The bullet that pierced Carley Penney's head on Oct. 13, 1986, stole the hearing in her left ear and many of her memories. It also sealed a romance.
She remembers the unkempt young man who filled his car with gas at her father's service station that evening, then walked into the store, grabbed some soda pop and asked for cigarettes.She never saw the gun and recalls only "patches" of the ensuing 72 hours during which she lay bleeding on the floor, was rushed to hospitals in Fillmore and Provo and became a mother for the first time.
Three years later, the scar has faded and what remains is hidden beneath Carley Penney's blonde hair. Her son, Joshua, delivered the night of the shooting a month premature, is a healthy toddler with a new brother.
And Gerald Bell, the 17-year-old robber who changed her life, remains incarcerated in Utah State Prison, his convictions for attempted murder and aggravated robbery upheld this past week by the Utah Supreme Court.
"I'm doing really good, considering what happened," Penney, 25, said in an interview from her home in Kanosh. "I have my life and my kids and my husband."
In all the seven years Penney had stood behind the counter at Ferg's Conoco, her closest brushes with criminals had been the motorists who sped off without paying for gas.
In fact, she did not believe she had been shot until she woke up groggy at the hospital, her head aching and her infant son down the hall in an oxygen tent with a respirator.
Her husband, Clint, broke the news to her.
"I didn't believe him. But I think after I finally woke up and looked around and realized how much my head hurt, I thought maybe it did happen. The last thing I remember I was at the station. He told me I had a boy and his name is Joshua. I thought, `Oh, a lot has happened since I've been asleep.' "
Joshua suffered no permanent complications from his dramatic entry into the world. His mother delivered him by Caesarean section after nearly 10 hours of surgery on her head wound. She revived with no memory of being shot.
As a precaution, doctors had put her on anti-seizure medication for two years. But she stopped taking the drug within months of the birth of her second son, Carl, in July 1988.
Besides hearing and memory loss, the bullet brought her chronic headaches and made her more forgetful.
"I have to write everything down, and even then, I might forget," she said. Still, she believes she was lucky - "very lucky."
"Sometimes I wonder what it would be like. There could have been a lot more wrong with me than there was. I look at my kids and think, `Gee, I might not have been here to see them. Carl wouldn't have been here, and I might not have gotten to know Josh.' Every once in a while it'll come to me."
Workmen's compensation covered her medical bills and lost wages, and her parents, four sisters and two brothers helped nurse her back to physical and mental health.
The ordeal united the family and cemented the relationship of Carley and Clint Penney.
The shooting taught the couple never to take each other for granted.
"He was shocked and then he realized how much he really loved me and how short a time we'd been together. And it's made us closer," she said.
"Our marriage would've been OK, but it made feelings come out to the surface more. We talk more freely. He does so much for me and helps me. We get things said now before something does happen, and you don't have a chance to say it."
Clint, 36, a road maintenance worker for the Utah Department of Transportation, wants to tell Joshua the circumstances of his birth when the boy is old enough to understand.
"We kept all the newspaper articles to show him and the pictures of him when he was born - all the tubes that were on him," Carley Penney said.
She no longer dwells on the shooting, although word that Bell had filed an appeal filled her with momentary dread.
The Rosebud, Mont., man, now 20, challenged Utah's procedures for trying juveniles as adults. But the Supreme Court rejected the arguments Wednesday.
Carley bears him no particular hatred, but neither she, nor Clint, will forgive him. She said as much in a letter to the Utah Board of Pardons.
"I said that after what he had done to me, I didn't think he deserved to be out of prison without serving a good portion of what he's supposed to," she said.
When his release finally is scheduled, said Penney, an Ogden native, she wants to know about it.
"Sometimes when I think about it, I wonder, `Well, is he going to come after me when he gets out of prison?' Because if I had died, he probably wouldn't have gotten caught. I don't know if he's going to come after me or come see me and tell me something. I'd be scared to death just to see him again."
She has no fears about the second youth involved in the case, an unidentified 17-year-old who never entered the store and was processed through the juvenile court system.
"I really didn't see him. I just knew there was somebody else driving the car," she said.
The last time Penney felt any great surge of emotion about the shooting came in April 1988 when she heard that a pregnant Salt Lake County woman had been shot by a robber at a Kearns video store.
The victim, Anna Holmes, died at a hospital moments after doctors delivered her brain-damaged baby girl by Caesarean section.
"I was sitting over at my in-laws house when that came on the news and it sort of made me hold my breath and I wondered how she was doing," Carley said.
She believes only God can answer why she was spared and Holmes was not.
"I think He wants me here for something, but I don't really know yet what it is. Maybe I will some day."