Day of Honor - Michael Jan Friedman [0]
Her father, a tall, darkly handsome man with friendly brown eyes, was standing by the curved window on one side of the room, staring at something-or at nothing, maybe. B'Elanna couldn't tell.
Her mother, a Klingon with wild red hair and a spirit to match, was sitting at the kitchen table on the other side of the room, picking at a bowl of serpent worms she had prepared moments earlier. She grunted a couple of times, but she didn't seem very hungry.
That was a first. As far back as the girl could remember, her mother had always been hungry, even when she was sick with some human disease she didn't have antibodies for.
B'Elanna didn't like the silence, but it was better than the yelling. That had gone on for days, almost every time her parents saw each other. And it had been the worst kind of yelling, a nasty kind that made the girl feel as if she wasn't even there.
After a while, B'Elanna had begun to wonder if she might be the cause of her parents' arguments. She wasn't the ideal child, after all. She had a temper sometimes and she didn't play nicely with the other kids. And though she tried her hardest to make her mother and father proud of her, it didn't always work.
Billy Ballantine, one of the older kids in the colony, had tried to explain it to her. "It's not your fault," he had said. "Your mom's a Klingon. Klingons yell all the time. That's what my dad told me, and he knows just about everything. To a Klingon, he says, yelling is second nature."
B'Elanna was half-Klingon herself, but she hardly knew anything about her mother's people. Her mother seldom spoke of her heritage, and the girl had never met any of her Klingon relatives.
Still, she didn't think Billy Ballantine's father was right. It was only lately that her mother had been yelling. Besides, her mother wasn't the only one raising her voice. B'Elanna's father wasn't Klingon, and he had shouted just as loud as her mother a couple of times.
Anyway, they weren't yelling anymore. B'Elanna wasn't sure, just being a child and all, but she thought that was a good thing. It seemed to her that her
parents were calming down, thinking about what they had said and maybe being a little embarassed about it.
Yes. The more she turned that over in her mind, the more it made sense. B'Elanna thought about how things happened sometimes that made her mad, that made her want to yell, and how she needed to be alone for a while afterward to sort it out.
But when a child felt angry about something, she could stomp into her room and close the door. B'Elanna's mother and father shared the same bedroom. It would be silly for one of them to go inside and close the door.
So maybe her parents needed to do other things to be alone. Maybe they needed to hide from each other behind a wall of silence, until they had worked out whatever was bothering them.
And maybe after they were done working things out on their own, maybe they would work things out together-and be happy again. B'Elanna smiled to herself. She would like that. She would like that a lot.
Suddenly, the girl realized she wasn't speeding things up for her parents by sitting there. If she went out and left them alone, they might start talking again a little sooner. Maybe by the time she got back, everything would be normal again, the way it used to be.
Maybe everyone would be happy.
"I'm going out," B'Elanna announced abruptly. She put the puzzle cube away on a wall-shelf meant for such things, and headed for the door.
"Be back before dinner," her mother told her, looking up momentarily from her serpent worms.
"I will," she promised.
"And do not let the Ballantine child fill your head with nonsense," her mother added.
B'Elanna looked at her for a moment. Had her mother heard Billy talking about her-about Klingons? She couldn't tell from the hooded look of her mother's eyes.
"I won't," she replied.
B'Elanna headed for the door, already