Charlene called her father, Nick Carpenter, and waited to be connected. The call went to his secretary first. He was a very busy man.
Charlene ‘s mind wandered as she waited for her father to come on the line. She saw long lines of trees on a distant horizon with elephants marching in front of them to a muddy watering hole in “her mind’s eye.” Farther off in the distance, large mountains sat as they had set for millennia in a haze of early morning mist and dust kicked up by a soft swirling breeze and thousands of wildebeest, heading in the same direction. The migration was underway again.
A river ran down from the rugged tip of the mountains to near where she was standing in the warm sun. Lions watched her hungrily from the deep grass just a hundred yards away. Hippos stood lazily in the water eating and doing what hippos do.
“More people are killed by hippos than any other animal in Africa,” the thin black guide stated from the safety of the land cruiser as he watched Charlene closely. Charlene could almost feel the breeze on her face as she remembered that she was on the phone with her father.
She wanted to go on this trip badly with Joe. This could be the chance she had been waiting for all these long and hard months. The snow had come and melted and then fall came again as she watched Joe get abused by Suzan. Charlene hated that woman now more than she thought possible.
Charlene’s parents had been divorced for years. Her father’s infidelities were said to be the reason for the end of the marriage, but Charlene wasn’t so sure. There had to be more to the story, of course. Her mother’s story was one sided at best but Charlene had no reason to believe otherwise until years later. She was just a young girl at the time of the divorce, and had no reason not to believe her mother when her father disappeared. Charlene had learned long ago from her mother, how to use those sins against her father, over and over again.
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More tomorrow. This story is set in Africa and will follow in the footsteps of our recent trip to Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania.