“Hola!” Stesha cried and threw her arms first around me, then my parents. I had met Stesha once before but had forgotten how much she and Reb looked alike: the same pixie body build, the same joyful smile, the same mischievous glint in their eyes. It was a little odd to see what Reb might look like in fifty years.
With one dramatic wave that jangled the bright bracelets on her wrist, Stesha ushered us toward a waiting van. Her walk was a girlish bounce barely touched by the gravitational pull of adulthood. Who cared that we were in a boring airport parking lot? I trained my camera on Stesha.
Afterward, I tried to relieve Stesha of her massive tote bag, but she brushed me off with a “You need both hands free to photograph.” Clearly, “helping” Stesha was going to be a challenge; I didn’t need Reb to warn me of that. In my initial call with Stesha, she had told me, “Everyone signs up for a Dreamwalk for a reason and a purpose.” She went on to describe how some people came to get closure on unresolved relationships, others to understand their lives. Case in point: An older woman named Grace was on this trip to grieve and let go, emphasis on the “let go.” Stesha had assigned me to be her walking companion.
A couple in their late twenties was already inside the van. The pale man could have been auditioning for an Indiana Jones flick, dressed as he was in a fedora, multipocketed safari shirt, and khaki pants. All that was missing from his outfit was a gun belt and bullwhip, but he wielded his iPhone like a munitions expert. Stesha had mentioned that a couple of grievers would be joining us, not just Grace. But neither the Indy wannabe nor the petite brunette with him looked particularly grief-stricken until she lost whatever game they were playing on their matching phones. Even when she threw back her head in defeat and he pumped a triumphant fist in the air, I doubted they were aware of us until Dad introduced himself.
“Oh, hey, I’m Hank,” the man said with a friendly grin. He nodded to the woman beside him, who looked up at us shyly through a massive halo of dark brown curls. Her long hair occupied nearly as much space as her entire body. “This is Helen. We’re from the Bay Area. What do you do?”
“Pest control,” Dad answered frankly as we maneuvered around the front row to reach the back two. Draped across Helen’s lap like a blanket was a Gore-Tex jacket, embroidered with the logo of Dom’s favorite game: Field of Fire. Had he been here, Dom would have gone into full fanboy mode. Dad must have noticed the logo, too. “So are you into gaming?”
“I’m just in finance.” As Helen tucked her hair behind her ear, her massive diamond ring caught the sunlight. She looked proudly up at Hank. “But he is gaming.” Hank shook his head modestly, though he smiled widely. “No, really,” she said, tapping the embroidered logo, “that’s his game.”
“Really?” I cringed at my squeal, the one that told me I wasn’t completely, one hundred percent over Dom. I remembered all too well Dom rattling off Hank’s bio—a Stanford dropout who banked his first million before he was legally able to buy beer. Dom intended to make sure that that start-up lightning struck him, too.
Turning to Dad, Hank asked, “So pest control?”
“It’s a family business,” Dad said.
“Well, good thing you’re here, because whenever I travel, it’s like bugs have a vendetta against me.” Then Hank told us about the scorpion infestation he had encountered in a remote village in India and the one cockroach that had nearly ruined his first trip to the Great Barrier Reef with Helen. “I never thought I’d see anyone walk on water until scaredy-pants here”—he gestured at Helen with his thumb before fluttering his hands in the air—“ran screaming bloody murder from our villa all the way into the sea.”
We all laughed, even Helen despite flushing a deep rose. She ducked her head so that her hair hid her face and mumbled sheepishly, “It was huge.”
Mom murmured sympathetically, “I’m sure it was.”
“Hey,” Hank said to Dad, his head bobbing up and down enthusiastically, “we should create the Mario Brothers of pest control. I bet that could be hot.”
My mouth opened to say that I knew someone who had already come up with that concept, but I clamped my lips shut and stared out the window at the parking lot, wondering yet again when everything would stop reminding me of Dom.
“You promised you wouldn’t work on this trip,” Helen complained lightly to Hank, now shaking his phone as if to drive the point home. Her ornate ring caught my eye. Two “H” initials, each outlined with diamond chips, flanked an enormous round diamond. Hank noticed me ogling, which wasn’t hard to miss—drool may have been a dead giveaway—and told me, “I designed it. H and H, see?” He lifted Helen’s delicate hand for our better viewing.