I'd been harboring strong doubts, having emerged five years earlier from a disastrous marriage. I'd been nineteen when we met, both of us sidled up to the counter of Yogurt Park on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, me cutting an afternoon class I was failing anyway, and him taking a lunch break from a geological convention he'd been attending, to further his understanding, he said, of the rock layers he made his living studying in a remote mine in extreme southwestern Oregon, just before the trees yielded to miles of sagebrush and bleak desert. We married two years later, after my quick decision that he was much more interesting than the classes I was failing and the morning San Francisco bay fog I woke to each day, and two years of living together in a small Nevada/Oregon border town whose only claim to fame was a Mom and Pop grocery store that didn't even have the Mom anymore, as she'd gotten tired of the boredom and left the Pop five years earlier. One January morning, over French toast and raspberry jam, we made the decision to drive to Winnemucca, Nevada and get married. As I remember it, I wore faded Levis and a favorite but frayed purple sweater, one of Mom's hand me downs she'd worn when she eloped with my dad, the scent of her Emeraude perfume long washed away but somehow, every time I put it on, I caught a whiff of it, and the whole wedding took all of about five minutes. We drove home in silence and spent the next two years in much the same way. It was over when I was twenty-three. Just like that, I decided I couldn't take any more of our odd state of limbo, of knowing, as he explained one night, gesturing around our 14 x 70' foot mobile home as I peered into the microwave, anxious over a new chicken and dumplings recipe and mesmerized by how dumplings could cook without a conventional oven, "this is as good as it's going to get". For him, maybe. Or maybe not. He's remarried, and living in a double wide trailer now. So at least he has more personal space, and thank you God, I found mine, too.

I found it in an apartment in Boise, which was as much civilization as I could handle after four years in the desert, and I'll gloss over the next five years by summarizing them as quickly and as accurately as I can: I worked as an office manager for a company that manufactured Wendy's hamburger patties, I dated seriously and compulsively, trying out relationships like a lotto-winning clotheshorse tries and discards outfits in Lord and Taylors, and in five years, I was so fed up with men, having completed an exhausting crusade in which I met all the wrong ones, that I took a relaxing train trip up the Oregon coast to Seattle, on the advice of my friend Deb the travel agent, the one I met in the local Safeway one Saturday when a minor computer glitch caused her lettuce to ring in at one hundred and twenty dollars a pound and created a back-up in the express line of no less than twenty minutes, and who would later comment on the state of the artness of Bob's teeth, and on this trip I met the most amazing man in the world. Never mind that he lived in Salt Lake City and had it not been for his own spontaneous desire to visit his sister in Seattle and take a train, we would never have met. He lived in a city four hundred miles away that I knew nothing about, except that if you jumped into the middle of the lake, even if you couldn't swim, you wouldn't drown, because all the salt in the water would hold you up. It made the whole business of our ensuing courtship feel safe, the thought that if we wound up together in Utah, no matter what else might happen, a person couldn't drown in the great salt lake. You'd just float, buoyant and suspended, safe in the water, forever. Or until you felt like climbing back out. Which of course held its own special appeal for me. I'm big on safe places. Security. Places where you won't sink.

At the risk of delving into psychobabble here, let me just say that I am a child of divorce. I'm thirty-six years old now, I've been with Bob for ten years, but inside, underneath all the unscented hairspray and the Anne Klein suits I've come to love so much in muted shades of green and brown, beneath the thin lenses of my wire framed glasses that correct my left eye astigmatism, is an eight year old kid whose parents got divorced and who was left to lay out her own clothes in the morning and figure out how to make Cream of Wheat by herself. I've read all the articles about how is divorce hard on kids or maybe not, and I'm saying, without reservation, it most definitely is. As a matter of fact, it's harder on kids than people realize. Maybe not so much today, in our modern society where everybody does it, where getting divorced ranks right up there, on the Unusual Things To Do scale, with topping off your gas tank before you're at the halfway mark. It gets no ranking at all. But when my parents split in 1973, it was a big deal. It was enough to set you apart from the other kids, to make you different. And if there's one thing I have never been able to stand, it's being different.

Bob asked me to marry him on Memorial Day weekend, six months after we met. I said yes. We were married in Idaho, in a little Presbyterian Church near Lake Lowell in Nampa, where my attendance, usually sporadic, had increased significantly as the relationship progressed and I took to whispered prayers before bed that if it was OK with God, if this could really be the right thing, the relationship I'd waited for. Fast forward nine years. He continued to excel in his job, which I never understood but which had something to do with the technical, engineering side of selling and manufacturing medical imaging equipment. Big, reasonant machines that could look inside the chambers of your heart, or unclog your arteries, explained by Bob, over and over again over grilled porterhouses on the barbecue, in clear, precise, engineering terms. I went to work for High Mountain Resort, settling in as the executive assistant to the general manager, exulting in a job I loved, on a property that offered dizzying views of the mountains and the great salt lake, not to mention gratuitous dry cleaning for management personnel, and fell in love with the routine, the safety, the sameness, and the quiet predictability of our life together, which was not so very different from the quiet predictability of married lives in all the novels I'd ever read. We spent nine years in Salt Lake City, and just when the house was finally furnished, our starting out, mismatched and semi-worn furniture long ago replaced with brand new furnishings, when the wood in the china cabinet matched the legs of the recliner chairs, and the soft leather of the downstairs couches had settled into worn, welcoming comfort but still smelled new, he told me, one afternoon after we'd walked our Collies around the perimeters of our property, that we were moving.

To Denver.

"Denver," I repeated mechanicaly, like an immigrant just getting a grasp of the language, then completely surprised both of us by blurting out the first thing that came to mind, something I'd read on the internet a month earlier. "They shoot people in grocery stores," I said, extracting a Diet Coke from the new, white, double doored GE refrigerator that matched the new, white, burnerless stove in the corner. "In a King Soopers store," I repeated, ignoring the raised eyebrows, the crossed arms before me, the clear, precise, scientific argument about to bubble forth. "A man walked in, shot his wife, and walked back out. Right," I added, as if it would change anything, as if it would give us more time in the safe haven of places where no matter what else happened, you wouldn't sink, "in the produce aisle." And aside from that, I added silently, surprised my lips were not moving, I don't want to leave my job. I don't want to leave our friends. I don't understand why we have to do this, when we're finally settled in.

It struck me as odd, when he gave me a crooked half smile that revealed only a few of the rugged steak chomping incisors, and the scientific argument evaporated in an unexpected hug, that he still smelled like Doublemint gum and I still very much loved him. Even after nine years. Even when he was uprooting me. Even with all the little foibles of marriage that ran across the movie screen in my mind then, instant replays of those times when you love someone the most when you most want to shrink them down to Fisher Price people size and run them through the Cuisinart just for drill.

Bob left for Denver, and I stayed behind with the dogs, waiting for our home to sell, which it did, in sixty days. Which wasn't as quickly as it would have sold, had it not been out in the country like it was, twenty five miles from Metro Salt Lake. Wrapped in a safe haven of Ponderosa Pines in an area where ground squirrels and deer outnumbered people two to one. But it sold, and the movers were coming, and life was changing, and that's really what brings me to where I started out in the first place, standing in our bathroom, rummaging through a drawer, waiting for the moving van to load all the boxes, counting the hours until it was time to load the dogs into the Subaru and begin my drive over the mountains to Denver where my husband and my new life waited. In a place, he said, of new opportunities, exciting new beginnings, but no guarantee, absolutely none, that no matter what else happened, you would not sink.

"There's no salt lake in Denver," I pointed out on the morning he left, offering my thoughts in the green and gray of Terminal A at Salt Lake International as if they were any defense at all. "There's no lake you can't sink in. How can we leave a natural wonder like that?" I was not comforted by the embrace he wrapped me in then, cutting off my feeble attempt at humor, even with the cool familiarity of Dial and Doublemint whispered against my hair. "Don't be a nut," he said, which was oddly imprecise, unscientific, and out of character for him. "Nine years, and we've never even gone to the lake. For all we know, you can't float out there at all."

Which was, I thought, watching him move through the long line of business suits and pressed linen dresses to the check in counter, a very disturbing thought to so flippantly put out in the atmosphere like that.

I married Bob because he smelled like Doublemint gum and Dial soap, and right now, standing in our bathroom, or what used to be our bathroom, making one final rummage through the bathroom cabinets for anything the packers might have missed, any final item that needs to be logged on my High Value Inventory sheet, trembling slightly in the old jade green courdoroy sweatsuit I bought at a half off sale at Nordstrom's Rack and have washed so many times it's faded to a pale lime seafoam hue, that's something to hold onto, that Doublemint gum feeling, that sense of new beginnings. It's just harder to hang on. Harder than leaving Boise. Harder than saying goodbye to friends, and my desk at the hotel, and this house with its hairline cracks over door frames and minute caulking projects to be done in the bathrooms, and the kitchen window that looks out neatly over the backyard which we should have sodded but used grass seed on instead so the whole effect will never achieve the manicured-Better-Homes-and-Gardens appeal we'd hoped for.

Now, with the buyers probably packing their own house, their two kids having fought over which bedroom in this place they want, I have only two thoughts on my mind. One is the innate certainty that I don't want to go, I have no desire to move to a place where the mountains are on the west instead of the east, where the freeways are too big and too slow, and where men shoot their wives over mounds of cantaloupe and green bananas, even knowing it's probably the right thing and the only thing to do. To make this one final rummage through the bathroom drawers and move on. No matter that I have a great job, a good income, and I can afford this place, all by myself. If I ran right out to the front lawn and yanked the For Sale sign down, heaving it with a resounding and satisfying clatter to the side of the RV parking strip next to the driveway, if I opened every one of these boxes and unpacked them, I could stay. I wouldn't have to leave. I was not without options.

The second thought is more complicated, and makes no sense at all, but I latched onto it, holding it tightly like the old purple sweater I'd refused to give up to the Goodwill, never mind I hadn't worn it in years, never mind that Bob thought it was just one more item to take closet space away from his neat rows of pressed and striped work shirts, never mind that I'd never explained its history and never would, knowing that his calm, precise, scientific mind would never comprehend ghost scents of long ago washed away Emeraude perfume. The second thought took quick precedence over any thoughts of uprooting real estate signs.

I would go, I knew, sliding the drawer closed, confident that it was empty, that every last piece of our lives had been boxed, inventoried, and labeled. I would go because Bob had already gone, and I loved him, and no matter what else had happened in my life, following him had never let me down. I'd go, and I'd make Denver work for us, I'd make it a home for us even if that meant I never felt the same security when grocery shopping that I'd felt here, safe in my strip mall at the base of Little Cottonwood Canyon, thumping cantaloupe and squeezing bananas with the thought of being shot at the farthest thing from my mind. I'd go because since 1973 I'd been making changes, jumping to different zip codes, it's just that not once before now, in this house, had I been able to stay in one so long, not once had I used the same address labels for nine entire years. Never before had I reordered with such confidence that yes, I would peel through the entire roll of sticky labels and my address would remain unchanged.

I'd follow Bob, but there was something I had to do first, and maybe I'd never tell him, and maybe I'd never tell anybody, and maybe just the fact of doing it at all, this late in the year, when the canyon colors were turning from lush greens to burnt orange and bright browns, was a sure sign that I'd made one move too many and should probably seek a mental counselor before I sought out a Denver employment headhunter, but that realization did not deter me.

By the time I got to Denver, all traces of what I would do would be gone. I'd never have to explain to him or anyone else, and the dogs, curled up against each other in the relative safety of the back seat, would never question my actions. By the time I got to Denver, it would just be another memory of Utah, tucked into the back corner of my mind, filed away with other pieces of my thirty-six years that I'd held tight like old sweaters that comforted for reasons I could never articulate but refused to relinquish.

By the time I got to Denver I'd have it rationalized in my mind as something that needed no explanation. I would never tell Bob, I'm thinking as I slide into the driver's seat of the Subaru and cast one final look at the now empty house, the same but so different from the day we found it, about one thing I had to do, this time, before I followed him.

Or maybe I would tell him. One day, in the far distant future, when we were just another wrinkled gray married couple sharing sections of the Sunday paper over steaming cups of Sanka, I'd tell him about the crazy thing I'd done so many years earlier when I was scared to death of leaving Utah, driving away from the only address I'd had, up to that time, for nine entire years, heading out on the I-215 belt route with my leg shaking through my Levis as I pressed down on the gas, whipping in and out of traffic to pick up I-80 so I wouldn't miss the exit for the great salt lake.

Maybe he'd laugh, a wide smile splitting a weathered face, revealing the same steak chomping incisors I'd fallen in love with, when I told him how I'd backed the Subaru up to the shoreline and waded in, first to my waist, then to my shoulders, fully clothed and immune to the pungent stench of stale brine shrimp they don't write about in travel brochures, the sandy clay bottom squishing into my Doc Martens, before I finally did it, hurling my entire body into the dark, murky waters, reveling in the fact that yes, it was true, I floated, I didn't sink, and I actually floated for so long I found myself doing a slow, labored breast stroke back to the shore and the still idling Subaru and the dogs, heads raised in the rear window, looking at me as if I were crazy.

And maybe, I'd add, I had been. But I'd just had to know.

He'd laugh, I think. Or maybe he'd just reach across the table and pat my hand, and ask for another half cup of Sanka, and explain to me, in clear, precise, engineering terms, that pure science, not field test, would have proven clear enough that I never stood a chance of sinking in the first place.