Chapter 83: The End of the Year

And thus ended 1983, a momentous year for so very many reasons. Tusker and Tessa had a new place to call home by Christmas. We helped them move in and kept an eye on Bucky as needed. By the time they moved in, Tessa was visibly showing; she was slimmer than Marilyn to begin with, so when she showed, everybody knew!

My hopes that the death of my brother had finally been put behind me were just that, hopes. My mother sued me in civil court for his wrongful death. Every reputable lawyer in town turned her down, already knowing what had happened and who they would go up against, but she found a shyster ready to take the case on a contingency basis and he had me served one day at the office.

Q: What’s the difference between lawyers and lab rats?

A: There are some things even lab rats won’t do!

I dumped it on John and DeAngelis. DeAngelis promptly invited the shyster to his office and explained the facts of life. Specifically, he laid out the evidence and said we would countersue my mother, since she was the person who had bought Hamilton the knife he had brought to the house and loaned him the car he used to stalk us. The crook promptly dumped my mother’s lawsuit. I got another bill from DeAngelis, for another five grand.

I kept him on retainer, though, since my parents then started suing each other, with me being named willy-nilly. That was when we learned that my parents had managed to secretly disown me back in the fall of 1978, shortly after I married Marilyn, without letting either me or John Steiner know. I guess they really didn’t like my wife. That was very upsetting, for both of us. I tried to stay in touch with Suzie, but she told me that our parents were trying to use her to fight each other and me, and she had stopped returning any calls from them and was getting an unlisted number and a new apartment. She would call me when she could talk, but otherwise it was best to leave her alone for a while.

The Buckman Group kept moving forward. After a year and a half of operation, I was noticing several interesting trends. Jake Junior was ambitious. He really wanted to grow the outfit and do bigger deals and wanted to hire some specialists from Wall Street to help. I kept an eye on him, but otherwise let him keep going. I still did the strategic guidance - I kept an eye on which companies he wanted to work with and red-flagged some that I knew would be a disaster. I did let him lose a little money on one or two that I knew wouldn’t work out, simply so he would learn from the experience. Missy’s role was interesting. Technically she was just a stockbroker, but she had the world’s biggest Rolodex. If we needed to find somebody, the odds were she knew someone or someone who knew someone. Very useful. After the collapse of her marriage, she was supporting three children. She could afford decent childcare now, as well as some good vacations with them. What she did about male companionship, I never asked. About once a quarter we would travel to the west coast to confer with people in Bellevue and Silicon Valley.

At Christmas time, I took a few weeks off and we went up to Utica, all four of us. Charlie and Dum-Dum stayed at the Lefleurs while Marilyn and I started our vacation early. We spent an inordinate amount of time explaining to Marilyn’s family what had happened that summer and fall, and I got some strange looks from some of her family. It was one thing to know that I had been in the Army, and that the Army was involved in killing, but that was a whole different level of abstraction than sitting down to dinner with a guy who had shot his brother. I worked my way through it; it was still better than being on the news for a week.

Marilyn had taken care of all the arrangements with Taylor, simply stating that we wanted something about as private as we had done on that first trip to the Bahamas, but on a larger island with some night life on it. Other than that, it was all supposed to be a surprise to me, and for once, Marilyn kept her mouth shut. Two days after Christmas, we got Big Bob to drive us over to the Oneida County Airport, where a G-II was waiting to whisk us away.

By that time, the need to fly away for a Mommy-Daddy vacation to make a new little Buckman had vanished. The incredibly potent combination of Buckman spermatozoa and Lefleur ovum had done its usual magic and Marilyn had caught in late October. Marilyn had insisted on going, however, since (her words, not mine) it was her last chance to wear a swimsuit without looking like a beached whale! I figured I would be delicate about it and simply said that meant there would be more of her to love. She replied, “Does that mean I can stop exercising with you?”

“No, by keeping your weight down, you get more love per pound!” That earned me an elbow to the ribs. Sometimes being a mathematician gets you in trouble.

Marilyn bullied me back into exercise and aikido practice. While she had been away at Sacandaga Lake, I had stayed home, out of sight, to lure the stalker into showing himself. I won’t say I was flabby by the time it was all over, but I needed to start up again. By the time I felt comfortable getting out of the house, without worrying about running into a reporter on the front lawn, it had been over a month.

We were still planning on doing a pool in the spring, as soon as the weather broke, with a fence around that as well. We’d have another big barbecue then and combine it with a pool party. I remembered how Big Bob had always done a big party every Fourth of July, for company and family, and it had always been a good time. Maybe we could do that sort of thing here.

Big Bob drove us over to the airport and helped us load our stuff on board, and then Marilyn and I peeled off our winter coats, tossing them inside the car, and scampered inside the plane. It was cold out there! As soon as we were onboard, the pilot closed the door and locked it up. This was a fellow I had never met before, and all he said to us was, “Welcome aboard. Please sit down and buckle up. There is some champagne in the cabinet and glasses here.” He tapped a built-in cabinet in the front bulkhead. “As soon as we get to cruising altitude, I’ll let you know, and you can unbuckle and move about.”

One thing I learned about small jets was that every one of them was different, even if they were the same model. When you bought one, either new or used, there existed a whole industry set up just to custom remodel the interiors. That one differed slightly from the one I had ridden from Hawaii to Seattle and back. There was a half-bath in the back, and there was a cabin door separating the cockpit from the passengers, but the arrangement of the seats was slightly different. Two of the seats were facing aft, so that a fold-down table between them could be lifted up and everybody could work or play cards.

Marilyn moved me along until I was in one of the chairs in the grouping, and I sat down facing forward. She surprised me, however, by sitting down in the seat facing me, and not across the aisle at my side. We both buckled our seats, and the engines began their whine up to speed. “I really need this,” I told her with a smile. “I have a funny feeling next year is going to be hectic.”