Sisterchicks on the Loose by Robin Jones Gunn Page A

meager collection.
    The contrast reminded me of when we first met Dave and Penny. When they started out, they had very little. They decided to get married when they found out they were expecting Noah. At the time they were living in a one-room converted farm equipment shed under high power lines beside a peach tree orchard.
    The first time I visited their substandard housing with a box of maternity clothes, my oldest, Tyler, was with me. He was three, and he thought sitting on the potty to take a shower at Dave and Penny’s was the most wonderful thing in the world. The soapy water ran under the lopsided bathroom door and down the linoleum floor to a drain. Tyler came home and asked Jeff if we could put a drain in the middle of the floor in our house, too.
    My dear hubby quietly collected funds from a few church folks and arranged for Dave and Penny to move into a two-bedroom cracker box before Noah was born. Dave had a full-time job by then and was taking computer classes at the community college. Penny read a library book on real estate and found a way for them to buy their little cracker box of a house.
    A year and a half later, with a toddler on her hip and another on the way, ever-clever Penny managed to finagle some creative financing. They bought a serious fixer-upper in a nice neighborhood while renting out the cracker box. Penny made good use of all my hand-me-down baby clothes. She stuck to a tight budget, and she and I worked for days trying to sanitizetheir terribly neglected fixer-upper. The house had four bedrooms, and we were certain that three of them had been used to raise chickens.
    Within fourteen months, Penny had turned that chicken coop into a cupcake, and before their third child, Nathan, was born, she had sold it for three times what they had paid. They bought a house six doors down the street from us and lived there for nine years. I think those were the best years for all of us. I didn’t realize at the time what a gift it was to be so close. Our lives were meshed together, and that made both of our families stronger.
    Then Dave was offered an incredible job in the Silicon Valley. Dave never finished college, but he was sought after because of his exceptional computer programming abilities.
    When they moved to the San Francisco Bay area two years ago, Penny managed to buy and sell another fixer-upper to get into the neighborhood where they wanted to be. I hadn’t been to their new house, which they had bought five months ago, but I’d seen pictures. By Chinook Springs standards, they were living in a mansion.
    Just like the contrasting stacks of belongings on our hotel room beds, Penny and Dave now had a blessed abundance, and I was the one with the drain in the middle of my budget.
    A knock on the door startled me. A young woman delivered our midnight omelettes. Each plate was covered with a silver dome.
    “Are you Penny?” she asked warmly.
    “No.”
    “Please tell Penny we made something for you that is a nice chocolate. I hope you will like it.”
    “I’m sure we will. Thank you.”
    I lifted one of the silver domes and found a delicious looking omelette and a parfait glass filled with a swirled chocolate dessert and topped with a Finnish flag on a toothpick.
    Penny opened the bathroom door. “Did the food come?”
    “Yes, and wait until you see it. Our first meal in the land of your ancestors, and it came complete with a Finnish flag!”
    “As long as it includes chocolate,” Penny said, “I’m sure it will be memorable!”

Seven

    A fter enjoying our room service banquet so late on that first night, we weren’t sleepy. Penny decided to organize her clothes in the closet and dresser drawers. I turned on the television, and the two of us wearily sat on the edge of the bed with our jaws slack, flipping through the channels and not understanding a single word.
    Around two in the morning, Penny decided we should call home to let our families know we arrived safely. On the West Coast