"Good," Charlotte said tightly. "Then it won't be long before he's well enough to leave."
"There's no need to rush him out of here," Mother said calmly as she stirred the chicken gravy.
"You like having him here," Charlotte realized.
"Yes." She wiped her hands on her apron. "I do. He's sweet, he's smart, and he plays gin rummy. I have to admit, it's nice to have a young man around again, to take care of."
"He's not your son." Charlotte was almost frantically upset. She never would have dreamed of speaking to her mother-in-law this way if she weren't. "It's foolish to pretend he is."
Mother Fletcher's voice was sharper, too. "My son is gone. What's foolish is pretending that anything you or I can do will change that bitter truth. We are here. James is gone. He'll be gone tomorrow, too—whether or not we continue to show common decent kindness to this young man."
Charlotte turned and walked out of the room. She was up the stairs and through the door before she realized that she couldn't take solace in her bedroom—the room she'd once shared with James an entire lifetime ago.
Vincent DaCosta was sitting up in the middle of her bed.
Wearing a pair of James's pajamas.
She stopped short.
He was holding a book, but he wasn't reading. He was looking at her, a silent apology in his eyes.
Of course, he'd heard every word she'd said to Mother Fletcher downstairs. The same way she heard everything that went on in Sally Slaggerty's apartment upstairs.
"How are you feeling, Private?" she asked, trying her best to be polite, while wanting nothing more than to run away from him as well—while hating herself for noticing how much better he looked with some color in his face, for noticing that he'd washed and combed his hair as well as shaved. For noticing how handsome he looked without that constant haze of pain in his dark eyes.
"Much better," he said. "Thank you. I'll leave first thing in the morning, if that's all right—
She cut him off. "Has the doctor said you were strong enough to leave?"
"No, but I don't think—"
"When the doctor says so, then you can leave. If you have a place to stay. If not, you should plan on staying here. I apologize, Private, if I made you feel unwelcome."
He shook his head. "I don't—"
"My husband is dead." It was not the first time she'd said those words aloud, yet their finality struck her anew each time she uttered them.
"I know." Vince closed his book, set it down beside him on the bed. He looked up at her, and she saw from his eyes that he truly did know. He'd been wounded fighting this lousy war. He knew what dead really meant in a day and age where bombs could blow a man to pieces, where shrapnel could shred him so that he bled to death inside even while he kept on fighting. "I'm sorry. Mrs. Fletcher—your mother-in-law—told me he was lost at Pearl."
She didn't want his understanding. "That's a stupid way of saying it," she said sharply. "Lost. As if he were misplaced."
He didn't hide from her flare of temper. "I think the word lost really refers to the survivors," he said quietly. "The loss is theirs. Yours. Mine." He met her gaze steadily. "More than eighty percent of my platoon was lost at Tarawa, Mrs. Fletcher. I, for one, will never be the same for having lost them there."
She didn't want to like him. She didn't want him to be anything more than an injured, anonymous soldier she was helping to nurse back to health.
But Vince DaCosta had stopped being anonymous the first day she'd brought an extra sandwich for him to share for lunch. As they'd talked, he'd told her that he'd grown up on Cape Cod. That his father was a lobsterman, that he'd been raised half in the water. The only thing he could do better than swim was sail a boat.
He'd never been to college, but he was the first of the DaCostas to get a high school diploma—no small feat for a working-class family.
He'd gotten the rest of his education the same way Abraham Lincoln had, he'd told her. By reading any- and everything he could get his hands on.
Including, apparently, Little Women, the book resting now beside him on her bed.
It was an odd choice for him to have made, considering that all of James's far more masculine books, Jack London's stories and the complete adventures of Sherlock Holmes among them, were still on her shelves.
But perhaps Vince knew that seeing him in James's pajamas was quite all she'd be able to bear,
"It's time to change your bandages." She knew he hated that. He would lay back in the bed with his arm up and over his eyes, as if that could make him disappear. Blushing furiously the entire time.
Changing his bandages certainly could have waited until after dinner, but Charlotte desperately wanted him to transform back into a patient. He was much too difficult to deal with as a man.
The steady look that he gave her told her he knew darn well what she was up to. Yet she could see kindness, not accusation, in his eyes.
"I'm feeling well enough to do it myself now," he told her.
She challenged him. "Isn't that what you thought the last time—and you ended up getting an infection?"
"I thought I'd nearly healed," he said. "And I had. I just... You're right, I should've taken better care of myself. I promise I won't make the same mistake again."
"The last promise you made was that if we let you stay here rather than sending you to a hospital, you would allow us to change your bandages every day," Charlotte stubbornly pointed out.
"Mrs. Fletcher," he said, "I really am feeling much better. Everything seems to be working the way it's supposed to be working again. Everything." He looked at her squarely, but a faint blush darkened his cheeks.
Perfect. Now she was blushing, too. She was about to matter-of-fact her way through it, though, when Upstairs Sally came home. Loudly.
Her sitting room wasn't directly overhead, but her footsteps still managed to sound as if she were flamenco dancing on Charlotte's ceiling.
The radio went on. Benny Goodman was at a high enough volume almost to mask the sound of voices. Sally's high-pitched laughter. And a second voice. A low rumble of a voice.
Her heart sinking, Charlotte looked at her watch. It was 5:45 in the evening. And Sally had already brought her date home.
Rapid footsteps sounded overhead and the laughter got louder. They were in Sally's bedroom now, and from the sound of things, Sally was being chased over and around her bed.
There was a sudden giggling shriek as the bedsprings above gave a loud creak.
Whoever he was, he'd caught her.
At this point, there would usually be a few moments of silence, as Sally and her friend undressed. But whoever this "friend" was, he was in a hurry. Because it wasn't more than five seconds before the bed upstairs started creaking. Rhythmically.
Unmistakably.
And the laughter turned to moaning.
Poor Vincent was as embarrassed as she was. Maybe even more so. If that was possible.
Charlotte all but ran for the door. "I'll go see about dinner." But then she turned back. The polite thing to do in mixed company was simply to ignore the fact that her upstairs neighbor was fornicating loudly, but unlike her, Vince couldn't run from the racket. She simply couldn't leave him there without saying, "I'm so sorry about this."
He'd already picked up the book again, but now he closed it, one finger holding his place. "It's not your fault that the walls and floors are so thin. He's probably home on furlough."
"Her husband died in the war."
That made him pause for only a moment. Then, "I guess everyone has their own way of dealing with their grief," he said quietly.
"Well, she 'deals with her grief endlessly," Charlotte told him. "Nightly. It gets tiresome after a while. Trust me. The night can be very long."
"I spent a night pinned down by the enemy," Vince said. "We dug ourselves into the sand, on the beach. Me and a guy who'd had his leg... who'd been badly wounded. I spent the night listening to him crying for his mother."
Charlo
tte couldn't speak, couldn't move.
"That was a long night," Vince told her as Upstairs Sally achieved fulfillment with a quavering scream.
"I'm sorry," she managed to whisper, then pushed herself out the door.
Chapter 8
"RUMOR HAS IT that your little 'oh, it was nothing' knee injury was in fact a broken kneecap," Joan said as Mike Muldoon approached.
He was wearing his uniform again today. It couldn't have been more white than anyone else's, yet on him, it truly seemed to glow.
For a moment he looked as if he were about to turn around and walk back into the restaurant's parking lot, where he'd left his truck. But instead he smiled. It was definitely forced. "There're always lots of rumors circulating," he said. "You've got to take 'em all with a grain of salt."
"So you didn't break your kneecap in Afghanistan," she clarified.
"No comment."
She rolled her eyes. This again. "I'm not the press."
"And I'm not at liberty to talk about where I may or may not have been and what I may or may not have done there, particularly in terms of the A-word," he countered. "Joan, do we really have to fight again today? Because I was kind of looking forward to having an indigestion-free lunch."
Joan was nervous, and it was true, she tended to pick fights when she was nervous.
It was weird. She'd purposely given Muldoon the kid brother speech last night on the phone, and he'd seemed to accept it readily enough. Except now she was the one who needed convincing. Seeing him face-to-face again, in all his shiny, youthful Navy SEAL splendor was enough to make her forget her own name, let alone her resolve not to wake up in a few weeks' time with a raft load of regrets and a new skeleton for her closet. She had career aspirations—and hers was a world where skeletons didn't stay inside of closets for very long.
She cleared her throat. "The men in your team really love you. Am I allowed to say that?"
Muldoon shook his head. "Definitely not. They can admire and respect me, but love? The word's not in the working SEAL vocabulary. At least not in reference to teammates, thank you very much."
She laughed. He was smiling, too, and this time it was more genuine. "I really am sorry about yesterday," he added as he held open the door to the restaurant, "and I really do appreciate your willingness to have lunch with me."
"I thought I already forgave you last night," she said, taking off her sunglasses and letting her eyes adjust to the lack of blinding sunlight inside. "Although, if you're really that contrite, I'll let you make it up to me by telling me where most of Team Sixteen were this morning, all morning. Training, I'll bet. But what kind of training?"
"Joan, there are things I can't tell you, no matter how contrite I am. You know this. Don't pretend you don't. I cannot answer any questions that are about past, present, or future operations." She opened her mouth, but he stopped her. "Yes, you can shout about your security clearance until you're blue in the face. You can even proposition me—promise me kinky sex till we both drop from exhaustion—but it won't do any good. You can marry me, for crying out loud, bear my children, and spend the next fifty years with me. But I still can't and won't answer questions about operations." He stepped up to the hostess. "Table for two. Near the windows, please."
The young woman flashed her dimples at Muldoon as she gave him a very deliberate once-over. It took her far less time to size up Joan. "One moment, Lieutenant." She vanished into the restaurant, and Muldoon turned back to Joan.
Avoid, avoid, avoid his kinky sex comment. She had to ignore it as completely as she ignored that dismissive look from that hostess bitch. Don't take that bait, Joan. Don't do it. He was testing her, but she was strong.
"Okay," she told him.
Her surrender completely caught him off guard. The expression on his face was comical. "Okay? Just like that, okay?"
"Are you really going to argue about my agreeing with you?" she said. "Aren't you the one who wanted an indigestion-free lunch?"
"Yes, but—"
"If I ask you a question that you can't or won't answer, you just say pass. Is that okay? It's easier than me trying to figure out what I can and can't ask. This way I'll just ask everything and you can be the censor."
He was looking at her as if he were wishing he could climb into her head to find out what she was really up to.
"Lieutenant Muldoon. What a pleasure."
Joan turned to see sheer perfection holding out a manicured hand and smiling up at Mike Muldoon. Petite and blue-eyed with perfectly coiffed honey-blond hair and a figure reminiscent of Pamela Anderson's, perfection wore Armani today and carried a handbag that matched her high-heeled shoes.
On closer inspection, perfection was in her early to mid-forties, but since she could probably still cause a riot by wearing a bikini, that quite possibly made her even more perfect.
Muldoon shook the outstretched perfect hand, morphing neatly into his too-polite evil twin. "Mrs. Tucker. How are you, ma'am?"
Tucker, Tucker. Joan had heard that name before. And she couldn't deny she got a charge of sadistic delight in hearing perfection get blatantly ma'am-ed.
"Call me Laurel, please, and I'm wonderful. Larry's gone to D.C. for a few days—it's always a nice break to have him out of the house." Her voice was as perfect as the rest of her. Musical and sweetly sultry. Shades of Barbara Eden's Jeannie. Thank you, Master. "You remember my daughter, Lindsey."
Lurking behind perfection was a skinny, freckle-faced teenager with short brown curls and a bad habit of biting her fingernails.
Muldoon nodded at the girl. "Yes, I do."
Oh, poor little Lindsey. Joan couldn't imagine how hard it would be to go through life with perfection for a mother. Talk about difficult childhoods. How could the entire world not compare them and find the daughter lacking? The whispers and stares must be excruciating.
And poor Lindsey was too young yet to know that the best men, the worthwhile men—the ones worth having and sometimes even keeping—didn't want anything to do with perfection.
Muldoon, who was doing his SEAL robot impression with real finesse, turned to Joan with his polite smile carefully in place. "This is Joan DaCosta. She's on staff at the White House and in town for a couple of weeks."
Joan felt the warmth of his hand at her waist and realized that he'd actually put his arm around her. As if they were there on a real date. As if lunch weren't the most nonromantic meal of the day.
Perfect Mrs. Tucker—whom Joan finally remembered was married to the skeevy admiral with the thinning hair—had a dead-fish handshake. "Lovely to meet you, Joan. I'm Laurel."
"Nice meeting you both," she said. Lindsey didn't seem to want to shake her hand. The girl was fiercely occupied by a hangnail.
"Lieutenant, your table is ready." The hostess bitch was back, holding a pair of menus.
"Please excuse us," Muldoon said. "Mrs. Tucker. Lindsey."
He kept his hand on Joan's waist all the way to their table, only letting her go to hold out her chair for her.
She waited until he'd sat down and the hostess had handed them both menus. By that time, her imagination had gone into overdrive.
"Don't you dare," she said, leaning across the table so that she could speak in a low voice, "tell me that there's something going on between you and Laurel." She imitated the way the woman spoke.
He laughed, and just like that the robot SEAL was gone and Mike Muldoon was back. "Why not? She's pretty hot. Don't you think she's hot?"
"Oh, my God, Michael!" She put down her menu without giving it a glance. "Were you..."
She shut her mouth, able only to make questioning, disbelieving eyes at him, as a waiter brought them bread and filled their glasses with water. Finally he left, and she leaned closer to Muldoon again, lowering her voice even more. "Were you trying to make her jealous or something? Was that what that was? You know, the arm around me thing?"
"Jealous? Wow, no," he said, with a laugh. "I was just... I don't know. She freaks me out a little. S
he's always there when I turn around, like she's maybe looking for some play, or ... I don't know, it's probably just my imagination, but I thought if she thought I was involved with someone..."
"Like that would stop her. I thought she was going to drool on your hand. I mean, hello, subtlety! News bulletin just in: Larry's gone to D.C. for a few days. Why don't you come up and see me sometime, sailor? Talk about blatant. And right in front of her daughter. Shit. Ain't no maybe here, babe. She wants your ass."
Muldoon smiled weakly. "Maybe you're right."
"Maybe again." She couldn't remember the last time she'd laughed so much. "Come on."
"I'm pretty sure she's just playing a game. You know, just flirting with me."
"Honey, she was looking at you as if you were dessert, and today was National Break-the-Diet Day."
He glanced across the room to where Laurel and Lindsey were being seated with a woman who looked as if her bathroom mirror was a time portal to 1983. Big hair. Big hair.
"I don't know," he said, shaking his head. "Her husband's a player. I think on some level it would really appeal to her, you know, to sleep with a SEAL to get back at him for all the times he's cheated. Particularly since he's not a fan of SpecWar, and in particular since he's not a fan of Team Sixteen. Some of the guys think I should play out the scenario, see what she'd actually do if I responded to one of her innuendoes, but I can't do that. I mean, what if she's serious? Then what do I do? She's married And I don't mess around with women who are married. Even if they are hot."
That was what was holding him back? She was married? "But, ew, isn't she, like, too ..." Joan couldn't think of the right word.
"Old?" he suggested.
"Yes," she said. "Yes! Old. She's old enough to be your mother."
"Actually, my mother had me pretty late in life. She just turned seventy, so—"
"I didn't mean literally, Einstein. I meant in theory. Laurel Tucker's got to be fifteen or twenty years older than you. That's creepy."
"Why?"
He was serious.
"Because it is," Joan told him.
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