Stormy climbed off the two-person lounger where she had been laying next to Marilyn, and padded over. She stood on her hind legs and Bucky braced as she put her paws on his shoulders and licked his face. Big damn dog! After a moment he pushed her down. “Down, you mutt! You really are a monster!” he laughed. Stormy gave a pleasant woof, and nudged his legs, and then went back and jumped into my chair.
“What’s up, Bucky? Charlie’s back in Hereford. If you rode down here to see him, you two got your signals crossed,” I told him.
“No, I’m here to see Molly,” he answered, a funny look on his face.
Holly, who had just wandered in, said, “Hi, Bucky! I’ll go tell her you’re here.”
I shrugged. “I thought she was going out on a date tonight.”
Bucky gave me a really odd look at that. “I know. That’s why I’m here.”
I just stood stock still for a bit. “You are?”
“We’re going out, Uncle Carl. Didn’t you know that?”
“Huh?!” I could just feel myself standing there and staring stupidly at him.
Marilyn added, “Carling, close your mouth before the flies go in.”
“You knew about this?” I asked her.
“Carl, everyone knows about it,” she answered, rolling her eyes.
Molly came out of her room and she was wearing riding leathers and carrying a helmet of her own. She said, “Hi, Bucky!” and then stood on her tip-toes and kissed Bucky! On the lips! I stood there with my jaw flapping but no sounds coming out. After the kiss, my youngest daughter said, “Don’t wait up for us, we’ll probably be late.”
Holly had been watching and grinning at me from the side. “Make sure you use protection!” she called out as they left.
That woke me up! “Holly!”
“Well, Dad, we wouldn’t want any repeat of past family history,” she teased.
“HOLLY!”
She sat down in my lounger with Stormy. “Daddy’s angry. You’ll protect me, right, Stormy?” She got a loud WOOF from the mutt as she rubbed her belly.
I turned to my wife. “How long has this been going on?”
“What, dear?”
“This! Molly! And Bucky!?” I demanded.
“I don’t know. Since last year?” she asked Holly.
Our eldest daughter replied, “Since she went out with Charlie and Bucky last summer on that race tour in August.”
“I thought that was an unpaid internship.”
Holly smirked. “Maybe Molly got paid a different way.”
“HOLLY!” I thundered.
Holly just laughed, and Marilyn said, “Holly, you’re not helping.”
“Dad, don’t you remember her sitting on his lap at the Christmas party we had? And at the Inauguration?”
“They said there weren’t enough seats,” I answered lamely. Had they really been dating for almost a year without telling me?
“Daddy, for a guy who is almost as smart as me and Molly, you’re awfully dumb,” she replied.
“So, are you seeing anybody I need to know about?” I asked her.
“No, I just sleep around.”
“HOLLY!”
“Maybe I could help with the gays and lesbians if I started dating girls, too, Dad.”
“OUT!”
Marilyn laughed and pointed out of the room. “You’re really not helping!”
Holly just laughed and scrambled out of her seat, with Stormy romping behind her. They went back to her room. I turned to my wife. “You knew?”
“Everybody knows! Where have you been?”
“I don’t know. Running the free world?” I responded.
She snorted. “I think Holly is right! You can be pretty dumb.”
“Marilyn! It’s wrong! He’s like our second son. It’s like… like… incest!”
“Oh, please!”
“Well, he’s certainly much too old! He’s six years older than she is!” I argued.
From Holly’s room sang out, “I told her that he was already way past his sexual prime!”
Marilyn laughed again and I yelled, “HOLLY!” I sank down onto my chair again. “Shit! When did this start?”
“Last year, when they set up their racing team. Bucky hadn’t seen the girls for a few years. Guess what, they grew up! They weren’t the little girls who used to bug him and Charlie anymore,” she explained.
“And she and Bucky are… you know!”
“Mister President, ever heard of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell!’”
I just growled and threw my hands up in the air. “Aaaaggghh! Daughters!” I looked over at her and pointed a finger. “This is all your fault!”
“My fault?!”
“I wanted sons, but you said, ‘No, let’s have twin daughters!’ This is all your fault!”
“Oh, puhhhleeeease! As I recall, it’s the male who provides the X or the Y chromosome, so don’t blame me!” was Marilyn’s reply.
“Yeah? I recall Henry the Eighth and what he did to a few of his wives when they didn’t provide some sons! You are on shaky ground here, your Highness!”
Marilyn just snorted and ignored me.
Thankfully the media never twigged to my daughters’ romantic liaisons, or maybe they just didn’t care. When the summer started and the girls were out of school, Molly went on an internship with Harley-Davidson that Tusker had arranged, and Holly spent the summer goofing off and visiting friends. If Charlie was anywhere near where we were, we tried to take an afternoon off and watch, but that is such a production to travel to that we mostly watched on ESPN.
It was still blood curdling to watch, but I knew enough about what he was doing to see that he really was good at it. The boys had made their business plan based on being in the top ten in the rankings after two years, and it looked like Charlie was there and more. Charlie had begun racing at the end of 2003 and had very quickly proved he could still outrace almost everybody on the smaller regional tracks. In 2004 he continued, and by mid-summer had been picked up by a pair of major sponsors. The first was Red Bull, the god-awful energy drink that tasted like kerosene, only worse. High energy, that was Charlie, all right!
Amazingly, the Marine Corps was the other major sponsor, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with me! The services often had NASCAR teams, and the presence of a certified Marine hero in the top ranks of motocross was definitely aimed at their demographic target. They actually built a recruiting campaign around Charlie, with ads and posters of him in his combat gear side by side with him in his racing gear. The Few, the Proud, the Hopelessly Insane!
In any case, it was beginning to look like Charlie might be able to make a go of this. He was going to begin racing in the AMA Pro Championship races, and was actually getting a real paycheck from his sponsors. If he continued at this pace, he had a chance to make it to national ranks by next year. He told me once what some of the top tier people made, and it was in the millions. Who knew!? To a considerable extent, however, this destroyed the Charlie-Bucky team, but both boys explained that that had only been a short term plan anyway. Bucky would go back to work at Tusk Cycle, and Red Bull would have professional handlers who would deal with the racing and transportation. Then Bucky arranged for an agent from Creative Artists Agency to handle endorsements and appearances.
As for me, I tried to stay on top of the tiger rather than inside him. In May we had a little war that nobody outside of the administration even knew about! For several years the CIA had been quietly supporting the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan against the Taliban. Things had begun heating up a hair, so we airdropped in a few Special Forces A-Teams to help and began flying a few more B-2 patrols. In turn, the Taliban complained to their bosses back in Pakistan, who decided a more active role was needed. In early May the CIA reported that an infantry brigade was slowly being prepared for action in Pakistan, much as it had been before 9-11.