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living?” She winced. Her laugh sounded like a titter in her
too critical ears. “I assume he’s retired.”
    “Ham’ll never retire, not completely.” Rob
snorted as a reluctant grin teased his lips. The car accelerated to
move around a slower vehicle. Another moment, then Rob blurted, “He
was a cowboy.”
    Dorothy hated the paper-thin defensiveness
that coated his words, the subtle accusation of snobbishness. Then
the import crashed in on her. “A cowboy?!!”
    Her husband’s studied attention to his
driving left no room for her to maneuver. She blanked out her
thoughts, determined not to let him win by getting angry and
lashing back.
    With one hand, she caressed her midriff. Such
turmoil had to be bad for the baby. A baby scheduled to be born
into a home so blessed with the material and yet so poor in the
emotional. Would this tiny life be raised in a two parent home?
    As the miles murmured beneath the tires,
cushioned in luxury, Dorothy pondered the mysteries of a failing
marriage. When had the first unhealed wound appeared? Rob’s
schedule as a top-level trauma surgeon kept them physically apart
much of the time, while his exhaustion and nervous tension from
bearing life and death responsibilities nearly every day isolated
them emotionally.
    Dorothy knew she’d helped to create this
division between them, that he viewed her requests for a reduced
schedule as criticism or her frustration, when rare evenings
together were interrupted with intrusive pages, as selfishness.
Counseling had enabled her to see his side of the story but since
Rob had neither the time, nor the inclination to attend counseling,
she stood alone in her self-knowledge. Nothing she’d tried recently
seemed to bring them closer together.
    Until this moment, she hadn’t realized how
much she’d staked on this trip as a salvage mission. Rob might be
able to avoid her emotionally but this weekend they were stuck
together physically, without the beep of the ever present pager to
allow him to escape, for at least 48 hours.
    Dorothy blinked and raised her head. She
massaged her stiff neck and stifled a groan. Somehow, she’d dozed
off and missed a view of some of the lakes and rivers that
Minnesota bragged about on license plates and official websites.
She’d also wasted precious hours of potential bonding. Her mouth
felt dry and a faint headache tingled behind her eyes.
    She looked around. Wherever they were at, the
road had been damaged by yet another severe winter, and not even
the Mercedes’ suspension system could level out all the bumps.
Luxury defeated by an overwhelming force. Just like their
marriage.
    Dorothy had grown up in what Rob had jokingly
referred to during their courtship as “the lap of luxury.” Holiday
travel had been to glitzy resorts set on sparkling lakes where
every need had been met with a smile. Places with spectacular
views, everywhere you looked a vista of beauty.
    Her parents had never vacationed in places
like this backwater, she reflected, peering through the passenger
window. When Rob told her where Ham lived, she’d imagined thick
woods smelling of pine needles and “nature”, not scrubby pines
alternating with birches and tangled ditches that bloomed with
orange, purple and yellow wildflowers. Or weeds, depending upon
your viewpoint, Dorothy reflected.
    After perhaps fifty or sixty miles, they
passed through only the third town since Dorothy had opened her
eyes. More small lakes, more ditches, more wildflowers. She found
herself wondering whether the names of those plants could possibly
be as a colorful as they were themselves, trying to imagine where
the people who lived in the small houses set well back from the
road could possibly work. No big box stores or fast food
restaurants in this “neck of the woods”, as Rob used to say.
    Used to. She yanked her thoughts back to the
countryside. A bird flew alongside the car and then veered off,
vanished. What did birds do after they raised a family? Fly