by Sarah Sundin
Ray chewed, swallowed, and flashed his most innocent smile.
Her mouth and eyes curved, and she walked over and placed a water-cooled hand on Ray’s cheek. “I’m glad you’re home, dear,” she said, her voice thick. “I’m glad you’re safe, glad you’ll never see the things your brothers have seen. I don’t know if . . .”
The truth stung, but Ray refused to wince. Mom didn’t think he could handle it.
Neither did Ray.
“Interest is flagging, donations are down. It’s hard to recruit volunteers.” Helen sat at the dining room table, proper and professional in a brown suit and cream-colored blouse.
Ray held up his glass of iced tea. What a perfect comparison to Helen’s eyes. Not only the color, but the clarity, the translucence, and the golden glow within. And her blonde hair glistened like honey. He had always liked tea with honey.
“We Americans are impatient.” Dad ladled a second helping onto his plate. “Casualties are high. We haven’t set foot on French or German soil, we’re bogged down in Italy, and progress in the Pacific is slow. How do we keep our sense of urgency?”
“I’ve been thinking. I’d like to put on a children’s pageant. I wouldn’t be able to organize it in time to help with this War Fund Campaign, but it’s never too late to help with the cause.” Helen sliced the chicken on her son’s plate.
“No! My do.” Jay-Jay swatted her arm.
“Sweetie, please.” Helen swept a nervous glance around the table.
Ray gave her a reassuring smile. He didn’t envy her duty to enforce manners while keeping the peace.
Dad picked up a drumstick and leaned closer to Jay-Jay. “It’s fried chicken, son. Finger food. Pick it up and gnaw at it.” He growled at the chicken.
Jay-Jay let out a wet chortle and screwed up his round face. “Grr.”
“John, you’re a horrible influence,” Mom said with a laugh.
Ray picked up a chicken wing, gave his mother a pointed look, and added to the growling.
Helen laughed. “Sounds like feeding time at the zoo.”
“Always. Always around here. I’m sorry, Helen.” Mom’s forehead bunched up, but her thin shoulders shook in laughter. “Boys never grow up.”
Ray let out a rumbling good snarl.
“So I see.” Helen gave him a look, half-stern, half-playful.
Something hot stirred in his chest. Mom was definitely wrong. Helen was ready. And didn’t the growling prove she needed a man in her life? Every little boy needed a firm hand, but he also needed someone to teach him how to make armpit noises. And wouldn’t Helen like a shoulder to lean on, a strong back to carry her burdens?
Ray took a deep breath to fill the width of his chest. Nora, Ann, and Dolores had all loved his solid build. Of course, they’d all broken up with him. And Jim had been built like a string bean. His chest deflated. Yeah, he did tend to get swept away.
Helen’s laughter pulled him back. Sunny, lemony laughter to go with the tea.
“I agree,” she said. “The pageant doesn’t have to be fancy. Red, white, and blue sashes, paper hats. They could wave flags they colored themselves. Wouldn’t that be charming? Songs, patriotic poems, maybe a skit.”
Mom cut her chicken with a knife and fork, always the lady. “How touching.”
“That’s the idea.” Helen rocked forward. “Remind everyone we’re fighting for the children, for the future. Then we pass sign-ups for the blood drive, sell War Bonds, recruit hostesses for the Soldiers’ Hospitality Center.”
Ray smiled. Her energy, compassion, and organizational ability would make her the perfect pastor’s wife. Getting ahead of himself, but maybe he needed to. Nora, Ann, and Dolores hadn’t been suited to life in the parsonage. If he’d considered that earlier, he wouldn’t have racked up three broken hearts and two broken engagements.
“No! Daff!” Jay-Jay cried.
Ray startled.
“Sweetie, please. Please don’t.” Helen’s voice strained. She pulled her son onto her lap and kissed his forehead.
“No! Mama, daff.”
“Daff?” Ray said above the boy’s grunts.
“Dance,” she said. “It’s something we do.”
“One of your routines?”
A glimmer of a smile. “Every night after dinner, we dance to the radio. It’s nothing, really.”
Nothing? Not to the little boy writhing on the lap of his mother, who looked ready to go home far too early.
“Jay-Jay,” he said in a tone just low enough to attract attention. “Would you like me to play the piano for you?”
Jay-Jay faced Ray with two fingers in his mouth and interest in his blue eyes.
“Oh goodness,” Helen said. “I couldn’t ask—”
“You didn’t ask. I offered. You lost your pork chop dinner. You shouldn’t have to lose your evening of dancing.”
Mom stood and gathered dishes. “Ray will play all night anyway. He’d rather have an audience. And I’ll be reading in the study to keep Pastor Novak company while he polishes his sermon.”
“I don’t want to impose,” Helen said.
Ray leaned forward. “Jay-Jay, what’s your favorite song?”
“Moo,” he said around his fingers.
“Moo?”
Helen stroked her son’s curls. “ ‘In the Mood.’ He likes anything fast and bouncy.”
“All right, then.” Ray tossed his napkin onto the table and headed for the parlor.
“I should help with—”
“You’d be the greatest help,” Mom said, “if you entertained Ray so I don’t have to listen to him whine.”
“Little boys.” But Helen’s scold held laughter, and chair legs scraped over the floor.
In the parlor Ray shoved back the coffee table and rug, shed his olive drab uniform jacket, and sat at the piano in his khakis.
Jay-Jay ran into the room. “Daff. Moo.”
“Coming right up.” A few scales, and Ray started the song. When Helen sidled into the parlor, Ray jerked his head toward the dance floor behind him. “Daff.”
“I’ll just sit and watch.”
“No, Mama, daff.”
“Go ahead, Helen. I’m not watching.” Not yet anyway.
She gave a self-conscious laugh, and soon two sets of feet shuffled and squeaked and tapped the hardwood floor. Jay-Jay’s squeals rose high in the air and low to the floor.
Ray built up to the finale and glanced behind him. Helen held her son on her hip and twirled around, her hair a golden wing behind her. She moved gracefully, without a trace of her old limp.
Ray remembered her tiny body lying paralyzed on the bed in the Jamisons’ living room, remembered her struggling to walk in steel-and-leather braces, shedding one brace and then the other with a determined set to her chin. He couldn’t believe she remembered his visits. It didn’t seem like much, but he couldn’t stand how Betty Jamison ran around the neighborhood on healthy legs with Dorothy Carlisle, who had been Helen’s best friend. A teenage boy couldn’t substitute for a sister or a girlfriend, but Ray could read a storybook or play a game of checkers.
Helen gasped. “You said you wouldn’t watch.”
“Nope. I said I wasn’t watching, not that I wouldn’t.” Ray drummed the final chord and grinned. “What’s next?”
She rolled her eyes. “How about ‘Don’t Be That Way’?”
He laughed. “Come on, we need fast and bouncy, right, Jay-Jay?” He launched into “Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar.”
The pace demanded Ray’s attention, but he popped occasional glances to watch mother and son jitterbug, squeal, and grow red in the face. Finally, Jay-Jay spun into a giggling heap on the floor.
“Uncle! Uncle! We can’t take it.” Helen lurched, laughing, to the wall and leaned her arms on the piano top. “Ray, that’s amazing, but please let us rest.”
He smiled at her rosy cheeks and tousled hair, and made a quick musical transition to “Taking a Chance on Love.” Not subtle, but he was in no mo
od for subtle.
“Oh dear, what’s this?” She poked between the threads of the doily on the piano top.
“You’ve discovered the Novaks’ deepest, darkest secret,” he said in his deepest, darkest voice.
“Looks like an ink spot.”
“Yep. Very deep. Very dark.”
“I imagine one of you boys had something to do with it.”
“Jack, of course.”
“He always got in trouble, didn’t he?”
Ray ran through an intricate run. “This time we all got in trouble.”
A scar on her cheek gave her smile a cute little tilt. “How’d that happen?”
“Let’s see. Jack was about five. I hated to see him get another spanking, so I told Mom I did it. But I didn’t know Jack had talked little Walt into confessing.”
“Typical. Walt lying, Jack manipulating, and you being nice.”
“I lied too.”
Her gaze pulled like a fishing line. “That’s different.”
The heat returned to his chest. How stupid to offer to play piano when he wanted to dance. “Jay-Jay, want to play the piano?”
“My?”
“Ray, he’ll just pound the keys.”
“How’s that different from what I do?” He put his hands around the boy’s solid middle and lifted him to the bench.
Jay-Jay slammed both hands on the keyboard.
“How’s that different?” Helen covered her ears. “Oh, I don’t know. Melody? Rhythm?”
Ray took a little hand and separated out one plump finger. “Like this. One finger at a time.” He walked Jay-Jay through “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
The boy started his own discordant composition.
Ray leaned down to his ear. “May I ask your mother to dance?”
Jay-Jay nodded and grinned at the keys while two fingers tapped like a pair of demented woodpeckers.
Helen stood straight, her lips parted, her elbows still on the piano top.
Ray got to his feet and bowed. “May I have this dance?”
She gave a small laugh, high and nervous. “Sure, but doesn’t that require music?”
He took her hand, so small and warm, and twirled her under his arm. “Sounds like ‘The Woodpecker Song.’ ”
Her laugh rang lower and more natural. “It does, doesn’t it? And we may not have a tune, but we have a beat.”
Ray grinned and worked that beat. He hadn’t danced for over a year, but it came back to him, and Helen kept up, the perfect partner. All that spinning, wiggling, laughing femininity drove the heat from his chest into every muscle of his body.
His cloud had a lining, all right, but gold instead of silver. This golden young woman.
4
Saturday, March 18, 1944
Helen clipped her white cotton nightgown to the clothesline and fumbled in her apron pocket. Only two clothespins remained, locked in mortal combat. Helen groaned. She needed both hands to separate them. As soon as she let go of the nightgown, the wind snatched it, and the gown billowed onto the lawn like a ghost.
“Every—single—time.” With each word, Helen snapped the gown, which hurt her wrist, but she had to work out the injury. She couldn’t do anything right, especially laundry. The Delta breeze blew from the San Francisco Bay, funneled down the valley where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers met, and blasted Antioch and Helen’s wash.
What a lousy weekend. How silly to hope Ray would visit or call on Friday. Last week she thought he might be sweet on her, but he was just sweet to her. Honestly, what did she expect?
She secured the nightgown with all three clothespins, then headed to the garage for more. On the lawn, Jay-Jay rocked back and forth in the old wicker laundry basket Mama had left when she and Papa moved to Washington DC in November.
“Oh no! A storm at sea.” Helen plucked up her son, plopped him on the grass, and set the basket over his head. He roared in delight. Mama was right—an extra basket came in handy.
The garage smelled of dust and oil and Jim. Helen grabbed a pocketful of clothespins and got out as fast as possible.
“Hi there.” At the foot of the driveway, Ray Novak tipped his garrison cap to her.
“Oh. Hi.” Helen’s heart tumbled like the load in the washing machine. She freed her hand from her bulging pocket to wave, and a clothespin fell to the asphalt. Stupid, clumsy girl. She picked it up. “Out for a walk?”
“Mm-hmm. Nice day.” Handsome in crisp khakis, he strolled up the driveway.
And Helen wore an old brown gingham dress and a ratty gray cardigan, with her hair up in a kerchief. She hadn’t even bothered with lipstick.
Ray smiled as if oblivious to her appearance. “Thought of you last night.”
“You did?”
“Death by pork chops.”
Helen gave him a smile. “Yet you abandoned me to my fate.”
“No choice. At the Air Depot I’m Laurel and Hardy rolled into one, and I couldn’t get the shipment out in time to catch my bus. Just got in this morning.”
“That’s too bad.” In the warmth of his smile, her disappointment evaporated. If only she didn’t look like Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath.
Ray peered into the backyard. “Um, your basket’s moving.”
The basket inched across the grass like a headless turtle. “It’s probably giggling too.”
“Yeah?” Ray walked over and squatted. “Say, what a big, strong tank. What’s a tank doing around here?”
A smiling face peeked out. “No. Day-Day.”
“It’s not a tank? It’s Jay-Jay? Whew. Thought I’d have to call in the Army.”
Jay-Jay poked a finger through a hole in the basket. “Bang!”
Helen went to the good basket and pulled out Jay-Jay’s blue striped shirt. “Ray, would you like one too, so you can have a tank battle?”
“Sounds great.” He sat cross-legged in the grass. “You survived the pork chops.”
Helen clipped the shirt to the line. “Only to suffer an after-dinner visit from Vic and Jeannie.”
“The Llewellyn kids? I thought you were friends.”
Helen shook out her yellow gingham peasant skirt. “We are. Jeannie and I have been friends since . . . since I was sick. We love competing against each other. But you know the Llewellyns. Vic pesters me to work for him at Port Chicago, and Jeannie drops French phrases then covers her mouth and says, ‘Pardon, chérie. I forgot you only had high school French.’ ”
“Does she? I should teach you obscure phrases in German, Hebrew, Latin, or ancient Greek.”
“You speak all those?”
“Read them, yes. Speak them, barely.”
Helen set clothespins like birds on a branch huddling from the rain. “Jeannie graduates from Mills College in June. We were supposed to graduate together.”
“You didn’t go.”
“Jim wouldn’t have it.” She sucked in her breath. Where did that come from? “We wanted to get married.”
“Young love is impatient.”
“Yes.” She wrestled a sheet in place, and it wrapped her in a clammy embrace.
Ray stood and helped her stretch out the sheet on the line. “Any regrets?”
She stared across the clothesline into those knowing eyes. “Not when I look at my son.”
Jay-Jay dug in the dirt under the hedges Mr. Carlisle had planted, oleander hedges that threatened the view of the outside world. Stupid things refused to die, no matter how much Helen deprived them of water.
“He’s a great kid,” Ray said. “A budding musician and a swell daffer.”
Helen smiled and dug in her pocket for more pins.
“Last night,” he said, eyes warm as gray flannel. “I’d rather have been daffing than sitting in my barracks worrying about you and pork chops. I didn’t even know about the scourge of the Llewellyns.”
She experimented with a playful look, but she was out of practice. “Some knight in shining armor you are.”
“I’m no knight.”
“Sure you are. Twice now you’ve rescued me after bike accidents.” She pinned up a bobby sock, so childish, but with stockings unavailable she had no choice.
Ray frowned at the sky. “Knights go to combat and slay dragons. Not me. If I met a dragon, I’d talk him into using his fire for good instead of evil.”
Helen laughed and added the sock’s mate. “I hope you never meet a dragon who won’t listen to reason.”
“Yeah.” His voice sounded tight, but he turned before Helen could read his expression. “How about I deal with this little dragon?”
The wind puffed out the sheet, and Jay-Jay chased it with dirty hands.
Ray grabbed him around the middle, swung him overhead, then glanced at Helen. “Before I get him wound up, does he still take—is it almost time . . . ?”
She nodded. Impressive for a man to remember about naps, especially a bachelor. “Half an hour.”
He gazed up at the giggling boy he held with nice thick arms. “Say, munchkin, how about a story?”
Helen pointed to the back porch. “I have books on the table.”
“Books. Your mommy knows what I like.” Ray flew Jay-Jay like an airplane, sat down with him, and thumbed through the books. “What would you like? Make Way for Ducklings? The Color Kittens?”
“Da boo.”
Ray looked at Helen, eyebrows twisted in comical shapes.
“His Daddy book.” She made her voice sober. “The brown scrapbook.”
Ray settled back and flipped through black pages while Jay-Jay pointed and jabbered. Helen whipped out piece after piece of laundry and focused hard on how many clothespins each required.
“Did you do this all yourself, Helen? It’s a lot of work.”
“That’s what I needed.” When the telegram arrived, Helen had laughed. Papa told everyone she was mad with grief. For the next month she sequestered herself, pasted photo corners with rubber cement, and mounted photos and mementoes to present Jim as everyone remembered him, as Jay-Jay needed to know him. Meanwhile, Helen learned how to act like a proper widow.
“For Jay-Jay’s sake,” she said.
“It’s a fine thing you did.”
Helen ducked to the laundry basket to shake out two socks. How much longer would she have to endure sympathy and admiration for her bravery? Would she ever get to be herself again? Could she even remember who she was?