“Unless you’re willing to agree to a few things,” she says cutting me off.
A few things? “Like what?”
“Well, for starters, I want to sleep in on Sundays. You have to agree to wash my hair in the shower at least once a week. You have to promise to just hug me if I’m grumpy when I’m on my period. We make dinners together. We always tell each other where we are and when we’ll be late. When I ask how I look, you have to tell the truth, even if it’s bad. If I cry for no reason, you have to hold me and tell me how everything is going to be okay. You have to—”
I pull her into a hug and give her a kiss. She kisses me back, and I know everything is good. No, it’s better than good—it’s going to be great. I draw back and meet her gaze. “All that and anything else you want, I promise.”
“Good, then you’ll do all the laundry. I’m glad that’s settled.”
I can only laugh. “I did say ‘anything,’ didn’t I?”
My phone pings as Maddie’s phone chimes, indicating we both received texts.
Rhonda:Y’all need to get your asses over here, pronto.
Ash:What my sweetheart is trying to say is there might be an opportunity for the girls to work on the film crew. We’re talking to them now.
Maddie:How does that work?
Rhonda:We’ll explain when you get here. Hurry!
This is an interesting development. “We should probably head over there.”
Concern is written all over her face and I’m not sure why. “Yeah. Do you know where they are?”
“I do. It’s about twenty minutes away.”
On the way there, I explain some of the problems the studio is having with the project. “The producer assured the network that he would be able to film everything, but that’s turned out to be more of a challenge than he anticipated.”
“How so?”
“Well, originally they planned to use all-terrain vehicles to follow us, but they’re loud, and since the wildlife we come across is one of the biggest appeals to our audience, that’s a problem.”
“They probably need the vehicles to transport all their camera equipment, right?”
“That, and they haul trailers with beds and food, and there’s even a trailer with bathrooms and showers. They’re too big. They won’t fit in a lot of the places where we’re headed. I don’t know what they were thinking. They should have consulted with us, but in their arrogance, they didn’t feel like Ash and I had anything to contribute so now the whole thing is one giant cluster-fuck.”
“Why don’t they just have you and Ash film everything with your GoPros like you’ve always done? Judging by the number of views your videos get, that seems to be working.”
“That’s been debated… many times. Their big cameras and drones can do a lot more, so the producer is determined to make their equipment work.”
“How have you been doing it? You aren’t carrying enough camera batteries for three months, are you?”
I turn off the main road into a warehouse district. “We do actually… well, sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“You know I’m an engineer, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, out of necessity, Ash and I came up with a tiny charging system. It’s hard to explain, but it weighs next to nothing and it’s small enough to fit in a side pocket of your pack. I wish I had one to show you. Anyway, it expands, or opens up rather, similar to the way a satellite does in space. That gives it enough surface area for the solar panels to do a quick charge, and it also has retractable fan blades that work with both wind and water. If the sun isn’t out, we can use wind or a small creek to do a quick charge. And if either of those aren’t available, it has a hand crank. We can charge our batteries by hand in less than thirty minutes. It’s how we made our first billion.”
I wince at the memory of our sister seeing it for the first time. She has a tongue that can cut you to your core and a vocabulary that can make you feel like the dumbest idiot ever. “Elsie called us dumbasses when she saw it.” I shake my head at the recollection of that classic Elsie episode. “And numb-nuts alongwith a few other things. She was in rare form that day. I think Ash and I still have a little PTSD from it.”
Maddie laughs. “Let me guess—you two were using it for yourselves and never even considered the value it could have to campers, or the army for that matter. Elsie started selling them to the Pentagon, didn’t she? You mentioned she signed some big contracts with the military.”
I love how smart she is. Veronica would have given me an exaggerated yawn with, you know this stuff bores me so why do you insist on bringing it up? She never wanted to know anything about what Ash and I were doing, mainly because it drew attention away from her. It didn’t bother me, probably because I really didn’t care about her, not that much anyway, but looking back, it’s all so clear now. She and I could talk about one thing, and one thing only, her. But with Maddie, I can share everything, we can talk about anything. Even this conversation, as benign as it is, reminds me of all the reasons why I can’t lose her.
