The Ring - Chapter 12

 

BETHANY STEINER

MUTTI IS SO stubborn, Bethany thought as the train with her and her mother left Paris. It was all she could do to convince her to come back to Stuttgart with her rather than fly home alone to the States. She’d need help with that ankle: her mother was feuding with her sister so Heather would be useless as a helper, and it wasn’t fair to burden Henry, especially now that her grandmother was dead.

Only five other people were in the car. Her mother had reminisced how modern trains were more like attached buses not divided into closed compartments for six people.

“How I miss chatting with people in those compartments with people sitting like they were in little rooms. Today’s trains are more like buses.” Margo arranged her crutches so they wouldn’t trip anyone.

Bethany watched them barrel out of the city and through the Parisian suburbs.

Papa would meet them at the Stuttgart train station. Mutti would stay with him not Bethany. “You can’t expect your mother to sleep on your floor,” he said as they were trying to decide what to do with Margo. Margo had not been part of those discussions.

Bethany was always amazed at how well her divorced parents got along despite her mother’s explanation that there was no reason they shouldn’t. They were friends with different passions and a shared daughter. Still, none of her friends with divorced parents on either side of the ocean had such a friendly pair.

Not that she was complaining. No matter which country and which parent she lived with, the annual transitions went smoothly. Because of the distance there was none of this one week here, one week there stuff that her friends with divorced parents suffered. The only thing both insisted on is whenever she changed countries she stay a year, more because of school than any other reason.

She found the changes interesting. The work was harder in Germany. They both started too early but only in the U.S. did she get lunch such as it was. That didn’t matter; it was speed eating. In Germany she had time to go home or to a snack bar with her friends and eat more leisurely.

Bethany suspected her father and mother considered part-time parenthood a bonus. Her mother would get lost in her art and her father could deep dive into his research. During her lifetime he had become a renowned scholar on the Vikings more by accident than career design.

During his year as a guest lecturer at Oxford, somehow, she never knew the how and why it happened, BBC filmed a series with him as the spokesperson which made his first book skyrocket to the best seller list in several countries.

She was proud of her parents and worried that she would never be able to match their accomplishments.

Despite dealing with two languages, two school systems, her marks, especially in the sciences, were always high, if not top next to it. Now she was doing research, granted as a lab assistant allowing her to work on her sub-projects within the overall grant.

There she had met Tobias, another lab assistant. She planned to introduce him to her parents since it was becoming apparent to both of them they were going to be permanent in each other’s lives. His parents lived in Berlin and they would spend Easter with them for the first time.

Tobias called them both Third Culture Kids, a term she’d never heard. Tobias explained they were raised in and outside their parents’ culture, dipping their feet in another culture and thus were never 100% of either, but their own third culture. And usually alone, that is unless they met someone who had the same experiences.

“I play like an American and work like a German,” she warned him, “but I make love like me. You’re a lucky man to have an international lover and a fellow scientist on top of it all.”