That alarmed me. “What? Mother! Don’t say things like that!”
She put a calming hand on my chest and locked eyes with me. “Conrad… son… listen to me carefully: SOME day I WILL die. It’s a fact of life. And, God help me, it’ll happen sooner rather than later. There is every good likelihood that you will be left holding the bag where Amity is concerned. We will ALWAYS have money with which we can live comfortably. That will never go away and you know it. But if you’re going to raise our daughter responsibly-”
“I’m not,” I interjected and leaned up a bit in alarm. “Not alone. I couldn’t, not without you.”
“You can and you will,” she said sternly. “In due course I will get too old to keep up. By the time she’s your age now, I’ll be in my fifties. I’ll be an old fossil by then, son. And I’m going to have to rely on you to chase after her, to make sure she’s okay, to keep her safe. You’re her father and you’re going to keep that busy, dangerous world at bay when she’s ready to jump into it head first. And she will. I know she will, because I’m her mother and even though she’s a harmless, witless bundle of cute and dirty diapers right now, she’s going to be a handful when she’s older.”
“Not if I can help it,” I rejoined sourly.
“Son, you CAN’T help it. Or, rather, you’re GOING to help it. You’re going to help her, when I can’t.”
“But-”
She placed a silencing finger on my lips and then kissed me. Hard. When our lips parted, she said, “Do as I say, son. Promise me.”
I wanted so much to say no, to absolutely refute the idea that she’d ever leave me, to rail against the notion that I would have to raise our daughter alone. She was my mother, dammit, and I couldn’t imagine my life without her. She was the woman I loved. She was my wife. She was everything to me. And yet there I was, almost 19 years old, having to struggle with realities that I couldn’t possibly be ready for. I looked into her eyes, ready to argue, but I saw in her gaze something that stopped me cold: fear. She was just as afraid as I was. She was terrified. And she was looking to me, her son and the father of her only daughter, to be the rock that she’d always been for me. She was looking to me for strength and resolve. She needed it.
I blinked and said, “Yes, Mother. I promise.”
A week later we had a computer in the house and a modem line installed.
Amity was incredible. There’s no other word for it. As my mother had prophesied, Amity grew up WITH the technology that was taking the world by storm. She played the games, used the computer, studied programming- she ate it all up almost as fast as I could. Almost.
I converted my workout area, the old building that my father had used as a lab before he died, into a technologically thriving office. It was constantly changing as the technology advanced, and I did yeoman’s work to keep up with it. I learned how to do web design, coding in various languages, 3D modeling, hacking… everything and anything that had to do with computers, I devoured it wholesale.
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