphlets always had "warning signs" that your kids were on drugs printed in them. I remembered how bizarre those so called warning signs had seemed to me even on my first trip through fifteen. A big one had been "loss of appetite". What was up with that? Maybe if you'd moved all the way through marijuana and had worked your way to a two hundred-dollar a day cocaine habit you would have a loss of appetite. But most teenagers simply smoked pot. Loss of appetite was most definitely not a symptom of marijuana use. They should have put "greatly increased appetite" instead. They should have put in "excessive use of Visine" as well.
I also remembered that the pamphlets had so called terminology for drugs. The theory was that parents would overhear their kids using these terms and would therefore know they were on drugs. Right, as if the kids would talk about drugs in front of their parents. I remembered having big laughs with my friends as we read these pamphlets, usually while we were stoned. Those that had used drugs in the previous generation had obviously transcribed the terminology. They said that common terms for marijuana were: Tea, Mary Jane, leaf, wonder green, and other such nonsense. None of the terms were current. In my age they called it pot, buds, herb, smoke, KGB, greenbud, and weed; none of which were listed in Nancy's pamphlets. I could imagine the laughter that would have resulted in the eighties if a kid had asked someone if they had any Mary Jane or tea for sale. I was forced to wonder if there had ever been a case of some kid being drawn off the path of drug abuse as a result of those "informational" pamphlets.
Dinner was consumed and another awkward moment occurred when Mom asked me a question just as we were about to start clearing the dishes from the table.
"Billy," She said, "Did you clean Anita Browling's windows yesterday like you told her you would?"
I looked up at her, searching my memory banks again. I came up with who Anita Browling was easily enough. She was a divorced neighbor in her late twenties that lived two houses over. She'd split with her husband sometime around the time I was twelve or so and I remembered Dad giving vague explanations about how Mr. Browling had 'found someone else' and left her (for some reason my parents had assumed that Tracy and I would be upset by their DIVORCE). My parents had, for whatever reason, kind of adopted Anita after her husband left her. She used to come over for dinner once a week. She had two small children that Tracy was volunteered to baby-sit frequently. I was always volunteered to mow her lawn for her since she professed not to know how to run a mower, or to do other small tasks such as cleaning her windows. Both of us were forbidden to take any money from her for our services, a point of resentment that had drawn my sister and I together a little in our teens.
The image in my mind of her was of a slightly chunky woman with large breasts. She was a brunette with short hair and long legs. She would meet another man at about the time of my high school graduation. About the time I moved away from home she would marry him and disappear from Mom and Dad's lives. I remembered thinking back then that I wouldn't mind doing her. But she wasn't so attractive that you could admit to your peers that you would do her, if you can dig that. I also remembered how she used to watch as I mowed the lawn, always dressed in shorts and a loose fitting T-shirt. I remembered catching glimpses of her bra-clad tits when she'd bent over to pull a weed or something. My adult mind, which hadn't thought of her in years, suddenly realized that she'd been displaying herself for me. Had she been hoping for a little action from a teenaged boy?
Before I could follow that train of thought too far I came back to the original question. Had I cleaned her windows yesterday? I had no freaking idea if I had or hadn't. My mother was looking at me, awaiting a response.
"Uh… " I started, trying to think this through. Had I cleaned her windows?
"Bill?" Mom said, deepening her voice. "I told you the other day they were getting really dirty after the windstorm we had. You TOLD me you'd do it before it snowed again. "
"Uh," That gave me a little more information. I was a horrible procrastinator as a teen. Chances are I hadn't done it the first time I'd been asked. "Uh, no Mom. " I finally spat out. "Sorry. I forgot. "
"You forgot?" She asked.
"Sorry. " I squeaked.
"Billy, that is just so typical of you… " She began. Her lecture went on for nearly two minutes. I gave her uh huhs, and okays in all the right places, amazed that I still had the ability to do that after all these years. I sincerely promised that my first stop after school would be Anita Browling's house. Mom seemed satisfied. I found myself hoping that Anita would be home. I knew something that the other Billy didn't.
After dinner I went up to my room. I opened my backpack and pulled out my Algebra book. I found some blank paper and a pencil and then opened the book to the first chapter. I began studying.
Tracy had gone out somewhere after dinner and I heard her return about 8:30.
I continued to study as I heard her go to her room and slam the door. Downstairs the television was on as Mom and Dad watched whatever sitcom was on in the eighties. I could hear their sporadic laughter drifting up from time to time as well as muffled comments that I couldn't understand but were probably commentary on how TV wasn't the same as it had been a few years ago. I had managed to get a basic concept of the Algebra in the past few hours, working my way to the test questions of Chapter 2. The homework that had been assigned I'd finally figured out and completed.