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It didn’t take me long to figure out which house was Jeana’s, since I had been there before, so to speak. I parked and got out and walked up the drive. The door opened before I even got to the steps. Jeana must have been waiting for me to show up, and she looked a little nervous. I decided to play it safe and not kiss her. I did, however, hand her a small bouquet of flowers. “They aren’t as pretty as you, but I thought it would be a nice welcome present for your family.”

I got a nice hug out of that, and she took me by the hand and led me into the living room. A man my father’s age was sitting there, eyeing us curiously, if not happily, and Jeana took a big breath. “Daddy, I’d like you to meet Carl Buckman, from school.”

Mr. Colosimo got up out of his armchair and I walked over to him. He was an inch or two shorter than me, and a fair bit rounder, though it seemed like there was a bit of muscle underneath it all. He was almost totally bald, and had very beefy arms and hands. I stuck my hand out and looked him in the eye. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Colosimo. Thank you for inviting me into your home.”

“Yeah, you’re welcome, but I think it’s more a matter of Jeana inviting you into our home than me,” he replied wryly. He didn’t try the squeeze-him-to-death trick, but I could sense some power there.

“Daddy!” she protested.

I gave him a wry smile back. “I think you’re right. I have a baby sister who’s only ten. I doubt my father will handle it all that well in a few years either.” There was the sound of some clattering pans, and then a woman came into the room. I turned and held my hand out. “Mrs. Colosimo, thank you for having me over. I’m Carl Buckman.”

Jeana’s mom looked like an older version of Jeana, short, Italian, busty as hell, with wide hips and a slim frame. She shook my hand. “You’re very welcome.” She glanced over at her daughter, who was standing there holding some flowers nervously. “Jeana?”

Spooked, Jeana hurriedly thrust out the bouquet. “Carl brought these over. Do we have a vase or something?”

“They’re very lovely. Well, come along, we can look for something in the kitchen.” Jeana and I followed along, trailed by her father.

“Something smells awfully good,” I commented as we entered the kitchen.

“It’s Friday and I didn’t want to do fish, so I made some manicotti,” said Mrs. Colosimo. “Do you like manicotti?”

“Love it!” I replied. “Can I help?”

This was received with laughter, since the kitchen was totally off limits to possessors of the Y chromosome. I was ushered back out to the living room with Jeana’s father, while Mrs. Colosimo prepped dinner in the kitchen and Jeana moved nervously back and forth between the kitchen and the living room.

Mr. Colosimo was okay. He just wanted to get a feel for the guy taking his daughter out. Although he looked like a plumbing contractor out of a bad sitcom, he was actually an executive with an insurance company that had just transferred him to their Baltimore office. Mrs. Colosimo was his secretary. Over dinner, he gently quizzed me about my plans for the future. At one point, exasperated with his daughter’s nervousness, he told her to stop having kittens. She grumbled back at him, and Jeana’s mom and I laughed at them both.

After dinner, Jeana excused herself to get ready to go out, and her mother asked me, “So, has Jeana shown you her trophies yet?”

“Trophies?”

“She’s a very good bowler.” Mrs. Colosimo led me into the den, where there was a small glass fronted display rack filled with a number of bowling trophies. That was where Jeana found us.

I smiled at her. “I think I’ve been hustled. Trophies?”

She gave me the biggest shit eating grin. “Oh? Didn’t I tell you? It must have slipped my mind. Come on, let’s go!”

“I want you home by ten,” said her father.

“Daddy! No!”

“Daddy yes! Ten!”

“I think we can let her stay out until ten-thirty,” said her mother. Dad snorted and waved us off after I promised I’d have her back by ten-thirty.

“They treat me like a little kid!” complained Jeana as we got into my car.

“They treat you like their only daughter, who is precious to them. Give them a chance. After I get you home by ten-thirty tonight, next week it will be eleven, and the week after that, we’ll be able to stay out until the crack of dawn.”

She smiled at that. “The crack of dawn! You sure about that?”

“Well, maybe not quite that late, but you get the idea.” I smiled over at her as we headed up York Road. “Trophies? Really?”

As I knew she would, Jeana cleaned my clock but good. Why not, she had the first time around, too. This time I had been expecting the trophy case, so I just smiled when I was shown it, and complained about being hustled. We bowled three games and then goofed off around the snack bar. I made sure she was home at least ten minutes early, and then hung around the living room with her until eleven. I got a very nice kiss, no tongue, but very nice, when I said good-bye.

I made sure I called her the next day, just before lunch, to tell her how much I enjoyed our date, and we ended up talking for almost an hour. Needless to say, Hamilton complained to our parents how I was using the phone. I have no idea why he was bothering, since both of them had been through the kitchen more than once and knew I was on the phone. After I hung up, I made some lunch and told my father, “You know, we ought to put a phone down in the family room.”

“You know how?” he asked.

“Absolutely.” — because I spent thirty years running telecomm networks. No I didn’t say that, but I thought it.

Hamilton immediately protested we weren’t allowed to do that, and I thought to myself, for once, he’s actually right. In those days, practically the entire country’s phone system was a licensed monopoly of the Bell Telephone System. You didn’t actually own the phones in your house, you rented them from Ma Bell. Until the Eighties, when it was broken up, Bell Telephone ran the entire thing. If you wanted a new phone in a bedroom, you were supposed to call them and they would send out a technician to run the cable and install a phone, for a small fortune.

At the same time, however, it was entirely legal to go out to the store and buy telephone wire and jacks, and even telephones. You just weren’t allowed to install them in conjunction with Bell equipment. It was a rule observed more in the breach.

I told Dad what we would need and we went out after lunch and went to the hardware store and picked up the supplies. It was ridiculously easy, run a fifty foot spool of two-pair twisted-pair phone wire to the junction block in the utility room, and then install a junction block in the family room. We spent far more time running the wire than anything else, sneaking it around corners and through the wall, and then up and over a door frame, tacking it down with wire staples as we went. At the end of it, Hamilton once more complained, “You’re going to get caught!”

Dad ignored him. I just said, “Well, if we do, we’ll know who squealed, won’t we?” He skedaddled off to his room in a hurry at that. I looked at my father. “His continued existence strains my belief in both a benevolent God and Charles Darwin.”