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Chapter 1 - Tell the World I'm Coming Home

Posted on 2011-07-29

August 2011, Plymouth, Michigan
Frederick

As the taxi pulls off the freeway after just a short run down from Detroit Metropolitan Airport and rolls through Plymouth, I let the sensation of homecoming wash over me. Because this is my real home, my first home; it's where I rightfully ought to be.

Suburbia is supposed to be blandly, mind-numbingly boring, but this time around, I'm unreasonably, ecstatically thrilled to find myself in the heart of the suburbs. After you've experienced what it's like to have nowhere to call home, you can't ever be tired of the warm, safe feeling of finally having a home to go back to. This is what I've waited a full 20 years for - the day I can return to the house I lived in as a child. And this time, I'm here to stay.

It's a day for firsts, because for the very first time in a decade or more, I've got real family of my own to greet me at the door. My sister Sophia pounces on me in a gigantic bear hug, which grows into a group hug with the addition of her four-year-old daughter Tiffany. They've been here for an entire summer by now, so they've had time to put away all the moving boxes, and Sophia can't wait to show me the comprehensive re-decoration job she's done.

When I last stepped into this house, it had a homey, lived-in quality, but in your usual '60s or '70s kind of way: with linoleum, carpet and lumpy overstuffed furniture co-existing in a sea of various orange, yellowish, olive and puce-colored textiles. It was the kind of interior you'd imagine from a retro sepia photograph brought into real life. Sophia's remake has updated everything to uber-chic contemporary standards, with even more character to boot because she's integrated little eclectic touches from the various places she's lived in, ranging from the Polynesian-inspired accent pieces scattered in the living room to the tatami corner in the master bedroom. Seeing what she's done with our house, I'm triply glad she was able to use the college funds Ed and I saved by getting scholarships to put herself through design school in the end; the human, personal touch from this being her own home has come together with her natural talent to create a masterpiece.

The best part has to be my new bedroom, the one which used to belong to Sophia when we were kids. There's no hint at all of her former pink floral color scheme, and she's redone everything in minimalist chrome and black. It's exactly the way I would've wanted it if I had a bachelor pad of my own. She's given me Dad's old desk, the one she took with her everywhere she moved to, and the matching desk chair, nicely covered in matt black leather. A glass-fronted display cabinet and all the walls are left bare on purpose; this is where I'll be displaying all my aircraft models and other paraphernalia, and she's leaving it entirely up to me to decide just how I want to go about it. The entire setup of the room is Sophia's way of acknowledging that she sees me as a grown man now, rather than an irritating little brother who's always underfoot at the wrong times, and it's both touching and flattering all at once.

In short, Sophia's done a perfect job with the house. Most designers would throw out everything old to create a uniformly new look, but she knows what to keep, and how to work around it. All the furniture Dad made himself is still there: the dining table and chairs, and all the bed frames. Even though everything's been nicely varnished, Sophia's kept another special touch too - the word "Wentworth" I carved into each piece of Dad's handmade wooden furniture with my penknife the day before we moved out, in the tiniest letters I could make so our tenants wouldn't notice and complain about the furniture being defaced or something like that. I never confessed to Sophia about it, of course; so the only clue I have that she's seen and deliberately kept my carvings is the minute attention she's given to every other tiny detail in every corner of the house.

Yeah, right, I could just go on and on singing Sophia's praises like this; until I find that she has transformed my room into a shrine to Hello Kitty. Not my room, of course, but the one that Ed and I used to sleep in when we were kids. Just about everything in the room is pink and white, and the face of that... uh... feline, is staring at me from virtually everywhere. Like for example, the curtains Sophia has hung from the top bunk as a kind of canopy for the bottom bunk bed.

It's obvious which bunk is meant for Tiffany, because the top bunk, the one I used to sleep in as a child, is occupied by a huge inflatable white rabbit sprawling on its stomach. To my admittedly undiscerning eye, this creature looks pretty much like a rabbit version of Hello Kitty. Sophia and Tiffany must've seen me gaping at it, because out of nowhere, they're both trying to explain its origins to me.

"That's Miffy," says Sophia. "You can guess why Tiffany likes her almost as much as Hello Kitty." Oh, of course. Both are white. Both are irresistibly cute to the fifty percent of the world population that's female. Me, I am completely missing the point, though.

"No, Mommy, that's Walter," says Tiffany. "See? His face is different. And he's lying down."

"Oh sorry, excuse me. This isn't Miffy, it's a character called Walter which was created by an Asian artist. They displayed it in a museum exhibition last year, and Tiffany liked it so much we just had to get the mini version."

Mini version, my foot - that inflatable rabbit's as big as I was when Dad made the bunk bed for Ed and me. In my whole life, I've only known one Walter. Correction - I've only known of one Walter, because I've never actually met him. And any namesake of Walter Elliot is the last thing I want sleeping in my bunk bed.

Even though I know it's absolutely infantile, I can't help but wonder how I can sneak a porcupine into the house someday when Sophia's not looking. This kind of thinking is bringing me right down to Tiffany's level, and if only she knew what's on my mind now, Tiffany would probably kill me this very second.

It's been a long time since I last felt the pull of family as strongly as this; in fact, I can safely say I haven't had this feeling in more than a decade, not since the time when I was engaged to Anne Elliot. But that's the power of family; they're the only ones who can make you do things you'd otherwise never want to do. I'd be lying if I said I don't miss the adrenaline rush of flying a fighter jet, and I'd equally be lying if I said the Air Force was all glitz and glamour. True, my days in Afghanistan and Iraq have given me some of the most gruesome memories of my life. Still, the net balance is positive; I'd have wanted to stay there till I'm too old to fly, if Sophia hadn't asked me to come back at the end of my 10-year service commitment.

"I've already lost enough of the people I love, without you going out there risking your life every day," she'd said. "Please find another job, one where I know you'll be coming home for sure."

Sadly, it's true. My brother-in-law was an admiral, forty-five years old and fit as a fiddle; yet he's gone just like that, right in the middle of a triathlon. They were living in Okinawa when it happened just this spring, and that's what brought Sophia and Tiffany back to the US, to build a new life in our old home. With a pull like that, how could I resist? It's kind of warped to think of myself as a father figure to Tiffany when her mom is my sister, but it isn't that far from the truth. I want to play a role in giving Tiffany a stable, happy, all-American childhood, the type of childhood I'd have wished for myself, and that's the real force that brought me back.

Back to Detroit, the same city where Anne Elliot's living in, to the best of my information. I wonder if she felt the same pull when she'd moved back from Everett way back in '01? It's not until now, when I'm doing practically the same thing too, that I really understand just how straightforward it all is; at those times when your family needs you in the face of loss, there's absolutely no competition to speak of between your family and your dreams. It may be painful for personal ambition to take a back seat, but yet doing the right thing feels so natural that it gives you the strength to put your fallen aspirations behind you for good and to shelve away any regrets you may have so they won't eat you alive.

Only Anne Elliot's story is very different from mine; for her, it's not such a simple story as just coming back to Detroit to take care of her family. It's been 10 years now, and I'm sure her grandma can't possibly have lived for this long with Stage 4 cancer. Yet not only has she never contacted me in all these years, she's never showed up at any of the class reunions or gatherings since graduation either. She might as well have vanished from the face of the earth, the way her former girlfriends never mention anything about her or her life, even though Tom and James have been asking them about Anne every time they meet up. That's the worst part of it; the people she's thrown aside aren't limited to just me alone, but also include all my friends from MIT, maybe hers as well. She's wiped us out of her life as though we never existed. As though we're not good enough for her any more, now that she's moved back into the Elliot family. Knowing what I do about the Elliot mentality, it's not much of a stretch to guess that she's probably living in the lap of luxury right now; maybe she's married to someone filthy rich, definitely someone with business value to them. Idling her time away with the country-club set, with their fancy yachts and shiny limos, practically dripping in designer labels and jewelry, I'll bet. And her path isn't going to cross with mine anytime soon; I'm far from hanging around in the rarefied circles that those Elliots move around in. So what if I'm also living in the Detroit area now? I could've still been in Afghanistan or Iraq, and it wouldn't make a single iota of difference to the probability of my running into her by chance.

Once upon a time, I believed that Anne Elliot could practically become my family; she was that close to me. Now I know that my vision of Anne and I building a life together was just the fantasy of a lonely kid yearning for stability and a sense of belonging; a kid with no parents to turn to and two siblings living abroad, too far away for him to really feel their presence. The same kid who naively believed that joining the Air Force would be pure fun and excitement; a complacently smug kid who thought he'd seen the worst that society could dish out to him, not knowing how sheltered he still was in the big scheme of things; sheltered enough, at least, to take world peace for granted. That kid has grown into a man now, and in fact, having been right in the middle of the War on Terror, I've seen and experienced much more than most men in this country have. So what's Anne Elliot to me now? I've got no more need to hang onto that kind of pseudo-family, when the only family that will ever matter are the ones who're tied to me by blood, the ones who've gone through the same thick and thin as I did and lived the same life as I have, literally from the day I was born.

Growing up has given me a new perspective about my family; there was once a time I didn't appreciate them the same way I do now, but I'm long past that. Sophia's nagging, and Dad's when he was alive, used to be a running irritation constantly buzzing in my ear; I took it that they were comparing me to Ed in ways where I'd always come up short, and I resented them for it. Because I won't apologize for the way I've been born, how I can't stand sitting still and keeping quiet, and how I always need some kind of thrills and spills to really feel alive. How I just can't be a pure bookworm the way Ed is; it was only when the carrot of an Air Force pilot slot was dangled in front of me that I actually felt motivated about hitting the books hard. Only after I grew much older did I realize how everything they've said to me ties back to how much my family values education, and come to recognize that this was one of the main reasons, if not the reason, why I've been able to walk down a different path from the stereotypical kid in the 'hood.

As I grew older, I came to understand what a difficult decision Sophia had to make when moving us out of our childhood home. Our neighbors offered to help us, even to take us in, and at thirteen, I couldn't identify with what I thought was her pride in keeping us from being beholden to others. It wasn't till she was getting married and I was heading to college that she told me her real reason for moving us out wasn't about pride at all; it was because she wanted to cut our costs and earn some rental income so Ed and I could go to college with the minimum of financial aid, so we could start our working lives without being saddled by student loan debt. That's when I came to appreciate the implicit trust she had in us; she'd had faith that we believed enough in going to college to stay focused towards getting there, regardless of where the other kids in our neighborhood were headed. Susceptible as I was to peer pressure at the time, she'd still believed I had the strength not to cave in where it counted. Not that she had much choice about putting us through the public school system anyway; move or no move, there's no way she could've possibly sprung for private school for Ed and me.

And no matter how preoccupied they were, Dad, Mom and Sophia must've taught me well in the end, because getting a good education is precisely how I've come back to where I am today. It's also the social leveler that gave me the audacity to conceive of joining my future to Anne Elliot's, despite the vast difference between her economic status and mine at that time. Having access to education is the reason why we have a flat society today, where anyone can make it with the right amount of ability and effort, regardless of the circumstances they were born with. In this society, it isn't my fault that my so-called engagement with Anne Elliot turned out to be such a fiasco. No, none of it's my fault at all; the fault's all hers.

Disclaimer: The actual "Walter" is a work by Singaporean artist Dawn Ng, which has been displayed at the "Art Garden" exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum.

Chapter 2 - Oh Charlie You're so Fine

End August 2011
Frederick

Tiffany may be a Croft by name; but at heart, she's a Wentworth kid through and through. For starters, she's really smart. Sophia's been teaching her how to read, so she can actually point out a good number of the words in her storybooks when we read bedtime stories to her. What completely floors me, though, is that she can do one thing I've never quite mastered no matter how hard I tried - she can function respectably in two different languages. In fact, she's singing this song in Japanese every day, every time she gets the chance.

"Ten-shi no pant-su wa…"

"What song is this?" There's only one word I can make out, and it sounds like "pants"; I'm not sure if it's my mind playing tricks on me, or if there really is such a word in Japanese.

"It's called 'The Angel's Underpants'", Tiffany explains. "I learned it in school in Japan."

"It… uh… teaches you Japanese grammar and sentence structure," stammers Sophia sheepishly, trying to cover. Yeah, right. I wish I had such interesting nursery rhymes to teach me grammar and sentence structure back in school.

Maybe it's my famously short attention span, or maybe I haven't been around kids enough to develop the kind of patience you need when you've got a kid in your life 24-7, because that underpants song gets old on me really, really fast. To get her to stop, I threaten to sing her to sleep at bedtime for every day this carries on, and this threat packs more serious punch than you'd think - when I sing, I sound like a chicken waiting for slaughter, and I'll bet you'd pay me to stop.

She's fearless by any standards, not just girl standards. On day two, I lop the training wheels of her bike, simply because I need something to do for kicks; after all, when I was around her age, I was already hopping little curbs on my two-wheeler, swinging from the guard rail of my bunk bed like Tarzan, and starting to illicitly discover the joys of playing with Ed's skateboard. Instead of walking her by the handlebars, I teach her to ride by pushing her from behind; once she's built up enough momentum, I can just let go without her being any the wiser that she's on her own. And she just goes on and on, until she hits a seam in the road and takes her first spill. Physically, I know she'll be fine; she's covered head to toe in protective gear. But still, I have to hand it to her when she picks herself up, gets back on the bike and pushes off again right away, without a whimper or a tear. A boy couldn't have done any better; I could hardly have done better myself as a kid.

She's got amazing perseverance. I didn't expect her to take me up on my threat about the singing, but she pushes me till I've got to make good on it. By that move, she's got me caught short, because I belatedly realize that all the songs I normally listen to need major censorship on the lyrics to make them even half suitable for her ears. But I used to be a Wentworth kid too, and so I'm not giving up on building my repertoire of G-rated songs to take her on with. So far, I'm on track to nailing Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting, and the Madagascar theme song. Good going, Fred, even if I do say it myself.

She's tough, and she rolls with the punches. Sometimes she gets sad when she misses her daddy; but rather than wallowing in it, she focuses on the future instead with an optimism and courage beyond her years. Like the way she's full of how she'll be starting preschool soon; she's been getting Sophia and me to count down the days with her. I've offered to do the morning preschool runs for Sophia, because she's not a morning person and my years in the Air Force have conditioned me to waking up at all kinds of unearthly hours; I couldn't sleep in even if I tried. So I end up being the one making breakfast for all three of us every morning, just like Sophia used to do for Ed and me years ago. I couldn't be happier to do so, when this little bit of chipping in is far from enough to reciprocate for all the years she's been filling in as a mom to us boys.

Parking along the street in front of the school, I get out of my RAV4, unbuckle Tiffany, and lift her out of her car seat in the back. Then I hand her the pink Hello Kitty backpack, give her a high five, and she's off and running. This is the way Wentworth kids handle the first day of school, and I'm as proud as any of the yuppie dads hanging around, even if I'm not her dad actually. But it is the first day of school after all, and so I still linger a little just in case anything happens, getting back into the RAV4 so I won't blow the whole breezy-farewell thing by showing her so blatantly that I'm lingering.

And then, I get a really strange sense of déjà vu. I'm dead sure I know the silver-grey Volkswagen Golf that's just swung into the space right in front of me from somewhere, even if there're probably thousands of silver Golfs all over the country. Of course, it's exactly the same model Anne Elliot used to drive in college, and this one's somewhat the worse for wear, just like you'd expect of any car that's been chugging around for 15 years. A minute later, I get that sinking feeling as it turns out my intuition has been spot on, because who else but Anne Elliot in the flesh comes out of the car. She opens the rear door, and lifts out a pudgy little boy with glasses who promptly wraps his arms and legs around her torso like a baby koala. Nudging the car door closed with her hip, she carries the boy towards the schoolhouse, bending slightly backward with the effort; he's probably at least half her weight, I'll bet. The boy's face is contorted as he bawls and bawls, fat tears running down his face while she strokes his back, murmuring words of comfort to him. I can't hear their actual words from where I'm sitting in the RAV4, of course; and so it's like watching a pantomime being acted out to the soundtrack of the Eminem music playing from my car stereo.

Even though I recognize the face and features as Anne's in an instant, this Anne Elliot I'm looking at is a complete stranger to my eyes, my memory and my imagination. An oversized watch with a fat leather strap accentuates her too-thin wrist, and she's wearing a drab, frumpy blouse-and-pants ensemble, the type my mom used to wear. Obviously, her sense of size and fit is gone, because the clothes bag visibly on her. And from the way her hair is long and scraggly, it looks like she hasn't bothered to get a proper haircut in months either. Before this day, I only had two concepts of Anne Elliot: the spunky, sassy chick with a pixie haircut who lives only in my memory, and the ostentatiously put-together socialite that I'm sure she has morphed into. One of these Annes may never really have existed, at least not as the girl I'd believed her to be; and the other, the latter one, is the one I don't want or need to see, ever again. But this third Anne, the physical Anne I have no choice but to see because she's dropping off her kid right under my nose, is none of the above. The other Annes in my mind were like phantoms that'd never leave me alone no matter how much I wanted them to; strangely enough, this real Anne actually looks like a phantom - she's so thin the wind could blow her away, and for the moment she faces in the direction of my windscreen, I can see the hollow expression in her eyes.

Over the next few days, I see the same scene playing out again and again, and each time I notice tiny new details as the same little pantomime unfolds before me, almost as if it's being replayed in slow-mo. Like how the little boy is wearing preppy Burberry Kids and Ralph Lauren, while she's always wearing too-big clothes which have seen better days. I see how she pries the boy from her at the schoolhouse doorway and hands him his backpack. But then she lingers a little too long as she makes her way down the steps; and the boy tugs fretfully at her blouse, while throwing the backpack down on the floor. So she turns back and walks into the building holding his hand, picking up the backpack and carrying it as she goes. And if I hang around long enough, I see her coming out of the schoolhouse after a full fifteen minutes or more; she's weary and hunched even though it's just the beginning of the day.

It looks like somewhere along the way, Anne's gotten married and she's raised one spoiled brat of a son. Surprised much? I suppose I shouldn't be; after all, isn't that what I expected of her after she returned to the Elliot fold? But yet, I am. Because she looks like the exact opposite of what I'd picture her to look like after more than 10 years of immersion in the Elliot world. None of the theories I've ever formed about Anne Elliot could possibly explain why she's living and sending her kid to school in Plymouth and not Grosse Pointe; why she's still driving the same Golf after more than 15 years; or why she dresses so dowdily and looks so fragile. I sure can't explain how a girl as sensible as the Anne Elliot I thought I used to know could grow into a woman who'd pamper her son so thoroughly that she can't even drop him off at preschool without him throwing a mega tantrum on her every day for almost an entire week; or for that matter, why she's the one dropping off her son when these are the type of menial tasks the Elliots would never deign to lift a finger for. True, she looks patently unhappy, but then I'd be the same way too if I were surrounded by the Elliots day and night; and I did offer her another alternative, didn't I? It's not my fault she chose not to take up my offer; or more accurately, that she flung my offer right back into my face after making me believe, for a whole year no less, that she'd taken it and was actually happy to do so.

So I tell myself that maybe it would be better if I don't find out the answers after all, and I stop lingering; I give Tiffany her high five when I drop her off, then pull away cleanly and immediately. Tiffany's a Wentworth kid, and that means a quick, cheerful tantrum-free farewell when it's off to preschool; she's a kid who likes new challenges, and takes them on with spirit and aplomb, not like some other people's kids. We Wentworths may not be the grandest of folks, but we, myself included, know how to bring up our kids the right way; never mind that I don't have any kids of my own just yet.

Just a little more than a week into preschool, Tiffany actually obliges me when I ask her to sing something other than that underpants song she's so crazy about.

"Oh Charlie you're so fine, you're so fine you blow my mind -"

"Who's Charlie?" I'm amused and curious; I've never heard of this Charlie person before, and I wonder if he's real, or just some new imaginary friend Tiffany has conjured up from nowhere.

"He's this kid at school," she explains. "He's my bestest friend, and I'm gonna marry him when I grow up. He's so cool."

"Why is - um, Charlie - so cool?" Hmm, this is new. Interesting.

Tiffany looks thoughtful. "He has funny-looking glasses. Just like Harry Potter. He can do that dance from Chicken Little. And he lets me play Angry Birds with him on his iPad."

No kidding - a four year old bringing his own iPad to school? Honestly, kids these days are growing up with way too many gadgets on them - and expensive ones to boot. When I was that age, I'm not even sure I knew how to use the humble dial telephone; yup, that's the antiquated contraption that's all but obsolete these days. I make a mental note to have a word with Sophia before Tiffany starts lobbying for an iPad of her own, too.

Sophia's planning to set up her own interior design business, and during this period while she's busy scouting for a shop front in town, I offer to pick up Tiffany when preschool ends at midday as well. And on the first day I start picking her up from school, she's pointing in the direction of Anne Elliot's silver Golf as she runs up to the RAV4 to greet me.

"Uncle Freddy, look! That's Charlie! Can we go over to say hi?"

There's no sign at all of anyone who could be named Charlie in sight, unless you count a pair of chubby legs sticking out from the open rear door of the Golf. There's every sign of Anne Elliot though, leaning into the car and probably saying something to the owner of the legs. We walk right up to where Anne is standing, Tiffany pulling me by the hand.

The boy's lying on his back in the backseat, drinking milk from a baby bottle with a hugely satisfied look on his chubby face. When he sees us, he quickly chucks the bottle down on the seat and stands up in a flash. Completely unembarrassed about being caught in such a baby act, he greets us with the most cherubic smile, and it just floors me how this same kid can be both an angel and a devil all rolled into one. He's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, indeed.

"You must be Charlie Elliot," I say. "Nice to meet you, young man." I stoop so I'm at his eye level, and hold out my hand to shake his. This is a deliberate dig on my part; I know such formalities would scare any kid off, but for a Little Mr. Preppy like this, he's practically asking for it.

"My name is Charles Musgrove Jr," the kid protests in a hoity-toity little voice. He ignores my outstretched hand; instead, he and Tiffany waste no time to squeeze themselves into the half of the back seat that isn't taken up by his child seat, and burrow into his backpack for the iPad.

Musgrove, huh? So that's the name of Anne's husband, and this is even more evidence that I'm a brainless old sod; if Anne's married, it stands to reason that her kid's last name wouldn't be Elliot.

"Fred. Frederick. How are you?" Apparently I'm a barbarian as well as an idiot, because Anne addresses me first, before I've thought of anything else to say.

"Good." I draw out the word as long as possible. That's to show I'm not just answering the question in the usual sense, but I really mean I'm doing good; never been better, in fact. "And how are you?"

"Good." Her version of the word is short and quick, like she wants to get it out of the way as soon as possible. It's the kind of "good" you say when what you really want to say is that you're actually not doing that good at all.

Just as an excuse to turn away, I rap on the sheet metal of the Golf .

"Tiff-any!" I call sharply. "It's time to go, or else Mommy will be waiting." It's not intentional, but I certainly won't mind if Anne gets the wrong idea. She's married, so why shouldn't I be as well?

"Okaaay," drawls Tiffany, but neither she nor Charlie makes any move to put away the iPad. At four going on five, she's already perfected the art of the eye-roll, and I feel massively sorry for both Sophia and myself in advance. Heaven help us when she actually becomes a tween. I drum my fingers on the doorjamb until she finally decides she's had enough of her iPad game, and she straightens herself with a big, fat, dramatic sigh for effect.

"Bye, Charlie," says Tiffany as she hauls herself out of the car. "And bye, Aunty Annie."

Aunty Annie. So that's what that Charlie kid has taught her to call Anne. The intimacy of it all is enough to make me want to vomit, so I figure the best thing to do is to clear out with Tiffany in tow, before I actually chuck my cookies.

"See you around," I say to Anne, not out of any real desire to see her, but with the certain knowledge that there won't be any way I can possibly escape from bumping into her every now and then. And I'm off before she's got any chance to wish me the same.

Disclaimer: I'm not sure exactly who to attribute "The Angel's Underpants" to, but this nursery song appears in Eiji Okuda's 2006 movie "Nagai Sanpo" (A Long Walk).
The lyrics of Tiffany's song about Charlie are adapted from the 1982 song "Mickey" by Toni Basil.

Chapter 3 - Name of Elliot, Ghost of Anne

Posted on 2011-08-04

Early October 2011
Frederick

Being the parent, as opposed to not being the parent, makes a whole world of difference. When my commercial pilot training starts and I'm no longer conveniently hanging around the house with nothing better to do, we end up with no choice but to find new after-school care options for Tiffany, because Sophia's in the thick of setting up shop too. And the answer is obvious when we ask Tiffany which of her friends she wants to hang out with after school. Being the parent, Sophia gets to make the final decision; and to her, there's no reason why Tiffany shouldn't go to the Musgroves' if they're willing to take her on. Not being the parent, I've got no way to establish my veto powers, even if I spilled the beans on my entire miserable history with Anne Elliot. Of course, Sophia knows nothing about why I could, or should, have any reason to object to the Musgroves; I told her I had a girlfriend in college, but that's where her information stops short. Which means that in Sophia's mind, my college "girlfriend" could have been just one girl or many of them, all equally forgettable to her. As far as Sophia's concerned, I use that term to refer to any girl I've gone on more than two dates with, so Anne has merged with all the other "girlfriends" into a single, amorphous entity with a zillion different faces.

Sophia's the one who negotiates the details with the Musgroves; this is one of the times when it's good to not be the parent, because that way I don't need to get personally involved. It turns out they're more in our backyard then I could've ever imagined; they're actually living in that big duplex just a block away from us, well within walking distance. As a gesture of thanks to them for agreeing to babysit Tiffany in the afternoons, Sophia suggests we invite the Musgrove family over for dinner on Saturday night, and who am I to say no?

"There's nine of them," I protest. "Aren't they taking advantage of our goodwill?"

"Now, Fred, you know that's not a very nice thing to say," tuts Sophia, making me feel like I'm ten years old all over again. She's the consummate hostess with everything in control - there's chicken roasting in the oven; a pot of stew bubbling on the stove; a home-baked chocolate cake, complete with a fancy icing job, sitting in the refrigerator; and she's talking to me over the aroma of the pilaf she's frying. To make myself marginally useful, I've been keeping Tiffany out of her hair and away from the chocolate cake, but other than that, I don't think Anne Elliot and her ilk are worth all the sweat she's put into creating this spread, which they'll probably turn their noses up at anyway.

Eventually, it's a party of seven who turn up on our doorstep: besides little Charlie and his dad of course, there's a down-home type of older couple who look just like the way they depict "Grandpa" and "Grandma" in Tiffany's picture books; a pair of tall, blonde teenagers who're twins in the style of Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, meaning they look enough alike for you to know they're twins, but yet different enough that you can tell them apart; and a plumpish lady, probably in her twenties, with short curly hair and a round face, wearing the kind of retro dress you see at swing parties. So, it looks like Anne Elliot has chosen to default on this party after all. Interesting.

The reason why I know that the stocky younger guy in this party is Charlie's dad, is because very often, he's the one who comes to pick up Charlie after school in a flashy, brand new, bright red Tesla roadster. Most of the times I see him, he's wearing T-shirts, jeans and Birkenstocks, like what he has on tonight; and he's got a ponytail. He couldn't be farther from my image of what Anne Elliot's husband would be; I thought she'd marry one of those buttoned-up prep-school-and-Ivy-League chaps with a fat bank account, a summer home in Martha's Vineyard, and a whole string of suffixes to his name. This guy, he might have all the rest of the above for all I know, but he's the exact opposite of buttoned-up and preppy. And there's one part of the whole puzzle that just doesn't fit - from the way the lady in the retro dress is hanging on to him, it's clear she's got to be his wife or girlfriend, and she is definitely not Anne Elliot. Even if nothing else can shock me about this family anymore, I'm pretty sure it'd be farfetched to presume she's his mistress; if that were the case, he'd hardly parade her around with an entire posse of extended family.

"Well, if it isn't Harvard Hottie," titters one of the twins to the other, and from the way they're giggling and nudging each other, they're probably sharing some kind of private joke; most likely, they've noticed the MIT T-shirt I'm wearing. I'm not even sure what I hope to achieve with that in the first place - to show that I still fit into my clothes from college? To emphasize that I'm still proud to have been a member of the MIT community? None of it matters anymore, because the intended audience is absent without apologies.

The older lady - the Grandma - silences the twins with a warning look, and starts the introductions. We learn that Henry and Lucy Musgrove are the proud grandparents of Charles Jr., and that the twins are the sisters of Charles Sr. I've got to stop thinking of the twins as elongated versions of Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, because they've got names of their own: Henrietta and Louisa, respectively. And Charlie has a little brother who sends his regrets, because unfortunately he's down with a bout of flu and can't come. That leaves the parents of Charlie Musgrove, and -

"Where is Anne?" I ask, before I remember that to everyone around here, I've got no reason to even know that Anne Elliot exists.

"How do you know Anne?" demands one of the twins - Louisa, I think. They're quick on the uptake, for sure. The rest are probably dying to know too, because everyone's looking at me.

"Uncle Freddy knows Aunty Annie because we went to say hello when she picked Charlie up from school," explains Tiffany helpfully, looking to Charlie. I'm not sure if this really makes things any better, because the idea of me taking my own initiative to chat up Anne Elliot while doing the preschool run - or even worse, that I'm doing the preschool run as an excuse to chat up Anne Elliot - isn't exactly one I want to put into their heads.

So I explain, "I knew Anne in college. She was in my year, and she was also an aerospace engineering major, so I saw her in some of my classes."

"So you know my sister?" the lady with Charles Sr. asks. "What was she like in college? She always says those were the best years of her life, but she never tells me anything else about it."

"Different," I say. "Besides, for me, college was a really long time ago." The best years of her life, huh? If that really was the case, then why would she want to walk away from everything that's left of her life in MIT?

"Different how? Was she happier? Anne never has any fun; I don't know if she even knows how to. She's a really nice person, but she can be a little boring. Did she actually, like, have a life when she was in college?" Henrietta joins in the fray too.

"I dunno," I say, shrugging. "I was a frat boy, and she was a good girl. 'Nuff said." Technically, both parts of this statement have some truth in them, and if these two comments lead the Musgroves to some other conclusion when put together, I'm not claiming any responsibility for it. They still look skeptical, though; probably because Anne hasn't changed at all as far as they're concerned. To them, she was a good girl before, and she's still being a good girl now.

Everything I see and hear over dinner is an ode to the misery of Anne Elliot. For the entire meal, Charlie doesn't take his eyes off the iPad at all. Keeping him entertained and fed is the work of two adults at the same time: his grandma cuts up everything into bite-size pieces for him to pop into his mouth, while Charles Sr. holds the iPad and plays memory games with him. It seems that when they're at home, this job isn't half as labor-intensive; Anne is the one who usually does it single-handedly, for both of her sister's kids. Of course, as Mary Musgrove nee Elliot points out, her kids are always better behaved when they're with Anne; somehow, they simply adore their sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice Aunty Annie. Tiffany slides off her chair and scoots over; the novelty of it all is irresistible to her when TV, books, laptops and the like are all strictly forbidden during mealtimes at our house. But Sophia and I simultaneously shoot her a firm glare, and she skulks back to her seat with a pout.

Crossing paths with Anne Elliot in Plymouth, of all places, turns out to be not as much of an act of chance as I'd originally believed. My parents set up home here because it's an easy commuting distance to both the Ann Arbor and Dearborn campuses, where Dad and Mom taught respectively; and serendipitously, it's near the airport too, which makes it very easy for me to juggle living with Sophia even after I start flying commercially for Delta. Funnily enough, the Musgroves moved here a couple years ago for reasons that aren't that different from the ones my family had; they needed a bigger place to accommodate the extended family when Charles and Mary had kids, and they're thinking ahead about how to keep the twins close even after they start college, which they're targeting to be at one of the UMich campuses. And Anne is living with them in some kind of strange babysitting arrangement; by day, she's working at the airport in her engineering job with Delta Airlines¹, and although they didn't plan the move here particularly to convenience her, the proximity suits everybody all too well - they can tap on her to do the school run in the mornings, and even to scoot out of her lunch break to cover for Charles on days when he can't make it to pick up his kid from preschool. This revelation underlines the inevitability of it all; even if Anne hadn't shown up practically in my backyard, the sheer fact that she's continued to work in aviation, as have I, would've set her up on a collision course with me sooner or later.

There's one piece of good news at least - there's not a chance that I'll run into any of the other Elliots anytime soon, because Walter Elliot can't hold onto his money and has spent his way to Florida, while ELMSCO is teetering on the edge of insolvency. This is completely new to me, and it just goes to show that for all their self-importance, the Elliots aren't such big shots after all. I've been following the news faithfully whenever I can, and yet I never heard about the downfall of ELMSCO because the news focuses on the big boys like the GM's, the Ford's, and maybe a little of the next tier of parts suppliers like the Delphi's and the Visteon's, but nobody bothers about a sub-sub contractor like ELMSCO. Privately held firms, in any case, can keep a lot of dirty linen private. Small wonder the Elliots like living in their own little bubble so much, because if they were to step outside of it, they'd realize what small fry they are to everyone else in the world.

Well, the real whammy is, it all boils down to this: my life has ended up being intertwined with Anne Elliot's again not just because of chance, and not just because of fate; it's a logical, unavoidable result of the life choices that she and I have made even while living parallel lives in separate bubbles. This is the perfect irony - it was aviation that drew me to her in the first place, and yet now, it's also aviation that makes it impossible to extricate my path completely from hers, no matter how much I want to.

Over dessert, Henrietta and Louisa finally realize why they think I look familiar to them; after they've put two and two together, they figure out that this isn't the first time they've seen my face.

"Aren't you that pilot from the Thunderbirds? We have the poster at home, and it's got your autograph on it. Can we call you Captain Wentworth?" asks Henrietta excitedly.

"Or maybe we should call you Captain America," coos Louisa, practically oozing syrup with every syllable.

"Just call me Frederick," I say, trying to sound as offhand as I can about this one. "Or you can call me Fred, or Freddy, or Fritz, or whatever. Take your pick." This whole "Captain" business is a sore point with me, because I was Captain Wentworth once, and then I got past that when I was promoted to Major, but now I'm not anything anymore. Talk about going from hero to zero. And after months of training on a simulator, I'll still have to spend who knows how many flying hours as a First Officer before I can become "Captain" again.

"Why aren't you married yet? Or do you have a girlfriend?" Mrs. Musgrove asks. "You seem like a good boy, and the girl who catches you is one lucky girl."

"Because I like the freedom of being a swinging bachelor," I say, deliberately keeping my tone frivolous enough that nobody knows if I'm joking or not. "Besides, who needs the institution of marriage these days?"

Sophia discreetly raises an eyebrow at me; it's her there-are-minors-in-the-house warning signal. In due consideration for said minors, I stop there, though censoring what comes out of my mouth doesn't mean I have to censor my thoughts as well. And it's true, really, that I don't believe in the institution of marriage. Who needs to exchange fancy vows when the real proof of the pudding's in whether you're even still together ten, twenty, thirty years down the road? In this day and age, the permutations are infinite: there are people who walk down the aisle with someone new once every five years or so; and those who devote all their lives to someone, even living together and having kids without ever seeing the need to get that formal piece of paper; and any number of possibilities in between. Of all people, I should know that best of all; I believed in the institution of marriage once before, and look where that's gotten me to now. See, it's still landed me empty-handed, all the same.

The Musgroves end up falling into the category of "family friends"; they're not exactly my first choice of people to hang out with, but I still end up spending a lot of time with them out of duty. Like for example, when Sophia volunteers to have Charlie and his little brother Wally over for lengthy play dates on some of the weekends to balance out our babysitting debt with the Musgrove. And Sophia's obligations are my obligations too; she's put Ed and me first for years, so it shouldn't kill me to take on the kids every now and then so she's got some free time to put herself first for once. When they're at our house, I insist the same rules apply to them and Tiffany, and with a little creativity, I end up enforcing them without too much difficulty; at lunchtime, I spring for pizza or bring them to Chuck E. Cheese, but if and only if they're willing to comply with the no-toys-books-or-gadgets-at-mealtimes rule. Things get easier as I build up more cred with them; it kind of helps that they really look up to an Uncle Freddy who flies airplanes, and also that I'm able to pull a convincing tough-guy act. If Anne's misery is somewhat mitigated by my taking the two little boys in hand for a bit, that's entirely an accidental by-product of me doing my duty. So don't get me wrong, man, I'm just being Wentworth here, and not being Fred.

Charles is sorely in need of a bro, and some weekends, Sophia watches the kids while he enlists my company to engage in various types of simulated car racing: whether it's actual karting, or virtual racing on everything ranging from NASCAR to Formula 1 on his Xbox. In terms of the actual kick I get from them, these cheap thrills are nothing compared to what I used to do, but after a whole week of practicing commercial flight procedures on a simulator, I'm usually up for any kind of fun on the weekends to break the monotony a little. And maybe I'm also in need of a bro to chill with at times, especially since my own pals are scattered all over the country.

When spring comes and we're able to spend more time outside, I find more outlets to occupy the kids and give Sophia a breather. We sign Tiffany up for a mini-soccer program, and the Musgroves enroll Charlie in the same program too. Just as a further excuse to get out of the house, I'm all too happy to take on responsibility for bringing them there and keeping an eye on them during practice. By this time, it's not just the kids and Charles who're happy to have me around - the twins also tag along when Charles and I go karting, and when I take the kids to their mini-soccer sessions on Sundays, and I don't mind; the more the merrier, isn't it?

Looks like, I'm well on my way to desensitizing myself to Anne Elliot's presence. The times the boys are with me, she'll just drop them off and go, which spares me the need for any kind of long conversation with her; and on the weekdays that Tiffany's at the Musgroves', I limit my dealings with her to just pick-up duty as well. And on those occasions that Sophia, Tiffany and I are invited to hang out with the entire Musgrove family, I've got plenty of other company to choose from. It appears like Anne's keeping her distance from me, and regardless of whether or not she's doing that on purpose, I've got absolutely no problem with it. After all, it's not as if I'm short of other things to do; I can always gravitate towards those people who actually welcome me.

¹ Northwest Airlines merged with Delta Airlines in 2008. After the merger, only one corporate identity (that of Delta) was retained. Hence, Anne is technically considered as working with Delta Airlines at this point, even though she hasn't changed job from her original employment with Northwest (as described in Just an Earth-Bound Misfit, I).

Spring 2012
Anne

"Fred-die," Lulu is saying for what must be the thousandth time. I hope nobody hears me actually gagging, because this is making me feel sicker than any morning sickness Mary ever had when she was expecting Charlie and Wally. Maybe I'm the ageing relic they make me out to be after all, because I actually like the sound of the name "Frederick". Somehow, it's befitting of how rugged he is. In times when expediency is necessary, I use "Fred", but never, ever "Freddie". Because when it's uttered by anyone over the age of five, "Freddie" is just too cute, and completely not him at all. And he hates it, too - or at least, he used to hate it back when we were in MIT. I'm not so sure of anything with regards to Frederick anymore.

Like why on earth, when we're now supposed to be mature adults and acting as good role models to the kids, he's behaving much more childishly than he ever did in college, even in freshman year. He's regressed into, I don't know, a Neanderthal from our pre-history or something. Fred knows he can't sing to save his life, and that's why back in college, he'd subject himself to any other kind of embarrassment to avoid answering to any challenge to sing. Yet now, he's parading his awful singing skills all over the place for comic effect with the kids. Whenever he's the one dropping in to pick up Tiffany in the evenings, I know right away because I hear him before I see him. There'll be the off-key rendition of "Everybody was Kung Fu fightin'...", and he'll be doing all kinds of exaggerated Kung Fu Panda moves to match. Charlie and Wally think it's great fun, of course, and they're showing it through the oldest, most genuine, and most effective form of flattery - imitation. The best example of that is how Wally, who turned three over Thanksgiving and is still disturbingly attached to his pacifier, will pull it out of his mouth to sing along the three words "kung fu fightin" every time they come up in the song. All this means my ears don't get a respite at all from the minute I get home from work until I've finally managed to put them to bed. Not to mention, bedtime becomes an extremely rubber concept when you're all winded up from being Kung Fu Panda and still ready to bounce off the walls.

And then, there's the first time Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove thought it'd be a good idea for both our families to hang out at their place on a Saturday afternoon, just so we could all get to know each other better. Hetty and Lulu were more than happy to find an excuse to escape that party when a bunch of their high school friends came by honking, and - I can't believe this - Fred actually hopped on their bandwagon to go to the mall.

"Got room for an ol' fogey like me?" he'd said, and next thing we knew, he'd shot out the door and bolted off just like our resident high school seniors.

Neanderthal or not, Fred's still got my entire family wrapped around his little finger, even though his interactions with us are limited to basically three categories of activities: firstly, keeping the kids highly amused and entertained with his ridiculous antics; secondly, doing pretend auto racing, whether miniature or virtual, with Charles; and thirdly, any en-famille gatherings that Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove plan, though if Hetty and Lulu find a way to ditch these, he lets them drag him along with them, and I mean actually, physically dragging him by the hand. Not that they don't do that other times as well; Lulu's been hanging onto him like a barnacle, and he isn't protesting about that at all. It seems like Fred isn't above doing anything to get an ego boost, because the kids and the twins positively worship the ground he walks on, and he's been lapping up the attention for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Even Hetty, who's been attached for the longest time, is hanging around Fred enough to make her squeeze, Chuck Hayter, a little nervous.

Seriously, karting? For your information, we've all passed the big 3-0 like, four years ago, and we've lived more than half our lives by now with real driving licenses of our own. So I wonder how on earth zipping around in pretend cars on a pretend racetrack can possibly hold any appeal to one guy who's got his own roadster and another one who used to fly a fighter jet, unless they're both massively bored. And if that's the case, I'm not terribly surprised, actually. Charles has been short of outlets to take a break from Mary's company for quite some time now that most of our old school buddies are married with kids; and I'll bet the pretend racing is the closest thing to adrenaline-driven excitement Fred's been getting since he left the Air Force. I kind of pity Fred for that, actually.

What I don't pity Fred about, though, is that no matter how bored and attention-hungry he is, stooping to the level of fishing for popularity from high school kids is just too much, in my opinion. Because the Fred I'm familiar with is capable of maturity, and I've got the images of the ambitious young soon-to-be-minted officer who spoke of his passion for flying on commencement day, the aerobatics pilot who performed daredevil maneuvers with perfect accuracy and discipline, and the outdoorsy-yet-sophisticated looking yuppie "dad" I saw picking up Tiffany from preschool (it was only when Tiffany started coming over after school that I found out he's actually her uncle), to show me the man he has become. But while the weekday Fred, silly antics aside, is still the perfect picture of a pilot in his neatly pressed clothes, on the weekends he'll come slouching around in layered T-shirts, hoodies and baggy jeans, with a baseball cap worn backwards. He knows exactly which underground streetwear labels will impress Hetty and Lulu's crowd; and his sense of hip-hop style, combined with the purchasing power to match, makes their guy friends more than a little bit wary and jealous.

Things boil over to the point that Chuck Hayter asks him, "Are you Louisa's sugar daddy?" one day, and I'm the one cringing on Fred's behalf. I hope this reminds him that he ought to be way beyond this; he's almost twice their age, for heaven's sake.

Well, even if Fred's maturity has gone all the way down the drain, his skill as a master tactician hasn't. Because he's a champion at doing all sorts of antics that make me tut in disapproval like someone's granny, so that I feel like a geriatric party pooper while he's charming the socks off everyone else - including the truly geriatric members of this household. It's strangely subtle in all its non-subtlety, because I'm the only one who hears the message loud and clear: Fred just plain wishes I could buzz off. I wish I could, too.

"What do you want to major in when you go to college?" I remember how it feels like to be pelted with this question in the lead-up to high school graduation, and I certainly don't envy Hetty and Lulu when Sophie asks them this over dinner, because I wouldn't want to go back to this stage of life myself.

"Maybe English," says Hetty. "But maybe not, if I've got to end up teaching high school after that." She rolls her eyes in a little pantomime of horror.

"I don't know," acknowledges Lulu. "I want a job where I can wear jeans to work, and where I can knock off in time to come home and watch Glee and Gossip Girl. But not if it means working in Silicon Valley, because compsci is so boring. And I don't think I can stand it if all my co-workers are geeks. I've got to have someone hot to look at once in a while, don't I?" Needless to say, she's turning moony eyes on Fred to make sure we all know who she's talking about when she says this.

"Well, looks like somebody sure knows what she wants," says Fred; he looks perfectly non-committal, but I think I can detect the tiny edge of sarcasm in his tone.

"Yup, I certainly do. We're Gen Y," says Lulu, deliberately linking her arm with Fred's. "Which means we know exactly what we want, and we won't settle for anything less. We're not like older people who do things because they have to; we've got the freedom to do only the things we want to do." She looks directly at me when she says this.

Fred says nothing, and Lulu takes his silence for acceptance; from this time, the implicit divide of Gen X vs. Gen Y is drawn, and it seeps into every little dynamic of our weekend interactions. I can't help feeling a little betrayed by Fred's apparent defection because the Fred I knew was a poster boy for Gen X from head to toe - he had a grungy appreciation of rock and metal, a decidedly independent outlook on life, an ability to see the potential for our generation to make a bigger difference to the world beyond ourselves, the resilience to cope with change, and an unobtrusively pragmatic attitude towards work that's driven by the desire to achieve. And from the way Fred's going about his transition to commercial aviation and playing dad to Tiffany, I don't see him as having lost his Gen X values either. But who am I to say anything? Gen X is the forgotten generation, after all. Fred may have - or pretended to have - changed, but that fact about Gen X is one thing that'll always remain the same, at least as long as Gen Y is around.

In these days of MP3 technology, there's technically no need for a high school house party to have a DJ, but it's just one of those things I always do for Hetty and Lulu anyway. It started way back when they were little kids, and Charles and I would put on different CDs for them to dance to in the house during the holidays. Now, they still love it when there's someone to DJ for them because they and their friends can yell out song requests on the fly, plus I can also sneak in little surprises here and there. That's the joy of being a spin doctor: you create the atmosphere, and you dictate the pace of the evening. When I'm the DJ, I'm directly responsible for orchestrating all the fun they're having, and that's a good feeling.

Everything starts when Lulu figures out she can't bring Fred to senior prom; that was a no-brainer all along, but it still took quite a while for it to sink in for her. There's this boy in her year called Brett who's been dropping hints to her all semester, only for her to keep dissing him summarily because no high-school prom date can quite measure up to our dear Fred, who's apparently set a whole new standard for both the words "hot" and "cool" at the same time. I must say, though, it's hardly a fair competition because when he was in high school, Fred had never fought in wars or flown a fighter jet either. Ever since Fred appeared on the scene, I've listened to enough monologues about the inferiority of high school boys to fill up a dozen cassette tapes, probably. Except I'd never want to tape those conversations down because playing them back would really be like putting me through a special kind of purgatory, worse than Chinese torture.

The only thing that saves Lulu from going to the prom stag, or whatever the girl version of "stag" might be, is the kindness of Chuck Hayter. Just when the situation was looking quite hopeless, he managed to get a friend from his band, a junior, to fill in as Lulu's date. Instead of feeling appropriately grateful, though, Lulu's been bellyaching all afternoon about the immaturity of younger boys; I'm actually glad when her date arrives and squires her out the door.

Post-prom, the party is the only thing Hetty and Lulu ever think about, night and day. They've got it in their heads that if only they can have a do-over of prom night at home, so Fred can be in the picture too, that'd be a perfect way to mark their high school graduation. Charles is quite happy to loan his half of the duplex for the event, and cover the cost of catering in a fancy spread as well. Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove protest mildly at the expense of it all, but Charles is determined to make this a memorable occasion for his sisters.

"It's not every day my kid sisters graduate high school," he says. "So take it that I'm giving them a special present to mark the occasion, and I want them to remember it as the best graduation ever."

In the run-up to the party, Fred finds the girls talking about the dance music they want to play at the party, and they end up doing some kind of mini music cultural exchange. Every time Fred pops by to pick up Tiffany, I always hear some snatches of our old '80s and '90s rock songs playing from the living room hi-fi before he goes off. So it's no surprise when Hetty and Lulu inform me of the theme for their graduation house party.

"The '80s are the days of disco dance music," pronounces Hetty, as if she's an authority on the subject. "So the theme of our party's gonna be '80's Night'."

"Anne, you'll DJ for us, won't you?" chips in Lulu. "You know all the retro songs, so you'll be perfect for this one. You're like, an expert on the '80s."

Regardless of whether they really meant to or not, they've managed to make me feel positively ancient all over again. But this is a task I might actually enjoy, if not for the fact that I'll be staring at Fred and Lulu in the face all night long; it'll give me a chance to showcase all the songs I grew up with. And I've got an idea: I'll use a laptop and projector to flash my favorite MTVs onto the wall for everybody to see, whenever I can find the MVs I want off Youtube, at least.

I open the evening with DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's Boom Shake the Room. Strictly speaking, it's not a '80s song per se, but I want to have something loud and lively to get everyone in the mood. In his younger days, I know Fred had some mean popping and locking moves, but I'd expect him to be rusty; after all, that was all half a lifetime ago. Well, Peter Pan needs to take some lessons from Fred, because the Fred who's here tonight actually blends in seamlessly with all the high school kids; he's decked out in streetwear with serious cred, and even though the moves he's doing are relatively simple compared to the stuff he used to do at the one or two frat parties we went to together, his attitude more than covers for what he's lost in technique. By the end of the song, he's got all the kids practically eating out of his hand. We were born in the same year, but in the eyes of those kids, I'm Geriatric Gen X, and he's the dude with 'tude. How fair is that?

Halfway through the evening, I put on Summer Rain by Belinda Carlisle. I didn't go clubbing all that often in my younger years, but on the rare occasions when I did go, this is the song I absolutely had to dance to. So playing this track is almost like a reflex action to me; I can't imagine going to any '80s disco party without grooving to Summer Rain. It's always been my happy song; only this time, I realize all the upbeat vibes I used to get from it are seriously deceptive. Never before was I remotely conscious that this is actually a very sad song at heart, and that it could jolly well be singing about my own life; but at this moment of reckoning, it becomes starkly obvious to me. Because I'm the girl in the song, who saw her sweetheart off into the military and never heard from him again after that. Unlike the song, Fred did come back, physically at least; but from the way he and Lulu are cavorting around on the dance floor, I guess it's obvious that emotionally, he's as lost to me as if he never came back at all. And yet, this girl in the song, who's dancing alone but imagining she's with her guy, she could be me right now. Only I'm not even doing any actual moves; if there's any dancing involving me, it's all going on in my mind.

As the song fades away, Lulu snaps her fingers and starts belting out the chorus one more time at the top of her voice, with Hetty's voice and those of the other girls joining hers in quick succession:

"Oh my love it's you that I dream o-of
Oh my love, since tha-at day
Some-where in my-y heart I'm al-wa-ays
Dancing with you in the SUM-MER RAIN!

Doe-sn't mat-ter what I do no-ow
Doe-sn't mat-ter what I-I-I say
Some-where in my-y heart I'm al-wa-ays
Dancing with you in the SUM-MER RAIN!"

Good grief. I should've remembered they had a remix of the song in '04, which is why these girls actually know the lyrics. In their voices, the song sounds campy rather than sad or wistful, and they end off with a wild whoop, cheerleader-style, before they land in a giggling heap. Now that they're done, they've fully succeeded in spoiling this song for me forever; for I don't think I can ever listen to Summer Rain again without the images of Fred and Lulu grooving practically hip to hip, surrounded by a whole bunch of raucous high school kids, playing like a sick MTV in my head.

By the time everybody loses steam, it's about 3 a.m. already. Mary and the kids are hanging out at Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove's half of the duplex to escape the noise, and I'll bet there's no point bringing them back now; they've probably crashed for the night long ago. I ask, not too loudly, if anyone's got final song requests; my hope is that there'll be none, and then I can close shop and go. Kids are everywhere - sprawling around either asleep or halfway there, with some couples making out at whatever private nooks and crannies they can find - but no one's really paying any attention to me. Luckily nobody's drunk, though, because we've put our foot down strictly on the no-underage-drinking policy. Enforcing that has been pretty uphill for us, especially with the insistent lobbying from Hetty and Lulu, and we couldn't possibly have done it if Fred hadn't weighed in and tipped the balance in our favor. Charles, bless his heart, is such a nice guy that if he'd been left to his own devices, Lulu would've run roughshod over him without any difficulty at all. I never thought Fred would be the one I'd end up having to thank for this; it's the first time I've ever seen him not humoring Lulu. But anyway, I do. Silently, that is.

It looks like I've got the all-clear to pack the laptop and speakers, until Fred speaks.

"One last song, please. I want November Rain."

Great. Wonderful. This song goes all the way back, even beyond the start of our history; as teenagers, Fred and I listened to vastly different stuff for the most part, but Guns N' Roses was one of the handful of bands we had in common right out of high school. And if there's one thing about rock Fred and I had total consensus on in freshman year, it was that November Rain is the song and the MTV of the '90s. Nobody gets up to dance when I play the song, simply because everyone's totally zonked out and also because this song isn't exactly conducive to dancing; it's almost 10 solid minutes of pure, unbridled angst. Plus the fact that, even if I suspend judgment on whether there's deliberate malice intended on Fred's part, the images of the MTV are directly mocking at me; or rather, my failure to actually make it to the altar with Fred.

With all the favorite songs of my youth turning traitor on me tonight, I'm not sure I can revisit any piece of nostalgia from my younger years without it seeming tainted in some way or other. Somehow, Fred coming back has done that to me. One thing's for sure: wild horses couldn't make me do another '80s party again after this, not for anyone at all.

Disclaimer: "Summer Rain" belongs to Belinda Carlisle.

Chapter 5 - Underneath the Same Big Sky

Posted on 2011-08-08

June 2012
Frederick

This holiday's supposed to be my "End of Freedom" party to mark my last weekend of not-officially-working life before I start flying for Delta, and it seemed like a no-brainer to go back to Lake Huron. It's where we used to go for short weekend holidays in the spring and summer whenever Mom was well enough, and it's full of memories for Sophia, Ed and me. It's where I used to cannonball into the water even in April or May, the only thing giving me the same kind of thrill as getting air on my skateboard or my BMX back when I was that age.

But this time it's different, because the Musgroves aren't really cut out for the outdoors at all - they've brought in enough suitcases full of clothes and toys, appliances and gadgets, tidbits, and cans of soda to last for more than a week, even though we'll be here for less than three full days. In the daytime, it gets warm enough for the twins to strip down to tiny denim miniskirts, tank tops and flip-flops, showing off the fancy new manicures and pedicures they just got. I just hope I won't be a spectator to the eventual drama, because if you ask me, the probability that they'll ruin those nails before the weekend is up is one hundred percent.

"Ooooh! Kayaking! Isn't that fun?" Louisa is looking dreamily at a few couples who're paddling on the lake, and from the way she's hanging onto my bicep, I think I know just what she's thinking about; except the reality of kayaking isn't that way. For starters, there's the pong of manure in the boathouse, which sends the Musgrove twins scurrying out the next second.

"Ewww… it stinks, and I'm so not getting in there. Charles, my darling brother, I know you'll be sweet enough to go in and get the kayaks with Fred-die, won'tcha?"

Great, just great - Charles groans audibly as he lifts up his end of the tandem kayak, carrying it off the rack and down the slope to set it in the water, and Chuck Hayter steps in help him while I balance them off on the other end. And then we have to repeat the process again, and again. It's no fun at all, when these kayaks are built like tanks.

Besides, Charles and I have to convince the twins to change into running shorts, or some kind of other shorts they can get wet in, and to put on shoes or sandals that'll actually stay on, before we can let them get into the kayaks. The balking we get from them for this is already bad enough, but it gets ten times worse when they carry on about the smell and the tan lines they'll get when it's time to put on their life jackets. All of it's enough to send my mind drifting back into another kayaking trip, in another time and another age, with another girl. That was the last time I'd been here before now, and I've got much better memories of that outing, probably because I wasn't subjected to motor-mouthed complaining about a wide enough variety of topics to fill up an encyclopedia; and this is only day one.

In contrast, that other girl on that long-ago trip was the real article; I was the one who'd introduced her to the outdoors, but once initiated, her love for nature was unadulterated and genuine. She didn't have to be told to grasp, instinctively, the three basic tenets I live by to stay safe and preserve the integrity of my surroundings: know your limitations, respect your equipment, and leave no trace. That girl would never come out here with miniskirts, bikinis, manicures, or flimsy flip-flops; in her Tevas and hiking shorts, she was always ready for sand, mud or water, and we'd had loads of fun no matter how wet or filthy we got. And we'd always made sure the place we left behind was the same or better off than how we'd found it, unlike the twins and Charlie who need to be reminded to pick up after themselves every time they drop a candy wrapper, soda can or Kleenex on the ground.

The summer before senior year, I made a detour to Michigan while driving back to MIT from Texas, and asked her to start her drive from Grosse Pointe back to Cambridge a day earlier than usual.

"I'll show you a gem in your own backyard," I'd told her. And after we'd come here, she'd agreed with me that this place is a gem indeed.

That girl is now right before me, and at this moment in her Tevas and hiking shorts, she's just the same as I remember her from all those years ago. Physically, she looks less like a phantom already; it's amazing what some sun and a little bit of happiness can do to perk somebody up in an instant. And it's getting easier to believe that the long-ago girl in my memory, the one I loved, is the same girl I'm seeing in front of me, when it's obvious she still likes dipping her toes in the water; and from the way she's savoring it, I'll bet she hasn't had a chance to do this sort of thing since that last time we came here, so many years ago.

"I wonder if I should take a single kayak," she muses. "Or maybe I should hang around here, with the kids? I'm sure Sophie could use some company."

"Actually, you can share with me," Charles says. "Mary won't go in because she says the water's too cold, so she can help watch the kids for a change. Besides, I've rented the double already. Take it as a favor to an old friend, won't you?"

"Yeah, why not?" I find myself saying. "You'll have fun, and you're a shark in a kayak." She's lethal in a single kayak, because she's light and nimble. I should know, after we'd devised our own version of kayak water polo on this very lake.

Everybody's staring at me now; to them, the idea of Anne being a shark in any context is just way out. I feel a little indignant that I've always known a side of Anne that's there, but which her family just can't or won't see; until I remember to register some kind of panic because with that one line, I've let slip that my dealings with Anne in college definitely went beyond what you'd usually expect from a frat boy who won't touch a goody-two-shoes girl like Anne with a ten-foot pole.

Anne just smiles. "It's true," she says. "And I'm gonna show you. Anyone on for a race?" She clambers into the front of the kayak she's sharing with Charles, and then beckons the twins with a challenging look and a come-hither gesture. She's always been good at defusing tricky situations, and this time is no different; she's just saved me from having to explain.

So that's how we end up on the water - me with Louisa, Chuck Hayter with Henrietta, and Charles with Anne. Maybe it's a good thing these tandem kayaks are built like tanks, after all. They're virtually uncapsizable, so I won't have to worry about the possibility of us turning turtle and my having to rescue Louisa. Somehow, I know she won't take it the same way as Anne did when I provoked her into overturning in her single. "End of Freedom" couldn't be a more apt name for this occasion, because it's only day one, and it's already the end of my freedom from thoughts of Anne Elliot. And this time, the fault's all mine for having dreamed up this stupid scheme in the first place.

Anne

"Hey, Anne," Charles nudges me from behind. "Wanna try bumping them? They're so caught up with each other that they won't know what hit them."

"For heaven's sake, that's so childish. We're not in high school anymore." Unlike what everyone's thinking, I do have a definition of the word "fun" in my vocabulary. It just doesn't have to include being a third wheel to Fred and Lulu, but nobody ever gets it because nobody knows. That's a good thing, actually; they're not supposed to know, ever.

"Oh, come on. We're on holiday, after all. And nowadays 30 is the new 20, you know? You shouldn't be acting like an old lady before your time. It's high time you had a little fun - especially you, you haven't given yourself a chance to really enjoy life ever since you came out of college."

"OK." I sigh. I'm sick of everyone telling me I'm a stick-in-the-mud schoolmarm, and Charles is just about the last Gen-X-or-younger person around who hasn't started the "you're-such-a-party-pooper" spiel, until now. "Let's approach them from behind, then when they turn a little we'll run into them at full speed. Then they really won't know what hit them."

Charles and I are lurking around, waiting for our moment to strike. I know how to be still, silent and invisible, because I've been that way all my life; and anyway, they seem so wrapped up in each other, they probably wouldn't be any the wiser if a grizzly cannonballed into the water and pounced on them at that moment. From where we are, we can just hear Lulu and Fred's conversation, and I guess our ears are sharper when we hear our names being mentioned.

"Sometimes, I really wish Charles married Anne instead of Mary," Lulu is saying. "Mary complains all the time and she's always finding excuses to bump the kids off to us when we're around, but Anne is so much more of a sport."

"You mean - was there ever a chance of that happening?" It looks like there's some major moment of truth coming up for Fred, and I'm not sure if I want to be in on this, but I listen anyway, just to find out whether this truth will support or contradict the warped version of me I think Fred has in his head.

"I'd like to think there was. Mom used to tell me and Hetty all kinds of cute little stories about how close Charles and Anne were when they were kids, stuff like how they were so sweet acting out An American Tail together when they were in elementary school or something.

"And one day when me and Hetty were really little - four or five, I think - we were hiding under the porch when we heard Anne telling Charles she had a boyfriend. After that, Charles was really sad for weeks, and Mom said it was because he asked Anne to go out with him and she said no. The funny thing is, we never knew who the boyfriend was, or even if there really was a boyfriend. For all I know, Anne might be faking. I've never seen her going on dates with anyone, ever.

"But then, maybe there could've been somebody when she was working on the West Coast, way long ago. When she came home, she brought this really clunky old car to Charles, and asked him to keep it in our garage. That car was so gross, with rust everywhere - I say, it's only fit for the junkyard. But all the way till now, Anne just won't junk it, no matter what we say. It's just sitting there, and sometimes Anne comes over to polish it - God knows why she even bothers. And don't ever try asking Anne anything about it. She'll kill you."

"What kind of car is it?" I swear I can hear some modicum of emotion in Fred's voice, but then maybe I'm just imagining things. Hearing what I want to hear.

"It's a Pontiac. '85 or '86, Charles says it is. Brown. Ugly as they come."

"Let's go." I don't want to listen any more, and maybe that's what makes me so strong all of a sudden. I stick my right paddle into the water and swing out in an arc, spinning us nearly a hundred and eighty degrees with a single stroke. Charles seems to have the same idea too, for he's adding his strokes to mine as we beat the quickest retreat we possibly can.

Hetty and Lulu's obsession with all things Harry Potter is just one of those things that hasn't changed in the past 10 years, and which probably won't change in the next 10 years at least. So we end up playing Muggle Quidditch, though I suspect more than fifty percent of the motivation behind that is just to create one more excuse for Fred and Lulu to prance around each other as if they're in a Bollywood movie. The other reason, I suppose, is for Hetty to impress Fred with her Girl Scout skills by square-lashing the kids' hula hoops onto posts for the goals, seemingly oblivious to how Chuck is seething right under her nose. Before this long-awaited game, the excitement's been building up to the point that even though Wally's still too young to understand the rules, he's added the word "Quid-it" to his vocabulary already.

We don't have enough players to have a full-size game, so we've come up with our own reduced version with two Chasers, one Seeker, one Bludger and one Keeper per team. It's the Gen X vs. Gen Y divide all over again, except this time, Team Gen Y has to borrow someone to undertake the boring, thankless task (in their words, of course) of being a Keeper for them, and Mr. Musgrove graciously steps in. Hah - so much for flaunting their youth and exuberance, the average age of Team Gen X is probably lower in the end. Getting someone to be the Snitch is easy enough, since everyone agrees Charlie looks every bit the part. He's certainly the roundest person around, if there's any.

"Anne has to be our Seeker," says Mary. "She's got the most experience chasing Charlie around the house." Thanks a lot, Mary. You're the one who roped me in as an ad-hoc au pair.

Team Gen X winds up with Charles gallantly offering to be the Keeper and Mary being the Bludger because she doesn't want bruises from dodging flying tennis balls, which leaves Sophie and Tiffany to be our Chasers. It's all for the best, because I think they'll be great as a mother-daughter team.

And Team Gen Y is rooting for Fred to be their Seeker, because they all think he's the living, breathing version of Cedric Diggory, only tougher, buffer and much hotter because of that. Except for Lulu, who's been having other ideas all along.

"Fred-die, you've just got to be a Chaser with me. We're the perfect A team, aren't we? Gimme a five!"

And so in the end, Chuck steps up to volunteer as their Seeker; he figures he's got more speed than Hetty - or me, for that matter.

Giving Charlie a free run of the entire park is definitely not a good idea. He weaves around other people's footballs, shimmies up into trees, and has absolutely no concept of the rules of right of way when he dashes across footpaths and bike paths. In fact, he's running right smack across the trajectory of an oncoming cyclist on a road bike going practically as fast as a car, when I catch up with him just in time to lunge forward and push him to the safety of the grass verge on the other side of the asphalt path. But such heroic life-saving measures are totally dumb for anyone who's straddling an improvised broomstick, and naturally, I trip on my stick and land sprawling.

Just when I think I'm going to end up being an impromptu speed bump on the road, someone pulls me up by the scruff of my neck and drags me backwards onto the grass. It's Fred, and he's had the sense to ditch his stick before running after me, at least. I shouldn't be surprised that he can move so fast - after all, he's got to have lightning-quick reflexes after more than a decade of flying fighter planes. But what I just can't figure out is how he knew how to come after me. To get here in time, he'd have to be paying some level of attention to what I was doing all this while, and there's absolutely no reason for him to do so when his role is to focus on Lulu and the goal, not to look at the Snitch - or at me.

"Thank you," I say rather feebly, but by the time I've turned around to say it, he's slunk off somewhere and is nowhere in sight. The numbness is wearing off and I'm starting to feel the sting; belatedly, I realize I've scraped up my palms and knees with road rash from my spill on the asphalt.

"Come back! The game isn't over yet," Lulu protests with a petulant stamp of her foot. "Anne let go of the Snitch, so it doesn't count."

A shadow sneaks up behind me, putting a bundle of something softly on the ground. It's a Nalgene full of water - Fred's - and the first-aid pack with gauze and antiseptic. Before I know it, though, he's slunk away again. He moves just like a cat, does Fred.

"Well, I've got the Snitch, so it's Game Over anyway. Ha!" Chuck lifts Charlie by the armpits and dangles him up in the air as if he's the Wimbledon trophy. "What's the score?"

"3-2 to Team B - if you count the winner Tiffany just shot in," says Mrs. Musgrove, and the Gen Y-ers stomp off in a huff. It looks like we do have the last laugh, after all.

Frederick

In the end, it's Anne who finally succeeds where Sophia and I have failed miserably, in getting Tiffany to stop singing that underpants song once and for all.

"Ten-shi no pant-su wa… Aunty Annie, aren't you going to sing with us? It's really easy."

"Tiffany, don't you think it isn't very nice to sing about underpants? I'll teach you and Charlie another song, something more grown up. I used to sing this song when I was in second grade, so both of you'll be way smarter than me if you learn it before you're even in kindergarten. It goes like this: Somewhere out there, beneath a pale moonlight…"

That's the song from An American Tail, I'll bet. The one Louisa said Anne and Charles used to sing when they were little. In fact, I guess I do sort of remember the movie, or at least I remember that Sophia took Ed and me to watch it when I was in the second or third grade. Back then, I never cared much for those types of movies, though - sentimental stuff like that's for girls. So I must be getting soft in my old age, because the song is really starting to get to me.

"And even though I know how very far apart we are
It helps to think we might be wishing on the same bright star

And when the night wind starts to sing a lonesome lullaby
It helps to think we're sleeping underneath the same big sky"

Man, Anne would really make a good mom to someone, someday. She never really had much occasion to sing back when we were in college, but somehow I knew she'd have an amazing singing voice. And Tiffany and Charlie are just like what I'd think Anne and Charles were like as kids. They could've been Anne's kids; they could've been Anne's and my kids, if things had turned out differently nearly eleven years ago. Or maybe not quite - any sons of mine have to be way tougher than Charlie and Wally are; I'd make sure of that. I'll make sure they're off shredding downhill on their mountain bikes before they fall completely victim to the Xbox, the iPad and the Wii, at least.

Anne and Charles - it really gets to me how close I could've been to the truth, the times I thought Charles was Anne's husband when I saw him picking up Charlie. The twins were around four or five when he asked her to be his girlfriend, and she said no - which means it was when we were in college, while we were together. That was the time I drove to Texas every summer in my Pontiac to clock up flying hours, working my way to pay for flight school.

Speaking of which, I wonder why Anne still keeps my Pontiac. I would've junked it long ago - in fact if my memory doesn't fail me, I was the one who specifically asked her to junk it for me. But I can't escape the reality that even if there's plenty of hard evidence by now to show she didn't break off with me out of snobbery, she did make a choice not to get back in touch with me after her grandma's passing. True, I wasn't exactly contactable then; but she could at least have set off the chain reaction by asking Tom or James about my whereabouts. Her conscious decision not to come back to me, though, just doesn't gel with the fact that she's apparently still hanging on to my ratty old Pontiac, and after twelve long years to boot. It all makes so little sense that I'd believe you if you told me somebody spiked the drinking water in my Nalgene with a hallucinogen. If I wrote this story into a song, I'm pretty sure it'd pass for psychedelic rock.

Underneath the same big sky - now, those are words that made sense to me, only it was so long ago. Back when I was fighting in Afghanistan, right after 9-11, I didn't know when I was ever going to come home again, if at all. Not that I had an actual home to speak of, but you know, I'd consider coming back to the US, anywhere in the US, as a homecoming of sorts. At that time, I still had hope, still thought Anne was just overreacting from her grandma's illness, that she might come back to me after she came back to her senses and faced up to reality. And the only thought that kept me going when I was thanking God every day to be alive, was that we were living on the same earth, under the same sky.

Disclaimer: "Somewhere Out There" is from the 1986 movie "An American Tail."

Chapter 6 - Flat Freddy

Posted on 2011-08-12

July 2012
Anne

All that stuff Lulu said to Fred about my never having a boyfriend in all the years since I came back to Detroit might be true, but I really wish they wouldn't paint me to be such a sorry loser, because I'm not. This is further testimony to the power of appearances - I've established a certain kind of image, and now it's getting to be completely impossible to live it down after it's had a decade or more to calcify.

The first few years of my working life at Northwest were the hardest, because all my co-workers within the 20-something age bracket were going to bars, clubs and parties after work, but I always had to go home to Grandma. So I missed out on an entire stage of life: the time when you've got more disposable income than when you were a teen; you don't have parents or other family breathing down your neck; and at the same time, you're still free enough from adult responsibilities - or should I say, family responsibilities - to be able to enjoy yourself to the max. Those were the times my colleagues would club till 2 a.m., and yet somehow they'd still be able to make it into the office the following morning. Not being a part of all that, it was inevitable that I'd drop out from that web of camaraderie, and start being pigeonholed as a stodgy old do-nothing. That's not a very conducive reputation for getting dates in the office, and so I never got any. But that's where perception and reality diverge, because to everyone else, they think I've never got any taste for fun; they'd probably believe I'd be happiest just sitting at home watching Days of Our Lives, or something of that variety.

Nobody knows - or more accurately, nobody even cares - about the adventures I have in my head still, the stuff sitting on my old bucket list from college which got relegated to the top shelf in the attic the day the big C came into our lives. That list includes stuff like, of course, the Boston Marathon I never got to do; backpacking through the not-so-mainstream parts of Europe, places like Croatia, for example; hiking Mt. Shasta and Mt. McKinley; going on a mission with Habitat for Humanity or similar; and setting foot at least once on every continent in the world, including Africa and Antarctica, within my lifetime. These are the things I thought I'd have all the time in the world to do, back in that period right after graduation when I expected working life to be a logical continuation of the freedom I tasted in college, in fact only even better because I had full financial and personal independence for the first time in my life. Sure, I was already tied to a future where I'd sooner or later end up having to follow Fred to wherever he was posted; but at that age, I could only see that I'd have two years of freedom to enjoy myself before that happened, and with the ease that we could plan little getaways during our college breaks, I'd had no reason to believe that getting the occasional holiday would be any more difficult in post-college, even post-marriage life; that was exactly how naive I was back then.

I may know better now, but it still doesn't stop me from indulging in flights of fancy; the only difference is that I know they'll always remain in the hypothetical realm. And that's why my years in college are the part of my personal history that I treasure the most; it's the only time I was really free to be the person I want to be, not inhibited by the confines of my family. My relationship with Fred was a natural follow-on from that self-expression; we were that close because he identified with my hunger to prove my worth and capabilities, to see more, and to experience more, since he had a hunger of his own too; and he supported me because he identified with me. I keep telling myself that I should keep an open mind with regards to relationships, and for the most part I do, except with one caveat: any relationship I get into has to have the same kind of authenticity as I had with Fred. This is the hardest part to achieve, when the sole source of any dates I have is through Father and Liz's set-ups; their manner of soliciting potential mates for me is equivalent to putting up a want ad screaming, "Partner needed to save chronically single Elliot daughter from perpetual spinsterhood!" with the word "Elliot" triple-underlined. Besides, you can't replicate the purity of college life in the real world - in college, we were all equals, and we were constantly being fed with new ideas and actively encouraged to have big dreams; whereas in the world outside, everything's about pragmatism and what kind of edge you can get over others. Excluding the friends I made in school and college, I've found there are broadly two categories of people out there: the ones who associate with us because they still think the name "Elliot" holds enough clout to get them somewhere; and those who can't be bothered because they know that the Elliot name has no real value anymore.

If you put everything together, it basically means my memory of college and Fred is the closest I've gotten to any kind of relationship in the past eleven years, and that situation's likely to continue for the rest of my life. And if you tell me that makes me a pitiful loser, maybe I can't argue with you after all. Because not wanting any excitement in life might be boring, but what's even more pathetic is when you constantly want something, and yet you know you won't ever be able to have it again.

This summer, the Musgroves are on a vacation of a lifetime that I would've loved: they're spending three weeks in Europe, of which they'll take two weeks to explore the historical ruins in Greece and Italy plus a short beach getaway in Mykonos, followed by a week in London to catch some of the Olympic Games. They've been planning this gig for more than a year already as something special to celebrate the twins' high school graduation.

"Anne, dear, you're more than welcome to join us, you know," Mrs. Musgrove said to me when the subject first came up last year. "And don't worry about the expense - just take it that you're part of the family. After all, we've known you since you were this tall."

"But if Anne comes and nobody's left at home, we'll have to bring the kids," Mary protested. "And how are we gonna manage? Wally still needs his bottles and his afternoon naps, plus with the stuff we're doing, we'll need an army to handle Charlie."

"Surely it can't be that bad," Charles has had to play diplomat too many times in this household, and this was one of the classic instances. "We could work some kid-friendly days into our itinerary. Or I can stay behind with the kids - after all, someone needs to be here to look after the company, right?"

"Don't be silly, Charles," Mary protested. "We're husband and wife, so how could I possibly go on vacation without you? And you know the garages all have their own staff already - they won't collapse just because we're away for three weeks."

"If the kids come, count me out," Hetty chipped in. "It just means we'll end up spending the whole time at Euro Disney, so what's the point of going to Europe if we could do that right here?"

"It's OK, really. I'll stay behind. Thanks a lot for inviting me, though. But I don't think I'll be able to get enough days off from work to make it for the trip, so it'll be no problem at all." It was true anyway, which made my decision pretty easy. That's the kind of flexibility that makes a huge difference between having your own business, as compared to working for someone else.

So that's how I end up being solely in charge of the house and kids for three weeks, and Sophie's presence is an added bonus because it means I don't have to go around calling the families of Charlie's friends from preschool to set up daytime babysitting arrangements. It's a lot to ask of Sophie because I'm sure she's busy too, so I try to fix some off days so she doesn't have to rearrange too many of her business commitments. She's been so sincere about offering her help, though, that I feel a little less bad about the whole thing.

"If you need help, just give us a call," she'd said. "And you're welcome to drop in for dinner with us too. I'll have to cook anyway, and it'll save you some hassle after you knock off from work."

Sophie's a godsend, and it's tough to say no to her invitation; I wouldn't want to, if not for the fact that Fred's in the picture. But I don't know if Fred would exactly welcome me at his dinner table, and this is something I can't quite explain to Sophie. So I just play it by ear, one day at a time.

"Aunty Annie, say hi to Flat Uncle Freddy," Tiffany says, waving a life-size cardboard cut-out of Fred's head and shoulders mounted on a stick at me when I come round to pick up Wally and Charlie from Sophie's the first day they're there .

From my stooping position, Flat Freddy is practically in my face, and he's true to life. Clad smartly in his Air Force uniform, he's looking me right in the eye with the same cheeky, confident smile I remember so well - he's the same Frederick who launched his cardboard airplane with a swagger, crossed the finish line at the Boston Marathon with his personal best time, and stood on the valedictorian's podium at MIT. This is the Frederick who's a total stranger to me now, because Flat Freddy's expression is far more benign than any his 3D counterpart has directed at me, specifically, since his re-entry into my life.

"Hi, Fred," I say weakly. I feel like an absolute idiot, so to cover myself, I give Tiffany an ultra-warm hello and lean around Flat Freddy to give her a half-hug.

Thankfully, Sophie doesn't snicker. She does invite me to dinner, though, and I accept only because she mentions that Fred's doing a long-haul flight and won't be back for three days. That's a relief - the combination of Flat Freddy and live Fred would be just too much for me to handle.

But even though Fred's out of town, I still can't escape from the fact that the dining table I'm sitting at is his, because Tiffany props Flat Freddy up on the chair at Sophie's left, directly across the table from me. Apparently, this is Fred's usual seat, and Tiffany used to do this every day in those times before Fred came back from the Air Force.

"It hasn't been easy making sure Tiffany grows up knowing both her uncles, when we were all living in different parts of the world," Sophie explains. "My other brother, Edward, has settled down in the UK and we Skype him every weekend, but Fred was in Iraq when Tiffany was born. That's when I had Flat Freddy made, so no matter what might happen - she'd still know her Uncle Freddy." Even though Fred's back now, Sophie still gets a little emotional thinking about the possibility that anything could have happened to Fred, and I've got to admit, it gives me the creeps too. The only difference is, Sophie can be open about it but I can't. It's a good thing the kids are around, though, because you can always count on Tiffany to lighten things up.

"I like Uncle Freddy," she says. "He tells the best jokes and stories, and he always makes me laugh. Uncle Freddy is so much fun 'cause he taught me how to ride my bike, and we can slam dunk in the driveway and play Pirates of the Caribbean. I like to be Elizabeth, but Mommy isn't any fun to be Captain Sparrow 'cause she's too girly. Uncle Freddy is louder and faster and so much more fun. "

"You and Fred, you were friends in college, weren't you?" says Sophie partway through dinner.

"Yeah," I admit. I'm not sure whether the "shark in a kayak" remark has actually made its way round to her, since she was watching the kids when we were kayaking, but as far as my former relationship with Fred is concerned, I find it's much easier to lie by omission than by commission - even if I wanted to claim we hardly knew each other, which I don't, I just can't get those words out of my mouth.

"Do you think there's anything different about Fred? I can't put my finger on it, but it just seems like something's not quite right with him."

"Boredom, I suppose," I shrug. "Back in college, he was the type of person who always had to be doing something - he just couldn't sit still. So I dunno - I won't be surprised if he's bored out of his wits by our little lives in sleepy old suburbia."

"Yeah, you're right, I guess. I just hope he comes to his senses before he ends up doing something really silly." Sophie's got enough grace not to name names, but from the pointed look she's giving me, she doesn't have to say it outright for both of us to know it. She's talking about Lulu, of course.

"Aunty Annie, you can have Flat Uncle Freddy," says Tiffany solemnly. It's after dinner, and I'm trying to hustle Charlie and Wally to pack up and go home, only the way they're dawdling, they'd make a snail look like Usain Bolt. "Charlie said you must be very lonely at night, 'cause at home you don't have anybody to talk to. So Flat Uncle Freddy can keep you comp'ny, and you can talk to him. Uncle Freddy's back, so I don't need him anymore."

Oh, wonderful. This isn't the first time I've been tempted to plaster Charlie's mouth shut with duct tape, but it's definitely the granddaddy of all the other times. When even five-year-olds are discussing the emptiness of your life, you know you've hit rock bottom.

"Thank you so much, Tiffany," I say in a desperate effort to keep whatever shreds there are left of my dignity, if any at all. "It's very kind of you to give me your Flat Uncle Freddy, but really, I can't take such a precious gift from you. What would Uncle Freddy say if he knew? He might not like it that you gave him away to somebody else." What I don't say is that Fred probably won't have very friendly thoughts about her giving Flat Freddy to me, of all people.

But Tiffany's not to be deterred by polite niceties. She presses Flat Freddy's stick into my hand, saying, "Oh, I'm sure Uncle Freddy will like it if it makes you happy. He likes making me and Mommy happy, and you're our friend, so I want to make you happy. He'll understand if I tell him you were feeling sad, so I gave you Flat Uncle Freddy to make you feel better."

Seriously, that's probably the last thing Fred wants to hear. I can't tell her that, though, so I figure I'll need to placate Tiffany first, and then find a way to divest myself of Flat Freddy later.

"Thank you, Tiffany. I'll just borrow your Flat Uncle Freddy for a while, and then I'll give him back to you in a few days, OK? It's only the right thing to do 'cause he's rightfully yours."

"Don't worry, just take it," says Sophie. "Tiffany has too many toys as it is, and she probably won't miss it now that Fred's back to spoil her silly."

The minute Sophie's waved the three of us out the front door, I start plotting how I can free myself of Flat Freddy, and it becomes obvious that I'm a lousy strategist.

"Swap you," I tell Charlie. "Give me your backpack. It's heavier." In one fell swoop, I'm undoing months of hard work, it took so long to condition him to carry his own backpack.

"No swap! I want to play with my Wii at home." Charlie winds a protective arm around the pack. It looks like my training's been effective after all, though I'm not sure if the long-term effect of having too many carrots and no stick will necessarily be good for them. Not that I have a choice about it, because they're not my kids, and I can't enforce anything without the backing of their real parents.

"I'll buy you Kung Fu Panda if you do. Just promise me not to tell Mommy." These are the words of a desperado; it's a certainty our entire household will wake to a blood-curdling shriek from Mary one of these days, because Charlie won't be above dangling the figurine in her face on purpose for laughs. And Mary just can't stand Kung Fu Panda, in the same way she can't stand the Teletubbies; she says their eyes give her the creeps.

"OK. You promised. And I still get to play Wii when we get home." Charlie shakes pinkies with me, and hands over his backpack in exchange for Flat Freddy. While I sling it by both straps on my arm and grab the handles of Wally's stroller, he's off running down the sidewalk, dragging Flat Freddy behind him on the ground.

"Hey! Stop," I run after him as fast as I can, but with the added encumbrances of the backpack and stroller, I can't make up enough ground to talk to him without hollering. "Give me Flat Freddy - now." We're still about fifty yards away from home, and I've already gambled all my chips and lost spectacularly. And Wally's beloved pacifier, which has sprung a crack around the rubber part that's been growing steadily for the past few weeks, chooses just this moment to split in two.

"No more binky," says Wally morosely, holding a half of the broken pacifier in each hand. The tears are rolling down his cheeks, but he doesn't wail or whimper. Instead, he just stares reverently at the broken pacifier in an expression of quiet, serious grief.

"It's OK, Wally," I tell him, stooping in front of the stroller. "We can always get a new binky for you."

"I don't want a new binky," Wally protests. "I want this one. Binky's gone."

"Char-lie," I yell while stroking Wally's hair to comfort him. "Come back here right now. With Flat Freddy. I'm not leaving Wally to come after you."

Charlie makes an about-turn and marches back rebelliously, dragging Flat Freddy hard on the asphalt all the way. He comes up right behind me, letting go of Flat Freddy's stick so I hear it clattering to the ground. I pick up Flat Freddy, tug gently at the edges to straighten them out where they've been scuffed by the asphalt, and balance him across the canopy of Wally's stroller, taking care to put him in a face-down attitude so his identity's a little less obvious.

It's 8 p.m., but with the sun still out, many of our neighbors are still lounging around on their front porches, and they wave to us as we walk past. I wave back but keep walking, and thankfully, nobody asks me anything. It's a relief when Flat Freddy makes it into my closet without further incident, and I finally hide him behind closed doors. And from the sound of the TV downstairs, I know Charlie hasn't waited for my go-ahead signal to start his Wii time. Not only have I lost every bargaining chip in my pocket, I've also established myself as a toothless tiger, and it's all for the sake of one Flat Freddy. My pathetic little life has reached a brand new low, for sure.

Strangely enough, Flat Freddy turns out to be a kind of lucky charm for me after all. A few days later, it's one of the times I'm taking a day off work to relieve Sophie, and Fred shows up on my doorstep with Tiffany. That's not new in itself, but what's new is how he's gone friendly on me all of a sudden; he knows I'm the only adult member of the household around, but still he asks if he can come in.

"Sure," I say. I offer to get him a drink, and he declines politely; instead, he asks me to sit with him, and he opens up this folded piece of paper to show me, which has a whole bunch of dates written on it.

"Most of my flights are long-haul, so these are my rest days at home between flights," he explains. "I can take the kids all day on these days, so you don't have to skip work to look after them."

Unexpected as it is, this is exactly what I need; my projects are piling up and even though I'm illicitly using GTalk to communicate with my team members from home, things are definitely moving slower because of my spotty attendance in the office. So I don't have qualms about graciously accepting, especially when for once, Fred seems to be happy rather than grudging about extending me such a kindness.

"Thanks, Fred," I say. "You can't imagine how much I appreciate it - I really need the time in the office, and well, I hope it isn't too much trouble for you."

"Not at all. It isn't fair for you to be the one always having to miss work when they're not even your kids, so it's only right for me to help out on my off days."

Fred ends up sticking around the whole day; he keeps the kids entertained and helps make lunch while I catch up on work with my laptop. Through it all, we're actually able to co-exist on friendly terms, even if we're not exactly intimate. The awkward tango we've been doing for the greater part of a year is over; this truce is real, and for whatever reason, we've finally found a way to behave like adults around each other.

The Musgroves will be touching down in Detroit tomorrow, and Charlie's badgering me to take the training wheels off his bike so he can welcome them with his newfound cycling skills.

"I can ride a two-wheeler now," he proclaims proudly, "and training wheels are for babies, like Wally over there."

"Who taught you how to ride?" I'm definitely not the one who did it; I generally avoid tasks like these because I don't have the energy or time to deal with the associated histrionics.

"Coach did. I learned on Tiffany's bike, but it's a girl bike with ribbons. I want my own big boy bike, to show Daddy and Mommy."

Soccer's out for the summer; and anyway, I can't figure out how on earth Charlie's soccer coach would have access to Tiffany's bike to teach Charlie with; or for that matter, why he'd bother to do so. But such riddles are for people who've got nothing better to do, and so I let the whole thing slide.

Even after the Musgroves are back, Fred continues to take Charlie and Wally on his off days, and over the next few weeks I see a series of changes in Charlie. He starts refusing his baby bottle, he carries his own backpack without reminding me about Wii time in return, and he keeps telling Wally, zealously if not exactly effectively, to stop sucking his thumb and to pick up his own toys. And Wally has a little triumph of his own, too. He's stopped mourning the sad demise of his binky, and he waves his empty hands proudly at me.

"No more binky," he says cheerfully. "Coach says Wally's a big boy. And big boys don't have binkies."

"Coach says I have to man up," Charlie says when I ask him who's taught him to do all these things. "And I don't want to be a baby anymore, 'cause I'll be going to kindergarten soon."

"Who's Coach?"

"Oh, you know."

"No, I don't. Tell me."

"You know. Tiffany's Uncle Freddy. He told me and Wally to call him 'Coach' 'cause we're big boys now."

Whoever said men are simple and women are complicated has got to be a man, because as far as I'm concerned, Frederick Wentworth is the most complex creature in the entire universe. I thought we were on our way to becoming friends, or that we'd at least scrounged up enough maturity to put our past differences behind us. And then he comes and pulls this kind of stunt, putting distance between us again.

It's sad, because I actually liked it when Charlie and Wally used to call him "Uncle Freddy". Somehow, that was more friendly and intimate. But if he wants to act distant and impersonal around me all over again, well, that's his business. I'm past analyzing the antics of Frederick Wentworth if he's going to be schizo like that.

Only, he isn't. He actually continues our friendly truce whenever we meet; even though he's still not letting the boys call him "Uncle Freddy". This is one piece of evidence to the contrary of popular wisdom - actually, it's the men who are complicated, and the women who are easy to understand. You just need to let the women write the story, and we'll set you straight on that one soon enough.