Earth Bound (21 page)

She didn’t want Parsons to know either, but there was no helping that now.

“Oh well, I hope you enjoy seeing it all,” Parsons said to her dad. “Your daughter is a real asset here. You should be proud.”

Charlie could feel her heart squeeze, shudder, and release. It might be true that her parents should be proud—in the way that all parents should be of their kids—but she knew that hers resisted whatever others might see as a biological imperative.

“She works hard,” her mother responded.

Which was true—and not the point.

Parsons watched her family levelly for several beats. Then he said, “Let me walk you.”

Now Charlie was truly surprised.

She trailed them—the odd cluster—and listened to her father and Parsons discuss the weather. She wasn’t sure why Parsons was doing this, but it didn’t surprise her that her parents were acquiescing to Parsons’s authority. She would have laughed, except, well, it wasn’t very funny.

Stewart held back and fell into step alongside her. She wasn’t certain how committed he was to her mother’s matchmaking plans. She gave him a surreptitious look. He was quite pretty.

“I can see the appeal,” he said quietly. Almost conspiratorially.

“Even though it’s not
real science
?” She weighted the last two words, fit them into her mouth precisely as her mother might.

Stewart gave her an amused look. Sadly, nothing inside her went pitter-pat in response. It was too bad, really, because if they fell madly in love today it would make her mother so happy, but there wasn’t any heat between them. This was going to be yet another way that she’d let her parents down. The tally was too high for even her to compute.

“It’s not IAS.” She waved a hand at the sterile corridor and stated the obvious.

“No, but independence for a bit. I understand why you might want that.”

A statement from a man who’d been in graduate school or working in someone else’s lab since he’d left college.

She made an affirmative, but noncommittal noise.

“Do you get back east often?” he asked.

“Not since I moved here.” There was no point in giving him any hope. This wasn’t going anywhere. She moved in front of the group. “This is it, the computing department.”

It took a lot not to declare that it was
my computing department
. She locked eyes with Parsons, and he bit his lip. He knew what she’d wanted to say. He gave her a little nod, as if to suggest she should. She didn’t, but she flushed at the shared secret all the same.

But right now wasn’t about that. It was never about that here. So she merely pushed the door open, and they went inside. The main room held desks for the support staff like Dot and Beverly, who were hard at work.

“The computers work in here,” she explained. “And this one is my office.”

Her mother craned her head in and nodded with approval. It was neat and a touch feminine, precisely as her mother would expect it to be.

Rather than inspect her personal space, Charlie’s father and Stewart had wandered over to a chalkboard, which was filled with equations.

Her father couldn’t see science in progress and not want to inspect it. He’d probably give her some notes if they stayed here for any length of time. She could tell he was itching to pick up the chalk. This wasn’t his field, but he would be confident he could add something all the same.

“Is this the rendezvous mission you were telling me about?” her father called to her, gesturing toward the board.

“Yes. I was working through the issue of docking. When the ships join, their center of mass will change. Being in a vacuum and with much less gravitational pull, the forces are completely different.”

Her father’s eyes had slipped half shut and he was nodding along, making a low noise of encouragement. She’d seen him like this many times before, as one of his students presented their work and he helped them untangle their math.

Maybe he could help her here. She took two steps toward the blackboard, intending to pick up some chalk, when her mother said, “Perhaps you can discuss that with your father later. We still have the rest of the tour.”

“Of course,” Charlie said, going stiff. “There’s so much more to see.”

She led them out of the computing department and down the hall, Parsons still following. She surreptitiously wriggled her fingers and tried to shake off her mother’s words. They’d be impressed by this next stop. They had to be.

“This is the simulation laboratory.” Charlie wasn’t able to keep the pride out of her voice at that. The lab was perhaps her favorite room on earth. “We have several dozen interconnected machines. Mini and mainframe.” She indicated these. “The desks are for the operators, but the real problem we’ve been working on now is communication between the different ASD facilities. For the next launch, we should have the data lag down to two seconds.”
 

She took a deep breath, preparing to explain how they’d managed that, when her mother checked her watch.

Charlie shut her mouth. This would have stung her at age ten, or even at twenty. But at thirty-two, she needed only a few blinks to clear the pain from her head. Charlie’s work mattered. It was important. She was good at it. That was enough.

Her mother looked up and smiled, but the effect was colorless. “Very impressive. That should have industry implications.”

“I suppose.” Charlie couldn’t give a damn about the industry uses, and of course her mother knew that. If anything, her mother pointing out the monetary value of an idea was an insult, not a compliment.

But Parsons didn’t understand how her family worked, so he seized on this. “Everyone is sniffing around. We’re going to have to work hard if we want to hold onto her.”

There was actual warmth in his eyes as he said the words. She could feel it spreading through her, and she would have blushed, looked away, made a joke, emphasized that he was talking about work, except then her mother might see what was between them. So instead Charlie pulled the door to the simulation lab closed.

“Let’s go see if anything is happening in the training space.”

There wasn’t, but she and Parsons took turns explaining the centrifuges and the MASTIF, and how the technology interfaced with the computers and software. Throughout her mother was blasé, her father aloof. Only Stewart seemed engaged, but even he couldn’t help but display his biases.

“Impressive,” he said looking at the network of computers in the control room. “But it is rather like a big erector set. I would have thought it less… haphazard for an effort of this size.”

“Well,” she said. “It is a bit jerry-rigged, but this is all new. It’s never been done before. No one knows how to do it. We have to invent everything.”

And that’s why I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
She looked at Parsons and raised her brows. But he shook his head a few millimeters. Seeing the beauty, the potential for failure, but the majesty in what they were doing here was intrinsic. She and Parsons had the ability; her parents and Stewart did not.

“Well, you’re doing well with all the money,” her father said as they walked back to the front of the building.

One of her parents’ big tirades of late was about how the federal government was moving away from funding pure science in favor of technology in its bid to beat the Soviets. ASD’s increasing share of the government’s narrow research budget incensed them.

“We’ll try not to spend so much on fancy conferences, or luxurious break rooms,” Parsons said, indicating the small one in which he’d told Charlie about his brother’s death.

“But we draw the line at coffee machines,” she said, gravely. “We can’t operate without those.”

He almost smiled at her then. She could see the smile edging around his jaw, but it didn’t quite emerge.

“You’ve been kind, to take so much of your afternoon to show us around,” her mother said to Parsons when they reached the vestibule again. “Can we entice you to join us for dinner? We have reservations at a steakhouse Charlie recommended.”

Actually, Hal had recommended it. Charlie knew nothing about restaurants.

Charlie was certain Parsons was going to say no. She was still deciding how she felt about it when he surprised her.

“Sure. What time?”

They exchanged details while Charlie stood there stunned. She was going to have dinner with her parents, her lover, and the man with whom they were trying to set her up? All while they refused to be impressed by the work she’d spent the day trying to explain to them?

No, it didn’t make any sense. “I’m going to drive them back to their hotel,” she said to Parsons. “I guess I’ll see you later.”

She had no words for what was in his eyes. He seemed to have figured out over the course of the tour how things were. She doubted he’d spent much time showing VIPs around, and she suspected that when he had, they’d been more receptive to ASD’s work than her family was.

But she also disliked being the object of his, or anyone’s, sympathy. She swallowed down the bile filling her mouth and braced herself for the rest of an afternoon with her family.

A few hours later, they arrived at the restaurant Hal had suggested. It appeared to be decorated with cast-offs from the set of
Rawhide
: wagon wheels, taxidermied animal heads, all manner of brass light fixtures, and the like. She looked around and wrinkled her nose.

The truth was that Charlie didn’t eat much of anything. She could cook in the sense of having the requisite skills. She could follow a recipe. She understood the terminology and owned the equipment.

Entertaining was a regular part of the faculty wife role. So much of her mother’s life had been pretending she was satisfied with—if not relishing—the part. Charlie had picked up bits of cooking knowledge through osmosis if not training.

But now Charlie was genuinely too busy to practice it much. She heated up Kraft Dinners and made herself sandwiches. On the weekends she’d grab doughnuts before heading in for a leisurely day… that commenced at 9 a.m. She hadn’t been to a restaurant in who knew how long.

She hadn’t been out to one with a man in even longer. And now she had two squiring her. How resourceful.

While the restaurant might have a certain ruggedness in its styling, it was classy enough to have a ladies’ menu that omitted the prices of the food.

That made Charlie clench her jaw. But Stewart didn’t help matters when he offered to order for her.

“No, I’m sure I can manage,” she said with a sickly smile.

Across the table, Parsons cleared his throat, hard, but tried to cover by taking a swig of water. She wanted to laugh, but she didn’t dare.

“You haven’t told us about how things are in the lab, Dad,” Charlie said once their orders were in.

“Well, the director has been clashing with the university again.”

Oh, Charlie could imagine. Her parents’ feelings about the director, and how that embedded with university and national politics, resembled
War and Peace
. She’d have to annotate it later for Parsons.

Parsons watched her father’s recitation of goings-on at the most recent staff meeting with evident amusement. He wasn’t smiling, and he certainly didn’t laugh, but his posture was loose and his shoulders lower than normal. All in all he was less wary, more elastic.

He needed to get out more.

Mother clucked her tongue when Charlie’s dad finished. “It was
awful
, dear, we all agree. But”—she drew the word out to a dramatic length—“I’m certain Charlotte wants to hear more about Stewart’s work.”

Charlie glanced sharply at Parsons. His brows had shot up. Now he knew her real, or at least her legal, name. Well, he’d been bound to figure it out eventually. It was on her employment paperwork, after all. She was actually surprised he hadn’t looked, but maybe he’d been trying to respect her privacy.

Knowing she was pouting about her secret being revealed, she turned to Stewart, who had dutifully begun describing his work. He talked not about himself
per se
, but what he’d written his dissertation on, what his research agenda was today, and what kind of job he hoped to find in a few years.

It wasn’t like there was anything to her beyond her work. They’d spent the day looking at the machines that consumed her every waking moment after all, but with an observer—even one who shared her values—the performance felt hollow. With Parsons watching, she wondered about her family dynamics for almost the first time.

Was this, all of it,
weird
? She didn’t have any information at all about Stewart beyond knowing he was her father’s post-doc.

“Where are you from?” she asked, interrupting Stewart.

He paused, blinked, and processed her question. “Oh, Baltimore.”

Interesting. She wasn’t sure she’d met anyone from Baltimore. People who’d merely attended Johns Hopkins didn’t count. “Do you think the President mishandled the situation with the missiles in Cuba?”
 

Stewart’s eyes grew wide. She refused to look at anyone else. Her parents were disapproving of this line of discussion, she was certain. And Parsons was thinking… Well, she had no idea.

Stewart finally stuttered out, “It was, you know, quite concerning. But his response? It was fine. We didn’t have a war, so… good. I guess.”

She wasn’t sure what she expected him to say. If the question had been put to her, she would have faltered too.

It was only that it had suddenly occurred to her that while her mother might have insisted that everyone talk at the dinner table, she hadn’t taught her children to converse. Charlie didn’t know how to reveal herself to other people as a, well, person.

She looked at Parsons. His looseness had evaporated. “Same question,” she said to him.

He glanced away. He was trying not to smile again. “Are you going to challenge Jack Paar for his job?”

“I’ve always liked Steve Allen better.”

“Yeah, me too.”

And that, that feeling in the pit of her stomach when he almost smiled at her, the immeasurable twitch around the corners of his mouth, was what she’d never had before.

She supposed it was camaraderie. When Parsons looked at her, he saw her. He recognized
her
. He didn’t want to alter her to be like anyone else—though he probably wanted her to work harder and better. But he understood her from her brain to her toes.