ONE

Maybe I shouldn't have been sporting a black eye on the day Kirk and I were going to announce our wedding engagement.

"I'm trying to explain, Kirk," I said. I inhaled through my nose. Kirk was under a great deal of stress. I needed to defuse that stress, not engage it. Couples Counseling 101. I exhaled.

Kirk's grip on the Volvo's steering wheel was taut. The white shade of his knuckles matched the color of his clenched face. The car lurched forward, and two oncoming SUVs and a FedEx truck disappeared on the highway behind us. My own hands were beginning to shake.

"Will you just forget about confidentiality, Dory?" Kirk demanded. "Just forget about it!"

I forced my eyes past the concrete barrier of the highway. I could see a stand of redwoods, then they were gone too. Damn. I could have used a needle of their coniferous wisdom, a limb of their transcendence.

Voltura County, California, was home to tall redwoods. The county also hosted rolling hills studded with oak trees, dry grasses, hay fever, and Voltura College.

"Kirk, you're driving too—"

"I care about you, Dory," Kirk said. "I want to protect you. Can't you understand that?"

We hurtled by the curve of concrete where my father had been killed in an auto wreck just over six months ago. I closed my eyes, holding back the scream building inside me. Did Kirk have any idea what message his speeding was communicating to me?

"Someone hurt you," Kirk ranted on.

Even with my eyes closed, I could tell we were still moving too fast, way too fast. I willed the tension out of my neck and back. If we did hit something, the stiff parts of the body would be the first to break.

Detachment, I reminded myself. Calm. Of course, I wasn't sure what message I might be communicating to Kirk either. But I couldn't take back the black eye.

"Kirk," I tried again, keeping my voice gentle. "Could we slow down just a little?"

"Slow down?" he said. "You mean our relationship?"

My eyes popped open. What the— Did he really think I was talking about our relationship? Everyone filters speech differently, but come on.

Kirk turned his head, peering through his steel rimmed glasses to look at me instead of the road. "Do you want to call off the announcement?" he asked.

There was an old El Dorado in front of us, going about half the speed of the Volvo.

"Not the relationship!" I shouted. "The car, Kirk! Slow down the car!"

Kirk slowed down and switched lanes at the same time. Then the El Dorado was gone behind us.

I let my breath out slowly. The air moving through each nostril felt cool and sweet. I was alive. Alive and wet. I'd perspired right through my turtleneck.

"Just the car?" Kirk said, confusion wobbling in his voice.

It was time for more deep breathing. I'd had a good, committed relationship with Kirk for two years. We'd even lived together for most of the second year and were still able to share a home without arguing over filing systems. That was no small achievement. I was thirty-eight years old. I'd almost given up on finding a man to share my life with. But then, I'd found Kirk. He was that man. The one and only. How could anything go wrong with so much mutual affection? Hah! I should have known better. I was a couples counselor. Everything could go wrong.

"Oh crap, Dory, your father," Kirk said with sudden realization. He let up even further on the gas pedal. "Dory, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to scare you."

"It'll be fine," I told him. I hoped I was telling the truth. The connection Kirk and I shared felt suddenly fragile.
Kirk's eyes were on the road again. I studied his long, narrow face, his dark, silky hair. Was love blind? What other show-stoppers had I failed to observe in Kirk's temperament besides this previously suppressed road rage?

"Kirk, I know you're asking questions from a position of caring, but I still can't give you the name," I said. "I told you the story. The name would be a breach of my code of ethics."

"I guess I know that," Kirk said. He sighed a sigh that could have reached the back rafters of any theater.

I watched his skin return to its normal peachy tan. But his teeth were still clenched. Anger? No, fear. Yep, that was it.
"Are you afraid of getting married?" I asked him.

"No, I just want you to tell me the name of the client who socked you!" he snapped back. "You have a black eye, Dory, a black eye!"

I didn't say a word. The car smelled of Kirk, of his anger, his fear, and of the textile dye he'd worked with the night before, none hidden by the overtone of his citrus aftershave.

"All right, I'm afraid," he said a few minutes later. "And I'm a complete idiot. How about you?"

Those were good assessments on his part. I thought about them. Did they apply to me?

"Yep, I'm scared too," I told him. "I'm not sure about the idiocy thing though. I need a few more lessons from my aunt Ellen for that."

Kirk snorted down a laugh. I felt immediately glad for the laugh and guilty a second later about using my aunt to get it. My aunt Ellen made herself a figure of fun for me. She always had. But I knew there was a real person underneath. Or maybe my own personal alien or something...it was hard to tell with Aunt Ellen.

"Dory," Kirk said. "I'm not that scared. But with my parents gone and all—"

"They're probably safe," I said. "They've been to Africa before."

"But they still think they're in the Peace Corps," he said. His face softened. "They're such do-gooders. They don't recognize the possibility of danger." He raised the pitch of his voice, and I could hear his mother speaking through him. "'Oh, darling, the people are so sweet. You mustn't believe what you read in the papers. They only threw the spear at us so we could admire it. The carving, you know. And what a work of art. Oh, my.'"

I smirked. Kirk had his mother down cold.

"Ma is too old to be traipsing around on other continents," Kirk told me. "I don't think she even likes to anymore. But Pop always talks her into this stuff."

"Your father's a good talker," I said. Tom Hansen was a Viking of a man—an aging Viking, but a Viking nonetheless, with his massive build and bright green eyes and long white hair. "He talked your mother into marrying him in Africa."
"But they were in the Peace Corps then," Kirk said, his foot heavier on the gas pedal again. "They were with a group, organized do-gooders. It's not like they can't find modern places to go in Africa. There are plenty of big cities with all the cultural amenities. But they insist on going to the undiscovered places a million miles away from a phone. And they're just running around on their own like there's no civil war anywhere, like there's no illness, like no one has any anger against Americans. Maybe if they read a newspaper once in a while, but noooo."

The car sprinted forward.

"Kirk," I said. My toes curled in my shoes. "I understand what you're saying. But can you please slow down the car?"
"Oh, Jesus, Dory," he said and slowed. "It's just my mother. I think of her, and then I go 'goo-goo, ga-ga.' But I regress."
I laughed and felt the spike that had lodged in my stomach dissolving. At least Kirk was capable of humor again. I wanted to comfort him with my touch. I reached out my hand and stopped short of his thigh. It wasn't advisable to comfort Kirk in a tactile manner while we were still on the highway. It's amazing how a traffic death in the family can tune up those instincts.

It was Saturday afternoon, a sunny September day. We were headed to my parents' house. No, that wasn't true anymore. I had to remember. It was Mom's house. Singularly Mom's, not parents', not Mom and Dad's, just Mom's. No wonder Kirk was so worried.

Kirk's parents usually called in on Friday evenings, but they hadn't called the night before. I felt the acute ache of my own father's death overcome the chronic ache. What if Kirk's parents really were in trouble? I shivered.

"I'm sure your parents are okay, Carpet Man," I told Kirk. Kirk designed textiles. He'd started out actually weaving them himself. He'd studied them all: Hmong, Persian, Renaissance, African, and Native American, just for starters. Usually, just the word "carpet" could calm him. Carpet, carpet, carpet, I thought at him. But Kirk's mind was still in Africa, searching for his parents.

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