Amanda

Silence. Unnerving silence. We both said nothing, just left the building and walked to the car parked in the lot across the street. Still nothing. If I didn't see her walking beside me—well, slightly behind me, I'd want to check her pulse. Is she still breathing? I can't hear it. I even opened the door for her, thinking perhaps.... Nothing. She just plopped herself into the seat like I was some unknown driver, hired just for this trip.
We crept through three lights and onto the freeway entrance ramp. My attention was diverted briefly as I merged into traffic, speeding up as I did. For perhaps the only time in my life, I realized that I was finally cruising just under the speed limit. My usual speed is six to seven miles per hour above the speed limit—no matter what the speed limit is. I figure that living in Texas brings with it the privilege of driving above the speed limit. Countless speed traps have excused me at those rates, so that's simply the norm in Texas—except in school zones; perhaps two to three mph above the limit there.
Transportation has always been a waste of time to me; I'm a strong advocate of teleportation if it ever works. But today I deliberately wanted to take extra time. We both needed it: time to think, time to reflect, time to fully understand the events leading up to this moment.
What really brought this on? Whose fault was it? Anyone's? No one's? I still didn't have all the facts. I hoped she would open up to me, give me all the (gory?) details. If she wanted to hold back, maybe she would hold back with her parents, but not with me; at least that's what I hoped. Now, nothing but silence. I had to let her be the first to speak, really tough for a talkative person like me. I bit my tongue and drove.
No judgments on my part, at least not until I heard her side of what had happened. Right now, I knew only what the police had said, and that wasn't much, just the results of perhaps many details creating a domino effect into the final outcome. Even the police admitted there was likely much more to the story than they knew.
Think. What was occurring at her home yesterday, last week, last month? Could anyone see this coming? Should we all have seen this coming? I needed to think about it.
However, rather than thinking about all that had just happened, I found myself drifting back some fifteen years to that day in Mercy Health Center in Oklahoma City. Nana and I had just flown up from Houston. Driving down the John Kilpatrick Turnpike, Mark's "outside temperature" reading on the dash showed triple digits. But we didn't care; it was a great July day—bright sunshine both outside and inside the car. As we jumped from the SUV, we didn't even notice the hot wind, slowed only by a few old oil derricks or perhaps a barbed wire fence or two on the prairies west of town. Wind always blows in Oklahoma, plays havoc with your golf game. On this day, however, our thoughts were on only one thing. Our second granddaughter awaited us in the hospital nursery!