Chapter 4

I woke up with the worlds most wonderful girl wrapped around me. The gentle scent of her body and her soft hair made me full of pleasure, until I realized that the ringing noise was the wrong tone to be my alarm clock. It was my cell phone.

I picked up the phone, and groggily muttered a greeting.

"Josh, its Ray," the voice came over, "Are you awake?"

"Sorta," I replied.

"What's 5 to the third power?" he asked.

I woke up. He needed me awake, and I was scared.

"A hundred and twenty-five."

"I am off on the side of the road, Josh, the Shomani's Forward is off the road. It was hit by a Ford Excursion offset. They got her parent's out, but they look pretty bad. They are being taken to the hospital."

"Oi veigh."

"Yeah." he said, and then told me what hospital they were at.

I got up and turned on the coffee maker. I was going to need the coffee. This was going to be one of the worst mornings of my life, no matter what happened. I prayed to god again, begging him to let them live.

I had wanted a way to allow me and Yasmin to progress in our relationship with out risking having her dad kill me in diabolical and unpleasant ways. I did not wish the man dead.

Indeed, since I had got him into the pots and pans business, and since I had given him a little heave-ho about life style, he was becoming a decent vendor. He had cottoned to the fact that, as counter intuitive as it might seem, my method of superior customer service actually got you a stronger business.

His love for his daughter was human, and nothing more. He was not my friend, particularly, but he was a reasonable human being, a credit to the market, and a person who deserved as much as the next man to live.

I went back over to my darling Yaz and gently shook her.

She woke up with a cute purring noise, and a soft smile on her face. I was never a morning person- don't ask why I do this work- but Yaz is the definition of morning person.

It felt awful knowing that I was going to wipe that smile off of her face, never to see it again for a long long time. I savored it.

I didn't need to speak to wipe it off her face. She saw the expression on my face, the tears coming down my cheeks.

"Josh, what's wrong?"

I couldn't speak. Forming the words in my mind was painfully hard.

"There was an accident," I said.

"What kind of accident?" she gushed, "Tell me. Please. What kind of accident? Josh!"

"Your mom and-"

"What about my mom and dad? They were in an accident?" Yasmin was hysterical, a look of deep shock in her eyes.

"Yasmin, this is really hard for me, don't interrupt-

"I'm sorry. What kind of accident?"

"I don't know the details. I know your parents truck went off the road, and that the ambulances were called and they were taken to the hospital. We are going there as soon as you are dressed."

She wasn't dressed. She was wearing just a bra and panties, and she looked awful. Her beauty was the kind that came from the bubbly personality that fed it. That personality was off like a light switch, right now. She was just plain upset- and who could blame her.

She jumped out of bed, grabbing yesterdays clothes off the chair where she left them last night.

While she practically threw them on herself, I poured my coffee into a driving mug. I wanted to get onto the road as soon as possible, but I also didn't want to rush lest we join the Shomani's not at their bedside but in beds beside theirs.

In a few minutes Yaz was rushing to go. She had to know what happened, and so did I. I got into the front drivers seat, and she got into the front passengers seat. I twisted the key in the ignition, and 15 litres of Caterpillar six-cylinder diesel came to raucous life. The whole truck shook mightily as huge cylinders bigger than paint cans punched up and down in their bores.

I had parked straight in, and so I pushed the button engaging drive, and slowly maneuvered my still-new-to-me behemoth towards the exit. After paying for the nights parking, I nosed the enormous 58' rig towards the road. The hospital they were taken to was over an hour from here, so I adjusted the air ride seat controls carefully.

All this while I was moving around in slow speed, Yaz was crying. She was very deeply upset. I couldn't comfort her. I didn't know how. This was the little girl showing through. Her insecurities, and her discomfort. She was having a hell of a hard time dealing with this.

My parents had been very old when they had me. My mother had been 42, and my father had been 49. They had died some years ago. I had been 34 when my father died at 83, and my mother, heart broken, had died a few days later, at 76. And it had been hard for me. Like Yaz, we had gotten distant- selling at the flea market was not the life they had wanted me to live, no matter how many millions I had made.

Losing them had been very hard for me. But I had been an adult. I had already found an inner platform on which to stand, and base my life. I had created an existence, and my own identity completely separate from them. Drawing on that inner strength and maturity, I had forged ahead.

I had made it through the funeral, and through the burial. With the help of my aged Rabbi, I had made my peace with God about what happened. In a few weeks, I had gotten over the worst of it. Granted, I still missed them terribly, but it had not been a psychological shock to my system. I had seen death before, had been aware of my own mortality, and their death was part of the natural order of life.

Yasmin wasn't an adult. She had adult qualities, but she was still, in many ways, a child. She had not, for one thing, accepted her own mortality. She was too young for that. This had so far been a royal shock to her system, and we still didn't know if her parents were alive or dead.

Worse, she had no religion. Her father and mother were both devout followers of Islam, but she had rejected it, I think by the time we met. Certainly by now- she respected that I believed what I believed, but she couldn't understand why. Some hours had been dedicated to discussing why I believed.

Early in my life, I had come to believe in God. His name is irrelevant, and the supporting beliefs of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Bhuddism- or Pastafarianism for that matter- are irrelevant to whether you believe in God or not. I believed in a relatively hands-off God who did not interfere with people's day to day lives. I believed in one who adjudged your merits as a human being, not as a follower of a specific view of Him.

Sometimes you need to draw on His strength. On His forgiveness, or your knowledge that He will take care of your loved ones when they pass on from this world. Having Him there for you helps in times of need.

And she didn't have Him. Real or not, the void created by not believing makes it harder to deal with things like this. Without Him, she was going to have a hard time dealing with this tragedy.

As we got out onto the open road and settled into a comfortable clip, the radio started playing a song by Gary Puckett.

To give me Love,

Dear god, it resonated. No, I had not been under a misapprehension of her physical age. She was a nearly 12 year old girl, just starting to bloom. And I have been painfully aware of small areas of immaturity that she had.

I was patently aware she was not ready for a strong sexual relationship with me, and I was even aware that she had an immature desire for it that she really wasn't ready for. I was aware of her clinginess, and her psychological fragility under that mask of bitter cynicism.

But I had also been convincing myself that she was ready for the emotional closeness to me that we had been developing. Children love their parents, and they are very close to them emotionally. There is a reason for that. In absentia of a full understanding, a parent is, in some way, a child's god. They are their well of strength. They are their moral compass. They are their protector, their guide, and their identity.

Yaz had more personal identity then the average girl her age. By far. But she was still a child, and her parents were supposed to provide that. Her mother tried, her father tried to protect. They weren't great parents, but they were important to her well being.

By becoming her lover- and I was her lover, even if we had never actually had sex- I was taking her to the place of an adult. Where the partner provides mutual protection, and a degree of mutual identity, and where the pair create strength between them. A parent is your leader, your lover is your partner.

And what rang hard about the song was the following question: Is she ready to abandon that leadership and become a partner?

One of the problems with underaged relationships is that what happens is that the older partner becomes a surrogate parent- the leader. As a partner, in a good marriage, say is equal. If we want to do things with our lives, she has to feel she has an equal right to veto what we do as I do.

In a bad relationship, where one partner is underaged (and I mean mentally- physical and numerical age are not relevant) the older partner becomes that surrogate leader. And one of two things happens- either the relationship is forever unequal, and you crush the person you think you love under domination, or they eventually leave you because they don't need a parent anymore, and you are too used to being one.

The song made me wonder whether I was doing right by the woman I loved.

"Do you think I'm just a baby in disguise?" Yaz asked, looking over at me very tearfully.

"Sweetheart, no," I told her.

"I see you thinking," she retorted, "Listen, I'm worried about my parents and I'm worried about us. Who knows what will happen if they have to quit the markets, or worse?"