Nano Day 16 - Trippin the Vortex - working title

[joegoda]

For Capi and the readers. No I didn't quit, I was just tired last night.

We had been on the road for about two and a half hours, and I suddenly noticed that there was no trees. I know that it was probably a combination of the rain and me focusing on all the weirdness, but there were absolutely no trees, or at least what I would call trees. All along I-70, there were signs of that trees might have grown here. There was ground, and there was sky, and there were scrub bushes and stuff like that, but there wasn't a single tall, green tree. A bit disconcerting that.

We were skirting along the Southern ridge of the Northwestern arm of the Rockies. The altitude was high enough that there just weren't many trees, or the ground was just rocky enough that it wouldn't sustain them. Either way, having grown up among trees all my life, it was just odd to not see them. To the North of where we were on I-70, in fact every since we entered Utah, there were the beginnings of mountains, the foot hills of the Rockies, and they ran off to the North to grow big and strong. Desolate and impressive in size and scope. I've driven through mountains before, in upstate New York and through Arkansas, but nothing like these. I understand where the 'purple mountain majesties' part of the national anthem comes from.

I looked over at Angelina, who in turn was gazing out the passenger window at something far off. It had been about twenty minutes since we had said anything to each other. A full half hour had passed since we left the little rest stop where she had thrown the rock that burned a hole into the ground.

"What do you think, Angelina?" I had to break the silence. I don't mind silence myself, especially alone. When I'm with someone else and they are thinking so hard, so loudly, I've got to scratch that curiosity itch. The noise of them thinking becomes like a fly constantly buzzing around me.

"I think a lot of things, Chester." She sighed and turned from the window to look at me. She was wearing her middle aged face again, and it looked drawn and tired. "I think, for instance, that my mother is very afraid of my father. He is an extremely powerful person, and I think that he has been keeping her... um... under his thumb for a very long time."

"Do you think he abuses her?" I asked as gently and as straightforwardly as I could. The subject of abuse is a touchy thing, and is kind of like walking up to a fuse with a lit match.

Again, she turned to look at the bleakness of the mountains. "I do not think so, not in the sense you are meaning." She snapped back to look at me. "What sense are you meaning?"

Uh oh. I cleared my throat. "I was just asking in a general sort of abuse way." I focused on the road. "You know, yelling, making threatening moves... that sort of thing."

There are literally hundreds of ways to abuse someone. Some have been done to me, and I'm quite sure I've done some to others. None of your business, of course. Adults, once they become adults and have the reasoning ability to make their own choices, decide to either accept abuse, or deny abuse. I know that a person can be trained from birth to crave abuse. I know that abuse can actually be an addictive thing. There is a point, however, when we, as adults, must make the choice to either accept or reject that which makes us uncomfortable. And to quit bitching and whining about it. Yeah... that would be nice.

"Oh," she said, simply. She turned back to the window, the mountains. "There has always been yelling in my house, as far back as I can remember. Father is a very passionate man, after all, and his business demands that he be so."

I was very tempted to ask what his business is. So I did.

"I told you," she said. "He's a diplomat of sorts, and the places he goes to... the people he talks to..." She let that hang, and then said, "It helps that he's as passionate as he is." She turned back to me, and her eyes were shining.

"I know he loves us, Chester. I know that." She reached forward and with her index finger scratched along the padding of the dash in front of her. Scritch, scritch is what she did for a few moments.

I took that quiet and checked the rear view mirror. There was nothing there except normal traffic. The invisible man had decided to be very invisible. I knew he was still back there because I could see the distortion of the vehicle directly behind me, which oddly held it's pace two car lengths back. The invisible man was very good at what he did, whatever that was.

"Part of father's job involves dealing with some other very powerful people. As powerful as he is, and as passionate." Angelina sighed. "The world he moves in is sometimes very, very dark. Sometimes he brings it home with him."

She looked at me again, her shining eyes catching some of the sun and bouncing it back at me. "You are wondering perhaps if he ever hit us, or mother?"

No, not really. Physical abuse is one of my triggers. It calls forth that part of me I really don't like.

She continued anyway, despite me not answering her. "He has, you know." She nodded to the windshield. "There have been a few times, a very, very few times," she looked at me to make sure I understood what she meant, "when one of us, the children, would interrupt him when he was deep in mediation or thought and he would lash out. It was always very brief, and he was always very apologetic afterwards, but still... the scars last on and on."

I knew exactly what she meant, but I kept silent. I think she needed to talk this out.

"One of the reasons why my father is so adamant about me being back is power play, of course." Now that she was talking, the ball was rolling. "He must be in control of everything. He has his reasons, of course. He has been in control for a very, very long time, you see."

Angelina reached down between the seats, pulled out the loaf of bread and the ham from the cooler. "Would you like one?" she asked, gesturing at me with the ham.

"Yes, please," I said.

"You are so polite." She sat about making us sandwiches. "You just let me ramble on and on."

"Well," I said, quietly, "If I'm in a situation where I might be killed, I'd rather know what I'm facing."

"Just so," she nodded. "After my talk with my mother, I made the decision to tell you all that I could. Would you like some cheese?"

"Sure," I said. "Thanks."

She nodded and went on. "There was time when my father was at peace. The world was much more simple back then, and things were farther apart. People came, people went. They asked him for favors, and he either granted them or did not. They paid him either way, and they were happy to do it.

"Sort of like a mob boss?" I ventured, carefully. "A mafioso?"

She laughed and handed me my sandwich. One handed, I nibbled, keeping one eye on the road, one eye on the invisible man, and one eye on her.

"That is one way to look at it I would suppose." She nibbled her own sandwich. She lifted up the edge of the bread, reached down and pulled out one of the pickles and nestled it in with the ham and cheese. "He never had the visibility of those people, though. Father preferred to work in the background." She took a bite, thought a bit and then said, "That is not to say that he did not get involved in people's lives." She laughed a bit more, lightly. "Oh yes, he did that."

"What about your mother?"

A look of sadness passed briefly over her face. She was still wearing her middle aged look, but it wasn't as drawn. I guess the talking it out was helping.

"Mother is special. She is like father in that she, too, is very powerful in her own way. She too, sometimes goes on trips where she must speak with others that are like her, to resolve difficult situations. She and father met on one such difficult situation. I don't know what the attraction was, but they fell in love, and vowed to be with each other until the end of time."

"That is a very long vow," I said.

"Just so. And in my family, when you make a vow, it is something that you will keep. Not like today, when marriage is something that is disposable and love is something that is meant by nobody but said by everybody."

"I know what you mean, Angel." I said it gently, but it brought up some very sad memories for me. I've said before that I had just lost what should have been the love of my life. It's a pity that sometimes life gets in the way.

"Love," I said to her, " is something that is eternal, something that will never fade and has no limits. I love many people, because they deserve it from me, and I know I am loved back."

She nodded. "Perhaps that is why..." she paused, and did not finish what she was going to say. "Yes, that is the way we were brought up as well."

I wondered what she was going to say, but let it be. If it was important, it would come up again. That is the way things always are. If it's important, it'll raise its hand later on.

She scooted in her seat to face me. I glanced at her and saw she was wearing her young face again. She smiled gently at me and said, "You asked if father abused us, and you asked it in such a way to be kind, to get me to... 'let it out', as it were. Here is the truth of the matter."

Oh, boy, I thought. No good deed goes unpunished.

"Father never abused us to the point that we thought we were being abused." "He could get very loud and sometimes he struck out at us. Even as children, we knew there were lines which shouldn't be crossed. And when we did cross them, we got exactly what we should have expected to receive. But, as children, we tended to cross those lines, to see if they could actually be crossed." She spoke rapidly, but paused often so I would nod to let her know I understood.

"There was one hunting trip my brother Michael came back from." She looked far away, so she could remember. "He was so excited that he had brought down his first stag that he rushed into my father's study without knocking, and without waiting to see if my father was busy."

She shook her head in the remembrance. "The entire house shook with father's roar, and it is not a small house. Michael came flying out of the big double doors to father's study from the force of the blow my father had given him. As further punishment, the stag that Michael had caught was turned loose to run free, and Michael was forbidden to every catch that same stag again."

She drank a bit of coke straight from the bottle, which was fine, since I tend to stick to coffee or water or tea. When she swallowed, she looked at me from the corner of one eye. "Do you see? That is the sort of abuse we children grew up with. It is not the sort of abuse one sees or hears about on the nightly news."

"But what about your mother?" Dangerous ground, Chet, dangerous ground. Other people's family business is not yours.

Angelina pursed her lips. "That is something I do not know of. I can guess that it was much the same way for her. If she broke the rules, then she paid the price. I do know that there were times when she would sit at her piano at night, crying. I do know that there were times when she dreaded father returning home. I could see it on her face."

"This last time, when she spoke to me at the park, I could tell there had been an argument between her and father. Involving me, more than likely. Mother probably tried to explain to father that, since I was on my way home, there was obviously no kidnapping of me by the Anthony's family, and that the whole vendetta thing should be called off. That would not sit well with my father's pride. Once he set a law into motion, that law was carried out, regardless of how stupid it sounded." She scratched at the dash again. "Father is like that, though. Sometimes very, very pigheaded."

"Wouldn't it matter to him that you were on your way home?"

She nodded absently. "Of course it would matter. He would be very glad to know I was on my way home, and not chained up in some basement. Father is the sort that carry out his vendetta not only to show Anthony's family how strong he was, but also to teach me a lesson."

"Like Michael's stag," I ventured.

"Just so," she said. "Just like Michael's stag. If I broke the rules, then there is a price that needs to be paid." Her voice took on a resigned sadness. "It would not surprise me to find out that I am forbidden to ever see Anthony again."

"What about the baby?" I asked.

"Oh, father much never, ever find out about that," she said, quietly. "At least not until the child is born. After that, he would accept it as his grandchild."

"Because he has to?"

"No, because it would be his grandchild. There is no 'have to accept' anything, Chester. Not in my family. Something either is, or it is not. If something is not right, you simply change it to be what is right, or you accept it as it is, and that makes it right." She paused, then nodded and said again, "He would accept the child simply because the child is his grandchild."

"Okay," was all I could say. Regardless of her belief, regardless of her faith, I have seen a thousand billion, kajillion situations where nothing turned out the way it was supposed to, because it turned out exactly as it was supposed to. People are just weird like that.

For the next hour or so, Angelina would tell me a bit more of her family, their dynamics and blah, blah, blah. Don't get me wrong. I don't mind being the listening ear, and in fact, it's something I pride myself on. People need to talk, to get things off their chest, to work things out. It's part of our jobs as human beings to be a shoulder to lean on, and to cry on if necessary. It doesn't mean that I have to necessarily care about what I'm being told, although quite often I end up caring and sometimes too much. But it's not part of the job description, this caring thing. Only that I listen.

The city of Green River, Utah is tiny. Tiny with a capital T. Not as small as some of the towns I've been in. Blue Eye, Missouri, which is also Blue Eye, Arkansas, has a population less than two hundred, and is spread across two states. Green River is tiny because everyone on it is twenty years younger than I am, and still has a population under a thousand. I suspect Green River is small because it's just a bedroom community for the Missile Testing range to the south, and the Four Corners mine to it's north. Green River is named for the Green river, one of the longest running tributaries to come out of the Rockies. Green River as a town is incredibly small.

This means that, even though I had wanted to see the town of Green River, just because of its name, the most I saw of it was a twenty second eye blink and an illuminated sign for a place called "Ben's Steak House". That was pretty much that. More interesting was the Green River Launch Complex. It sprawled away to the south and as looked to be very empty. I guess that was to be expected. It is in the desert. Still, I did wonder if they still did testing there. I made a note to check it out on the way back.

At Green River, we turned north again, off from I-70 and onto state highway 6, also part of the Prehistoric Parkway. State highway 6 ran long the foot hills of the Rockies, passing though a redundantly named town of Desert. It followed the path of a railroad as well, the rail service moving wood south from the great Northwest and coal from Utah to just about anywhere in the country.

State highway 6 also crosses over the Green River, at the itty bitty hamlet of Woodside. It was a skinny little river, but showed promise in the width of its banks. I could tell that the overflow from when the river flooded was pretty darn wide. Still, it was pushing four pm, and there was another seven hours to go. No time to sight see. I really wanted to get to Winnemucca before midnight.

Trees started to make their re-appearance just about the time we hit Woodside, an appropriate name. The Green River apparently supplied enough top soil to give some hardy pines the go ahead to put down some roots. I was incredibly happy to see green trees again. There's just something about them I miss when they aren't around.

The trees grew more plentiful the more North we went. I remember thinking that it wasn't that we were so far up in altitude, just that the ground must be really crappy for trees. By the time we got to Wellington, I was ready to give up the desert dwelling life of the high plains drifter and become a tree hugger. You think the flat fields of Kansas is bad, you ain't seen nothing like the drive from Grand Junction, Colorado to Wellington, Utah. I mean, okay, Canyons and Rocky mountains and white sands and sand dunes may look cool and interesting if you are into desolation. But believe you me, it's just one more rock after another.

State highway 6 also becomes the main street of Wellington, Utah, which pretty much means it becomes like any other small town that straddles a highway. Speed traps abound, everything the town has for sale sits where drivers can find them. Angelina needed to make a pit stop, and so did the van. It had been about three hours since I gassed up the van in Montrose and the needle was pushing the E for Empty. We pulled into the Gas n Go, right off Main street.

As I pumped the gas, I thought about some of the things that Angelina had told me on the road. Her family, all of them, were magic users. Not just magicians or wizards or circle casters, but magic Users. They used magic. They used it on an everyday basis.

Mom was pretty good with seeking eyes and far-speak and stuff like that. Apparently she was a big mucky-muck in the magic community and sometimes had to go an discuss magical things with folks on her own level.

Dad was a really big mucky muck. Angelina wouldn't go much into detail about what he could do, but it was a fair guess to say that he was not a man to piss off. The little demon in my old college days wouldn't have left a skid mark on dear old dad's Reeboks. Not only did dad go and meet with some of his magically inclined chums for cigars and brandy, but apparently he and his chums were in some dispute about something or other about how magic should be handled in the world.

Daniel was a tracker. He could find anything, anytime, anywhere, or so she said. That was what he did, and that was what dad had trained him to do. If he did anything else, Angelina didn't say. He could use the seeking eye to a degree, but not like mom could. He was working on developing his farspeak, but was limited in his range. His tendency and his aptitude was to do something like my kite flying. Except, apparently, he didn't get tired. Maybe he would teach me that trick.

Michael was a hunter, quick to anger, fast for retribution. Seems he got some of dad's hair trigger temper. He was a big guy, according to what Angelina told me, standing nearly, if not, seven feet tall. That is a foot and a half taller than me. And none of his is fat, says she. I pretended that she wasn't talking about my little pot belly. Humans can be so vain at times, and yes, even me.

Raphael was a loverboy, which was apparently okay doke with dad. He wrote poetry, music, song. He picked up on mom's music like a duck to water, and became mother's pet. Angelina showed just bit of jealousy over that, but not much. If he was mother's pet, then he deserved it, because he spent more time with her than anyone else. He was famous with the women in their circle and could charm the birds out of the tree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. Guys like that just stick in my craw. Their egos tend to grow bigger than their crotches or brains could justify.

Damien, according to Angelina, was dark and brooding, with a quick sense of humor that often turned to sarcasm. He could be cruel, but he also had a gentle streak. She didn't elaborate on his abilities, only saying that he was one of the most unpredictable of her brothers and his talents came on earlier than his brothers.

Angelina confided in me that her magic hadn't formed yet. She was a late bloomer, and had to rely upon charms, potions and castings for her bit. Granted, she didn't like them much, because they seemed to irritate her father, and, as she put it, if she relied upon crutches like those, how would she ever know what her talent would be?

This made sense to me, actually. If a person uses a crutch for all of their life, how would they ever know all they had to do was straighten their leg and walk?

I did point out to her that she wasn't entirely without something. She did, after all, talk to her mother, and she did, after all, throw a flaming metor into the ground where it melted into the earth and may still be melting even now.

Oddly, she just smiled and shrugged, as if it was no big deal. "Yes, I did that," she said, "But of what use is it? Perhaps I can start the fire at the next family cook out."

I didn't have a good answer, so I just told her that people have to find their talents or have their talents find them. Once that happens, the reason for that talent becomes apparent, eventually. Besides, I told her, the fire tossing thing would probably impress her father.

"Father is not terribly impressed by anything." She sulked to me. "There are times when I don't even think he knows the rest of us are alive."

See? It doesn't matter if you are some high mucky muck magic user or a janitor cleaning toilets at the High school. Everyone is screwed up in one fashion or another.

We finished at the Gas n Go, and we went. Wellington led to Price, a larger town of about ten thousand, but not quite.

There is a big dinosaur museum in Price and I longed to wander though the millennium, but not this trip. Maybe on the way back. I stopped at a little filling station, just for a souvenir. It was getting dark, and there was still five hours and some change.to go till I could sleep. I needed Winnemucca. Why, I didn't know. It was important. Sometimes you just need to listen to your gut.

It was about two hours before we reached Salt Lake City, home of the Mormon Tabernacle, the Tabernacle Boys Choir and all sorts of Tabernaclly things. I don't have anything against the Mormons or their offshoot branches. Good people, for the most part, from what I see. I even fell in love with one of them, and she was and still is in my heart and my head. Still, it wasn't Winnemucca, and therefore I didn't want to spend too much time there.

Those two hours were spent with me doing more listening. Angelina, now that the dam had burst, so to speak, was spilling her guts out to me. Not necessarily about her family and their weird and wacky ways, but about life, her life, her feelings about love, boys, and stuff like that.

I responded with nodding a lot, and saying the right things at the right time. The sun was going down, and it was getting darker. Every time I looked into the mirror, I could see less and less of the invisible man. Darkness hides nothing much better than daylight can.

It gets dark pretty darn quick after six pm, even in the mountains, and maybe especially in the mountains. We slid past Provo because the traffic was so bad I didn't want to take the chance to pull over. We were both getting pretty tired of ham by then, and I decided to treat Angelina to an Italian dinner. Yeah, I wanted to get to Winnemucca, but the butt can take just so much of sitting in a carseat.

I had also decided to fill up again in Salt Lake City. From the map in my glove box, the one I bought hundreds of miles ago, I didn't feel like there would be much of a chance between Utah and Nevada to get gas. Every town looked too small to be open after seven pm. Then again, I-80 was an Interstate. Still... why trust your luck to luck, when you decide your own fate?

Besides, after driving through towns with the name of Spanish Fork, where highway 6 joined I-15, and American Fork, which was just north of Provo and Orem, I was ready to attack something with a fork. I don't care where you are, rush hour is rush hour is rush hour, and after a thousand miles on open highway, it's just not a place I want to be. Rush hour, another word for crazy people given the license to drive.

Driving through Salt Lake City was like driving though Saint Louis. Lots and lots of tiny suburbs, all joined at the hip and all claiming their independence from the metropolitan complex that called itself Salt Lake City. It didn't matter to me. After a while, driving through one town is pretty much the same as driving through another town. The only thing that changes are the fill-up points and the speed traps.

I will say this though. Salt Lake City is BIG. They had tall buildings, lots of houses, and lots of train yards. Well, all right, maybe one or two train yards. I saw lots of chugging locomotives, though, and I silently wished them straight tracks and clear tunnels. Those guys have a rough life, though it may look simple. It's a job I always wanted. To work on a train as engineer or something. Just to be part of it. Ah well.

It was a bit after six when I pulled off of I-15 and went in search of something to eat. I told Angelina that it was time for a rest stop and I was going to go in search of foot, preferably Italian. Her eyes lit up and she clapped her hands together like a child. Obviously I was doing something right. She asked me if I knew where an Italian restaurant was. Of course, since I had never been in Salt Lake City before, I was clueless. That had never stopped me before.

I stopped at a Holiday Inn, went in and asked the front desk clerk where the best Italian eatery was. The clerk was very helpful, but one of the guests came up and the two of them had a big discussion about which was better; A place called Al Fomo or a place called Buca Di Beppo. I thanked them and left them to their argument. Buca Di Beppo had my vote, just because of the name.

I pulled open a phone book that was conveniently left on the counter of the Holiday Inn. The address was pretty easy to remember. The ad for Buca Di Beppo showed where it was on the map, and fortunately, it was not terribly far away. Maybe a mile, maybe two.

We drove into the parking lot of Di Beppo. It was pretty crowded, but not so much that I felt claustrophobic. We made our way to a table near the back with the help of a very friendly waitress, whose name was June.

The decor was pretty standard for Italian restaurants. Red and white tablecloths. Empty wine bottles decorated the wall. Soft Dean Martin singing Mi Amore' in the background. The smell of cooking marinara sauce wafted through and my tastebuds were already twirling. It felt like the little Italian place I used to go to back in Tulsa. It was family owned, but it was incredibly good. Then, one day, it was just... gone. Nothing lasts forever.

The dinner talk was soft and casual. Angelina and I had decided that we wouldn't talk about anything heavy. This time it was my turn, she had decided, to tell her about my life. So I told her about growing up in small town Indiana, surrounded by cows and automobiles.

I talked bout how I learned to talk to trees and more importantly, how to listen. That got her attention, and she leaned forward with questions about what it felt like, how did trees sound, things like that. I explained that trees were just like everything and everyone else. They all have a story to tell, and if you listened to them, you might just learn something. She asked me what I learned from trees. I told her patience. That was the one big thing I learned from trees. Oh, and to get plenty of sunlight, so your leaves would be nice and shiny. She laughed at that.

She ordered calamari, and I didn't. I ordered chicken parmesan, which is one of my favorite dishes. I don't know what there is about sea food, but I just don't like it. It smells like burned rubber to me, and it tastes like something similar. I imagine that burned rubber tastes like it smells before anyone decides I might just have tried to eat burnt rubber.

We munched on garlic breadsticks and I felt the familiar tickle at the back of my neck. Angelina must have seen my eyes grow large, because she just smiled and said, "It's only mother. She's just checking up on us."

Checking up on us? On US? "Angelina," I asked, "What does your mother think about you being with me?"

She stopped in the middle of a breadstick bite and raised her eyebrow.

"I mean," I went on, "she knows that there isn't anything going on between us, right? I'm like, twice your age, and I wouldn't want anyone else to get the idea that we were romantically...." my voice ran down, because I could tell that she was laughing at me.

She was laughing so hard, in fact, that she had to put her hand over her mouth, choke out a "Excuse me!" and went to the bathroom.

I sighed. What was I thinking? Apparently I was thinking that my traveling with a young woman was causing others to think that there was something going on. There wasn't, of course. The last thing I needed was a relationship that going to go nowhere.

But because I make it a rule to be totally honest with myself, I had to check my own motives. Was I starting to believe that there could be something there? Was I starting to develop feelings for Angelina that I had not recognized. I mean, the best way to get to know someone, and your compatibility with them, was to take a long trip with them. The longer the trip, the more revealing.

And Angelina, regardless of anything else about her, was a good traveling companion. She talked when talking was good, she was quiet when quiet was good. She didn't ask stupid questions and she showed interest in something other than whining about how bad the trip was or how long the trip was. She pointed out things to me on the drive that I might have missed otherwise, and she did it in such a fashion that it didn't distract from my driving. As far as traveling companions go, Angelina fit in the top three.

I decided that I was letting my emotions and imagination run away with me, and put the kibosh on any stupid thoughts combining Angelina and me as anything other than driver and hitchhiker. Which, I never pick up, by the way.

Our dinners arrived just as Angelina returned. As we ate, in silence, she kept looking over at me and smiled quite a bit. I didn't say anything because I felt I had said too much and I felt like a moron anyway.

She decided to break the silence. "The calamari is excellent, Chester. Thank you for this."

"You're quite welcome, Angelina," I said. "I figured that you needed something good, to reinforce that good things are going to happen to you."

"You are sure of that, are you?" She asked me this with her quizzical smile and that eyebrow raised. "You're sure that good things are going to happen to me?"

I didn't know what to say. I knew she was playing with me, but I didn't know how. I sputtered out something inane and told her that my parmesan was excellent as well.

It was damned uncomfortable, and it wasn't made any easier with Angelina sitting across from me, smiling her Cheshire Cat grin. I did notice that the tickle at the back of my neck had gone away. Maybe mother was done spying on us.

After ten minutes or so of her torturing me, she reached across the table and placed her hand over mine.

"It is all right, Chester." She ignored the fact that, when her hand touched mine, my hand jumped like an electric shock had been applied to it. "Mother knows you are a good man. She knows I'm in safe hands with you. She told me that she has seen that everything will turn out all right, and I am to travel the entire distance with you." Her face turned serious. "She also told me that we are not to meet up with Daniel in Reno. She has seen that it would be too dangerous."

Oh, great. Mom is also a fortune teller. "That's okay," I told her. "I didn't like the feel of Reno, anyway. We'll find another way to get there."

Angelina nodded. "I told mother that you were very resourceful and that I had total faith in you." She gently squeezed my hand and then pulled hers away. The place where her hand had overlapped mine tingled gently, in a pleasant way. I decided that I would put that feeling in the attic in my mind, with all the other ones.

"Something is very wrong, Chester," she continued. she had finished her calamari and was sipping her Cabernet. "I've never heard mother sound so... worried."

"Well, Angelina," I said, trying to smile and trying to sound as casual as I did not feel. "I guess it's up to me and you to make sure that her worries are unfounded." I checked my watch. It was just after seven. If we left right now, and I meant right now, we might get to Winnemucca by midnight. Maybe.

I looked across the table at Angelina, felt my heart start to beat faster. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It wasn't something that I could help, except to do the one thing that I knew would help. "It's time to go, Angelina. I need to get this over and you delivered to your parents, so I can get on with my own life."

Angelina stopped in mid-sip. Her Mona Lisa smile faded and her eyes crinkled in consternation. This was not the romantic ending she was probably hoping it might be. I didn't want romance, I didn't need romance and it sure as hell wasn't going to happen with someone more than half my age.

Slowly she put her wine glass down. She leaned forward and looked very severely in the eyes. "Very well, mister Chester," she said, whispering. "Let's get out of here and back on the road, so you can get back to your life, as exciting as it is." She stood up, took her jacket off the back of her chair and walked to the front door, waiting for me.

I paid the check, picked up my own jacket and joined her. I held the door for her and as she passed through, she did a little bump with her hip, and jostled me. "What was that for?" I asked her.

"Just to let you know that you don't fool me for a second." She walked ahead of me and didn't turn back as she spoke. "You do what you feel you have to do. This will end as it is supposed to."

Mysteries. You either love 'em, or you hate 'em. Me, I go either way, depending on the mystery. Though I took what she was saying and stored it in my brain to look at later, my reaction was much more casual. "Whatever you say, Angelina." Yeah, whatever you say. My survival is my first priority.

We pulled out of the parking lot of Di Beppo's and wandered our way thought the fading sunlight back to I-80. Angelina kept sneaking looks over at me while I concentrated very hard on not getting lost. My friends will tell you that getting lost is something I do very well, and most of the time I enjoy it. Getting lost opens up all sorts of worlds, places and people that I normally wouldn't meet. But not tonight. Tonight I needed to find my way.

"Mother also said she will find it a pleasure to meet you." Mysteries. Whatever. I hate romance novels.

I found and joined I-80 as a passenger jet flew over head about five hundred feet. I had just enough time to be dazzled by the lights from the airport and the incoming traffic before I saw the Great Salt Lake with the sun redding and oranging it's last lights on the open water. So very cool, and so very beautiful. There were boats out on the lake, some with their running lights on and some with their cabin lights on.

You know how sometimes you can be out on a clear sunny day, and suddenly get the feeling that the world had just been freeze framed, and it had been all painted by some incredibly artistic hand and it was all just for you? That was the feeling I had that night, driving past the Great Salt Lake at sixty-five miles an hour, a pretty girl by my side and the sudden knowledge that everything was going just the way it was supposed to.

Just like Angelina's mother said it would. Stupid magicians.