At the airport, everyone was walking in different directions as if they knew where they were going, but clearly they didn't because whenever a screen with boarding information appeared everyone would stop and look at it with their mouths open. Our plane to Denver was leaving from gate B13, which seemed to me an unlucky gate. We got in line to board and when we went to scan our boarding passes the scanner flashed red white and blue. I thought we were about to get arrested on account of nothing, but then party music started playing from a small box nearby and an attractive flight attendant with long legs, a jaunty hat, and a Florida accent which I could only describe as somewhat southern but with a seaside flair, told my husband and me that we had won.

"Won?"

"You've been selected as our America Day winners."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you get to sit in the fancy seats near the guy who drives the plane, what's he called? Pilot. The pilot."

"Oh wow," my husband and I said in unison.

The flight attendant continued. "There's more. The seats are leather, but not the kind that makes your back sweaty, and they recline all the way to the ground, farther than you would want them to go. Plus me and another flight attendant, a man one, will feed you yummy things like grapes and crackers with visible seeds in them."

"How nice," said my husband.

"Ya!" agreed the flight attendant.

On the plane, my husband and I ate as many grapes as we could fit in our mouths. He went a little too far and started choking. The stewardess gave him the Heimlich until he coughed out the all pulpy bits which went flying out in a great confetti celebration. That's how I knew we were being well taken care of and it was ok for me to rest a little while. I fell asleep and when I awoke the window shade was open and unfiltered sunlight stabbed my eyes.

My husband looked at me and then turned back to the window.

"We're in mountain time, baby," he said.

I could tell he'd been waiting for me to wake up to say it because he had a really proud look on his face and I understood why. It was a really cool thing to say.

We took a taxi from the airport straight to a brewery where a woman with beautiful brown hair and a mouth that suggested a fun personality poured lots of different amber beers into very small glasses for us to taste. We tried at least twenty beers and my husband and I had all the same favorite ones. I was tipsy and reached under my barstool for my purse which had my water bottle in it but I couldn't feel it anywhere and when I looked down I noticed it was gone and so was my suitcase.

"My suitcase!" I cried.

My husband looked at me and at the floor where there was nothing. Then he looked under his own chair and when he saw his suitcase was still there, unabashed relief washed across his face. A face which, all of a sudden, looked very stupid to me.

"It's ok, it's just underwear," he said, stupidly.

"What? No. My medication, my phone, my favorite travel tee."

"Those can all be replaced. Let's just go to the hotel and the concierge can call the police."

So we did what he said. We got another taxi and I spoke to the concierge at the Hyatt while my husband went upstairs to wash his legs because he said he had "plane groin." I felt like I sort of knew what he was talking about so I didn't ask any follow-up questions. After making no progress and figuring out nothing at all with the very nice concierge person, I trudged into the elevator and went up to our hotel room, defeated. I slid the blue key card over the black card reader one, two, three times but it kept flashing red and wouldn't let me into the room. I banged on the door but no one answered so I tried the card one more time and it worked. For some reason, for no reason at all, I felt like the faulty card was my husband's fault. Or to be more specific, I felt like perhaps everything wrong in the world was my husband's fault.

The shower in the room was on and I assumed my husband was in there scrubbing his hairy legs or whatever so I got into bed just to rest my eyes a while even though I had napped on the plane. But it was one of those things where the second you're on vacation your body relaxes and you're dead tired.

According to the hotel's bedside digital clock, I had accidentally fallen asleep for four hours. When I awoke the shower was still on. I thought this was strange so I went into the bathroom to complain at my husband for wasting water, which was still waste even if we weren't paying for it. The bathroom was completely fogged out and like stepping into a cucumber and bleach-scented cloud. I opened the glass door to the shower, turned off the water, and looked around. There was no husband. Just a pair of my husband's glasses, his watch, and a wad of his once dark-brown hair clogging the drain.

"See your hair clogs the drain too," I said. But there was no one there to roll their eyes at me. So I said the words again, much quieter and to myself, all the while wondering where my husband was and wishing for nothing more than to hold his hand, which if I thought about it, was really very precious to me.

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