Then as I got used to it, I grew to love it. Having the knowledge that someone actually truly cared about who I was and what I was up to was something that I never thought would happen to me. Once I had it, I reveled in it.
That being said, I knew I couldn’t stay living with them forever, and if I let myself, I would stay too long. Maybe they would get sick of me. I didn’t want to ever have them not want me around, so I did what I could to get into college and live on my own as early as I could. I decied that with this arrangement I could visit on the weekends and not overstay my welcome.
Lana and Hank, or as I always called them, Mom and Dad, insisted that I would never spend too much time with them. They loved me and wanted me to succeed and spend time with me. So when I moved to Tennessee, one of my main goals was to have a place they could come visit me. That way I could prove that I was the successful man they helped try to raise, making up for the lost time of my childhood.
With them staying the week, I wanted to spend as much time with them as I could, but I still didn’t feel too easy about taking the whole week off. Carter insisted, and I was grateful for the luck I had in coming to work for such wonderful people too. No matter how terrible my life was until the Pettigrews took me in, I felt so blessed for how it turned out afterward.
With Wendy still out, this meant there was no one who could do any surveying work for the business, and I wanted to head in and check some paperwork, just to get an idea of what was going to be piled up for me the next week. I also wanted to bring Lana and Hank around to meet them all. So on Monday, I told them we were going to go meet a few people.
The drive over was fun as they ogled the mountains, and we stopped a couple times for them to take pictures and read plaques on the side of the road. The offices were about twenty minutes from where I lived in normal traffic, but when we got on the road, the only other people out there were truckers who had no intention of doing less than ten miles over the speed limit. Lana clutched the door handle the entire way, never quite having gotten used to anyone other than Hank driving her around.
We got to the office a bit later, and I found Carter hanging out at the reception desk. He smiled wide when he saw Hank and Lana and hopped up to shake Hank’s hand.
“Dad, this is Carter. Carter, Hank,” I said, introducing them. “And this is my mom, Lana.”
“Nice to meet you folks,” Carter said. “Lauren and Carson are in my office. I’ll go get them.”
“Oh wow,” I said, “that’s awesome. Are Deacon and Everett out on a site?”
“Yeah, but they’re coming in for lunch in about ten minutes,” he said. “Why don’t you guys take a seat. Can I get you some coffee or anything?”
“A coffee would be lovely,” Mom said.
Carter returned with Lauren and little Carson, who was a bit sleepy and spent most of his time coloring. Deacon and Everett came in a little bit later, both happy to see me and meet my parents. Overall, it was a great experience, getting them to meet my coworkers and having them talk me up to Hank and Lana. They were effusive in how much they loved having me as part of the company and as a friend, which seemed to make Mom relax.
I knew she always worried that I was a bit of a loner. It came from the years of being essentially on my own. Most of the other kids who grew up in my kind of situation either ended up in massive trouble with the law or just kind of faded into the background and disappeared. I stuck to myself through most of school, and though I wasn’t unpopular, I just didn’t form close friendships either. For her to be able to see that I had a nice network of people here who all seemed to care for me, I knew that did her heart good. She worried. She was a good mom.
Hank seemed in his element hanging out with the boys. He grew up a bit of a farm boy in Massachusetts and got along famously with Deacon and Carter’s more backwoods mountain man lifestyle. Everett was the flashier one and did more of the talking with Mom, and by the time we left, he had made her blush a couple of times. He was good at that, and it was why they had him interact with clients more now than the other two.