“Sounds good. See you then.”
It had been so long since Megan had been on any sort of a date that she did an Internet search using DuckDuckGo.com for “conversation starters” when she got home and added that to her morning reading for the next few days’ commute. If Joshua was worth adding to her life, she wanted to get past the superficial pleasantries that usually transpire before the magical third-date threshold was crossed. Since the women in Megan’s office were notoriously generous with the gory details of their love lives, she knew it was generally acceptable for a woman to “give it up” after the third date. If Joshua wasn’t several orders of magnitude off that standard, she would never have replied to the e-mail in the first place. But the dating sea had a lot of sharks swimming around in it, and she wanted to be sure that she could get to know him as a real person.
• • •
On Tuesday, Joshua was fifteen minutes early to meet Megan. He thumbed through his pocket testament to read through a psalm while the band Switchfoot quietly played in the background. Megan, notoriously punctual, was walking through the turnstiles at three minutes until noon.
“Hello, Megan, good morning. How have you been?”
“Good morning to you as well, at least for the next two minutes. I’m well, buckled up, and excited for some Korean food. Hey, that isn’t an I6 I hear. What are you running in this rig?”
“I didn’t know that you were into trucks. That’s a small-block Chevy, naturally aspirated with a mild cam and a HEI distributor—not too flashy, but rock-solid reliable.”
As they proceeded slowly down Mapes Road, passing the Defense Media Activity, Megan said, “My sister, Malorie, got the motorhead gene; mine is a bit more recessive. She is very handy with a wrench and would love to pick your brain about your Jeep. Is that a four-inch lift on here?”
“I went modest; I could have gone with a six-inch lift, but I wanted a reliable vehicle versus a finicky trailer queen. Hence the simplicity small-block, and I have a spare circuit board for the HEI distributor in a small tin in my toolbox, uhhhh . . .”
“You carry a what?” Megan feigned an incredulous tone; she wanted to cut to the quick and sort Joshua into either the “keeper” or “do-not-bother” category.
“Well, the Chevy 350 is the most popular engine in the world, parts are ubiquitous, and these engines are a cinch to work on. However, I started to read certain blogs and I realized that the whole world is deeply connected and the linchpin is electricity.”
“Hmmmmm, sounds like you’ve been doing some threat analysis; one of the blue badgers in my office is getting ready to retire—maybe you could apply?”
“I should have taken into account that you were a threat analyst before I opened my mouth . . .”
“Joshua, please don’t be shocked about my inquisitive tone; I really do want to hear more about your thought process.” Megan gripped the roll bar instinctively as she had on so many trips out in the backwoods of Maine with her family as the Jeep slowed down and turned right into the seedy rear parking lot of Mona’s Gourmet Carry Out.
“This Jeep is my sole means of transportation. I maintain it meticulously, but I got to thinking that the stretch of land between Baltimore and Quantico is such a huge target—what if some rogue terrorist group were to pull up in Baltimore Harbor and set off an EMP? Or if those same people were to fly a small aircraft on approach to Tipton Airport and set it off over the NSA campus? Most cars, say ninety-five percent, would be dead—but I could be back on the road in twenty minutes.”
Joshua was sure that he had just put himself on the weirdo do-not-return-phone-calls list, but little did he know that Megan was very impressed with his “prepper indicators” and that his stock value had just gone way up with her.
As they entered Mona’s Gourmet Carry Out, Megan immediately noticed that they accepted only cash, a sign of a good place to eat. “Wow, everything looks great,” she said. “What did you order for me, by the way?”
“I ordered the Kimchi Bokkeumbap for you; it’s reliably very good.”
“What’s your favorite thing on the menu here?”
“I’m Korean by ethnicity, but I never grew up in the culture. I much prefer fried banana peanut butter sandwiches on account of my origins, but I do love the Beef Bulgogi and the Spicy Korean Beef Soup combo here.”
Megan was in full analyst mode. “I couldn’t help but notice your facial features.”
“You mean that I don’t look very Korean? You’re right. I did some study on this—all of us orphans are obsessive about our origins—and I concluded that my mother must have been Chinese, or perhaps my father and/or mother were ethnically Chinese, but somehow I ended up with a Korean surname.”
Joshua carried the tray back to the table, and they sat down. Megan did not want to waste any time during their lunch hour so she started out by asking, “I really want to hear more about you. So tell me, are you from Memphis?”
“Since I was raised in an orphanage, where I’m ‘from’ is quite relative, but I claim Tennessee as home. I’m an average guy, I live off of Haviland Mill Road near the Brighton Dam in a rented room above a garage, I name Christ as my Lord and Savior, and I can’t relate with anyone on the first ten pages of Details magazine.” Joshua paused for effect, arranged the items on his tray, then continued, “I was left on the doorstep of a Memphis Catholic church when I was a newborn. My birth parents were never identified. They only left a note with my name, ‘Joshua Kim,’ and I was raised in an orphanage in Nashville.”
Joshua pleasantly noticed that Megan was proficient with chopsticks as he continued, “I was raised to be Catholic and all in all I would say that my upbringing was pretty good. I had a lot of different exposure to other cultures, growing up. We had one nun from Ghana who taught us classical literature, a Jesuit priest from Bolivia who taught all of the math and physical sciences, as well as a nun from France. Eventually, I learned enough French to pass the CLEP for college credit when I was a junior enlisted airman.”
“Vraiment? Tu parles le Français? Je suis Quebecois.”
“So you’re telling me that I’m winning back some cool points for the tin foil hat comment about my spare HEI distributor?”
“You’re all right with me, Officer Kim. We happen to believe in spare parts and putting things away for a rainy day at our house, too. Please continue with your story.”
“Well, if you’ve never been to an orphanage, it is rather hard to explain. The one thing that got me through was my best friend, Dustin. He and I were inseparable; we basically are brothers. He lives in Kentucky now, and we still talk all the time.”
He paused for a moment, and went on. “One summer we both earned a trip to a boys’ summer camp that the local Diocese puts on every year in southern Illinois. We were both pretty nervous about the new setting, but since we had few worldly possessions and we were also used to daily routine we adjusted quite well. The first afternoon we got our bunk assignments and there was this one shy boy prone on his stomach flipping through an off-road truck magazine. He was tall and skinny with red hair and was pretty much minding his own business when a few kids who were sent from a rough Chicago parish decided to raise their collective testosterone level and bully this kid reading his magazine. The boys reached over him, grabbed the blanket on the other side of the bed, folded it over to envelop him, and in one motion jerked him down onto the floor. Two kids held him while the other two had bars of soap in a sock and started to hit him. Well, these kids did not factor in Dustin or his high sense of justice—probably what makes him such a good sheriff’s deputy now. Anyway, Dustin swept the legs of the nearest kid and delivered a sound knee to the right side of his torso, taking the wind out of him. Without missing a beat he grabbed the back of the shirt collar of the other boy who was hitting the kid, who appeared to be the ringleader, and put him right down on the ground with his knee on his chest, and said, ‘Get!’ It was really something to see, at eleven years old.”