Probably not since she had been in college. Which meant that, during the handful of years that Richard had absentmindedly neglected to think about her, she had lived her entire life.
In those days, her look and her identity had not extended much beyond her backstory: an Eritrean orphan, plucked by a church mission from a refugee camp in the Sudan, adopted by Richard’s sister, Patricia, and her husband, Bob, reorphaned when Bob went on the lam and Patricia died suddenly. Readopted by John and his wife, Alice, so that she could get through high school.
Richard was ransacking his extremely dim memories of John and Alice’s last few Christmas letters, trying to piece together the rest. Zula had attended college not far away—Iowa State? Done something practical—an engineering degree. Gotten a job, moved somewhere.
“You’re looking great!” he said, since it was time to say something, and this seemed harmless.
“So are you,” she said.
He found this a little off-putting, since it was such transparent BS. Almost forty years ago, Richard and some of his friends had been bombing down a local road on some ridiculous teenaged quest and found themselves stuck behind a slow-driving farmer. One of them, probably with the assistance of drugs, had noticed a similarity—which, once pointed out, was undeniable—between Richard’s wide, ruddy cliff of a face and the back end of the red pickup truck ahead of them. Thus the nickname Dodge. He kept wondering when he was going to develop the aquiline, silver-haired good looks of the men in the prostate medication ads on their endless seaplane junkets and fly-fishing idylls. Instead he was turning out to be an increasingly spready and mottled version of what he had been at thirty-five. Zula, on the other hand, actually was looking great. Black/Arab with an unmistakable dash of Italian. A spectacular nose that in other families and circumstances would have gone under the knife. But she’d figured out that it was beautiful with those big glasses perched on it. No one would mistake her for a model, but she’d found a look. He could only conjecture what style pheromones Zula was throwing off to her peers, but to him it was a sort of hyperspace-librarian, girl-geek thing that he found clever and fetching without attracting him in a way that would have been creepy.
“This is Peter,” she announced, since her boyfriend had emptied the Glock’s clip. Richard noted approvingly that he checked the weapon’s chamber, ejected the clip, and checked the chamber again before transferring the gun to his left hand and extending his right to shake. “Peter, this is my uncle Richard.” As Peter and Richard were shaking hands, Zula told Peter, “He lives pretty close to us, actually!”
“Seattle?” Peter asked.
“I have a condo there,” Richard said, sounding lame and stiff to himself. He was mortified. His niece had been living in Seattle and he hadn’t known. What would the re-u make of this? As a sort of excuse, he offered up: “But lately I’ve been spending more time at Elphinstone.” Then he added, “B.C.,” in case that meant nothing to Peter.
But an alert and interested look was already coming over Peter’s face. “I’ve heard the snowboarding’s great there!” Peter said.
“I wouldn’t know,” Richard said. “But everything else is pretty damned nice.”
Zula was mortified too. “I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch with you, Uncle Richard! It was on my list.”
From most people this would have been mere polite cliché, but Richard knew that Zula would have an actual, literal list and that “Call Uncle Richard” would be somewhere on it.
“It’s on me,” he said. “I should have rolled out the welcome mat.”
While stuffing more rounds into empty magazines, they caught up with each other. Zula had graduated from Iowa State with a dual degree in geology and computer science and had moved to Seattle four months ago to take a job at a geothermal energy start-up that was going to build a pilot plant near Mt. Rainier: the stupendous volcanic shotgun pointed at Seattle’s head. She was going to do computer stuff: simulations of underground heat flow using computer codes. Richard was fascinated to hear the jargon rushing out of her mouth, to see the Zula brain unleashed on something worthy of its powers. In high school she’d been quiet, a little too assimilated, a little too easy to please in a small-town farm-girl sort of way. An all-American girl named Sue whose official documents happened to read Zula. But now she had got in touch with her Zula-ness.
“So what happened?” Richard asked. For she had been careful to say “I was going” to do this and that.
“When I got there, all was chaos,” she said. The look on her face was fascinated. Going from Eritrea to Iowa would definitely give a young person some interesting perspectives on chaos. “Something funny was going on with the money people. One of those hedge fund Ponzi schemes. They filed for bankruptcy a month ago.”
“You’re unemployed,” Richard said.
“That’s one way to look at it, Uncle Richard.” she said, and smiled.
Now Richard had a new item on his list, which, unlike Zula’s, was a stew of nagging worries, vague intentions, and dimly perceived karmic debts that he carried around in his head. Get Zula a job at Corporation 9592. And he even had a plausible way of making it happen. That was not the hard part. The hard part was bestowing that favor on her without giving aid and comfort to any of the other job seekers at the re-u.
“What do you know about magma?” he asked.
She turned slightly, looked at him sidelong. “More than you, I would guess.”
“You can do heat flow simulations. What about magma flow simulations?”
“The capability is out there,” she said.
“Tensors?” Richard had no idea what a tensor was, but he had noticed that when math geeks started throwing the word around, it meant that they were headed in the general direction of actually getting something done.
“I suppose,” she said nervously, and he knew that his question had been ridiculous.
“It’s really important, in a deep way, that we get it right.”