Insert a pause. Not a long one, but an incriminating one: to this pod-person Charlie the question is not rhetorical. It does not elicit an immediate yes. It requires thought, thought that produces a sentence of hurried syllables that tries to cover up the awkwardness but only emphasizes it.

The ring box pinches uncomfortably in my pocket.

“That sounds great. Sure. What time?”

It’s excruciating, and when I get off the phone instead of being excited or love-charged, I have an ominous out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire feeling.

But I push it aside. I tell myself I don’t care.

For now I am a man of action and tonight, whether everything is perfect or not, I’m popping the question.

When Charlie shows up she has a fragrance I’ve never detected on her before that is at once acidic and yogurty, stinging and curdled. It’s not atmospheric, that’s for sure. It’s not something she picked up from the environment. It’s biological. It’s either anxiety or fear. Maybe both.

Even worse: she is still talking to me as if I’m a difficult maitre d’ and every smile she gives me is efficient and careful, the kind of smile you give to someone you have just met and on whom you are trying to make the right impression.

Or from whom you are trying to hide.

Is it wrong of me to feel an exultant, stomach-clearing relief when she tells me about her father?

He was in an accident, Charlie says. On the Pacific Coast Highway near Hurricane Point. It wasn’t that bad, and he’s basically O.K., but he lost a finger and the backseat contained a certain number of empty beer cans and, she says, boxes and boxes of balloons. Hundreds, thousands of balloons; he had been drinking and driving and inflating. His finger, she says. She finds this hard to articulate; she gasps it out. To me, though, it sounds like no big deal to lose one digit in a highway-speed smashup—to me it sounds like an opportunity to thank lucky stars—and I have to work fast to alter my relieved-face into one of sympathetic worry.

“No one else was hurt,” she says. “But he’s been put into some kind of therapeutic seclusion at a psychiatric hospital out there. I’ve gotten all this information from the police and from his intake person at the hospital, Miss Sharon, and Miss Sharon won’t let me see him or talk to him or anything. It’s been like this since Thursday, and it’s just been making me crazy.”

Thursday, I think. The day after I lost the K’plua. Ever since then I’ve been so wrapped up in my own problems I didn’t stop to think that Charlie might have had some of her own.

“His fin-ger,” she says again, stricken, her tongue snagging on the syllables.