“What about you?” Brent asked “You did want to be the CEO. Don’t try to deny it. We were gonna be the chief engineers, Sarah was the chief financial officer and you were gonna be the CEO. The wheeler-dealer. So how come?”
David looked at the ground. He moved a rock with his toe. Then he said quietly: “Mom. She loves the guy and I think he loves her in his way. He’ll treat her right.”
Then, because mush is not an appropriate emotional state for a fifteen year old boy or a captain of industry: “Besides, it’s a good deal. The foundry will really increase production once it’s upgraded a bit.”
* * *
Sarah didn’t buy the last part for a moment. Oh it was true enough, but it wasn’t what had decided David, and she knew it. David was doing it for his mother. She wouldn’t have fought it after that, even if she had cared, but the truth was she didn’t much care. She was more concerned now with other things.
Afterword, some time later: Grantville High School
Brent and Trent were arguing as usual when David and Sarah arrived. “I tell you we don’t need electricity to make it work,” said Brent.
“Maybe not for that, but what is really needed is a household electrical plant.”
“What’s up?” asked Sarah.
“Huh?” said Brent. “Oh, we got to looking at that list. You know, the one we made up last year, before we decided on the sewing machines. A bunch of stuff on it that seemed impractical at the time might be doable after all. I think a pedal-powered washing machine would be good.”
“But what we really need is a home or small business power plant,” said Trent. “It opens the way for everything from toasters to TV.”
Brent and Trent were off into their argument again. David and Sarah drifted off a ways.
“We’re still kids,” Sarah pointed out. “The bank probably still won’t give us a loan, and I don’t want Mrs. Higgins to sell any more dolls.”
“True,” said David. “But now we have the stock in HSMC, and it’s really gone up since Karl took over. I think he was right about the problems people have with kids running businesses. What we need are fronts. People that will nominally be in charge, and won’t scare investors away. Uh, Sarah, you wanna go out sometime?”
* * *
It just sort of slipped out when he wasn’t looking. He had planned and replanned how he was going to ask her out. Then before he realized what was happening, he had opened his mouth and out it popped. That half smile, and the twinkle in her eyes as they figured ways and means of financing the terrible twin’s new project. It just happened.
* * *
It took Sarah a few moments to assimilate the sudden change in conversational direction. Once upon a time, back when she had been focused on Brent, she had been sort of vaguely aware that David was interested in her. But as they worked together on the sewing machine company she had gradually gotten over her crush on Brent. She had forgotten about David’s interest. Apparently he hadn’t.
Pretty constant guy, David; not exactly boring, either.
* * *
While Sarah was thinking it over, David was sinking into the grim certainty that he had put his foot in it.
Here it comes, he was sure, the dreaded words: can’t we just be friends?
“Okay,” said Sarah. “When?”
THE RUDOLSTADT COLLOQUY
by
Virginia DeMarce
April 1633
Ed Piazza squirmed as inconspicuously as possible on the hard bench of the University of Jena’s anatomy amphitheater, as the debate on differing Lutheran views of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, both up-time and down-time, flew over and around his head in three different languages. Before he’d made the acquaintance of the different parties that existed among Grantville’s new citizenry, he had just been naive in his assumption that only his own Roman Catholic church encompassed communicants with views as divergent as those of Francisco Franco and Dorothy Day.
The brightest idea that anyone—anyone at all—had had last winter had been Samantha Burka’s suggestion that the growing tensions among the Lutherans of the United States could be dodged by taking advantage of political geography. Count Ludwig Guenther of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt had not only built St. Martin’s in the Fields Lutheran Church, of currently uncertain orthodoxy, for the benefit of Grantville’s huge influx of Lutheran citizens but had also built it on his own land. True, Rudolstadt was part of the new little United States; but, on the other hand, the United States was a confederation and that territory was not the responsibility of Grantville itself. Thus, the Grantville government could take the high road, virtuously declaring that it did not interfere in ecclesiastical disputes, and dump the whole squabble into the lap of the Rudolstadt administration.