The remote was on the floor in front of the couch. Sam picked it up and turned off the TV.
Which woke up Mary Lou. She was groggy at first. “Sam?” With her thick southern accent, she could make his name sound as if it had two syllables.
“Yeah, it’s me. Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
She sat up, got her bearings. “What time is it?”
“A little after four.”
She was wearing a pair of thin cotton pajamas that did little to contain the bounty of her bosom. He’d read that somewhere. He couldn’t remember exactly where or what. But the phrase came to mind immediately whenever he looked at Mary Lou.
She had a body that didn’t quit. After her pregnancy she thought of herself as fat, but Sam had seen her naked and the more appropriate word was lush.
With just a little bit of sweet talk, a few hints, and some extra warmth in his smile, he could have her. Whenever he wanted.
Trouble was, he didn’t want her.
He knew she was working hard to try to make him happy. In every possible way. Even right now, after she’d spent the night crying over him. If he so much as told her that she smelled good, she’d be on her back, waiting for him.
And, Jesus, that was weird. Like, instead of a wife, he had a concubine. Her selflessness—and he didn’t mean that in any positive sense of the word—was getting kind of freaky.
She did something of the same thing when it came to her so-called domestic duties. She cooked and cleaned and did his laundry with a devotion that was a little frightening. If he so much as mentioned that the kitchen floor needed sweeping, she not only had the broom in her hands, but the mop and bucket out as well.
As if maybe keeping the house clean enough would magically make him happy.
Mary Lou opened her mouth to speak, and he braced himself. Because as compliant as she was these days about everything else, the line was drawn when it came to Alyssa Locke.
And no matter how often Sam assured her that he hadn’t slept with Alyssa since they were married, Mary Lou didn’t buy it.
But this time she only said, “You’re home earlier than I expected.”
“Yeah.” Unwilling to wait for her to bring up the subject, Sam threw it out on the table. “I spoke to Jules today. He told me he and Alyssa bumped into you at work.”
“Yes.” Mary Lou stood up. “They both looked…fit. It was…nice to see them.”
What the hell…? Sam stared as Mary Lou headed toward the bedroom.
“I’d appreciate it if you took a shower before coming to bed” was all she said before she vanished down the hall.
His first thought was that she finally believed him. That everything Sam had told her about Alyssa hooking up with Max had been verified through the local grapevine and that Mary Lou now knew the truth—that his affair with Alyssa really was a thing of the distant past.
But he knew that wasn’t a possibility. Because who would’ve told her that about Alyssa? Who would’ve dared bring Alyssa up in a conversation?
No one, unless Nutjob Don next door had received the info via an alien radio signal picked up by his fillings…
Sam looked at the video box for Saving Private Ryan that was lying on the coffee table. Mary Lou hadn’t been watching that movie because she’d wanted to. She didn’t like war movies. She didn’t like anything that didn’t have a happy-ever-after ending.
But just last week Sam had casually mentioned how much he’d enjoyed that film.
It was all just more goddamn selflessness, both her watching this movie tonight and her walking away from a potential fight about Alyssa.
She was trying to make herself as easy as possible to live with.
Because on some level she knew that Sam no longer truly believed he’d done the right thing by marrying a woman he couldn’t even pretend to love.
Charlie couldn’t sleep.
She’d fallen asleep right after dinner, and now she was up, drifting about the house like a ghost at 4:30 A.M., trying to be quiet while Vince slept.
Of course, she could probably vacuum the bedroom rug and he wouldn’t wake up. He was losing his hearing, despite his insistence that he wasn’t. She was getting good and tired of repeating herself every time she spoke.
But whenever she brought up the idea of his getting fitted for hearing aids, Vince found some excuse to go out into the backyard—usually on the pretense of tending their garden.
Was it possible that he was in denial about growing old? She had to chuckle at that. His eightieth birthday was fast approaching. It was hard to pretend that you hadn’t achieved elderly status when you hit the old eight-oh milestone, as she’d done three years ago.
Despite their advanced years, they were both in good health, and she thanked God each day for that. Their children and grandchildren were all healthy, too. Well, with the exception of Donny. And she’d long reconciled herself to the fact that he’d never be well.
God worked in mysterious ways, and for some reason He’d decided that Donny would be one of His special people.
Perhaps it was His way of reminding them that without sadness, joy wouldn’t be quite as sweet.
Charlie had learned that lesson years ago. Firsthand.
She stopped her early morning waltz around this house—their “new” house—that she’d shared with her husband for the past twenty-five years, pausing by the picture of Vince in his Marine uniform. She picked it up from its place of honor on the fireplace mantel. It had been taken right after he’d signed up. The day after Pearl Harbor. The day after James had left this world.
Vince was grinning in the photograph, looking as if he were going to burst into merry laughter. He looked healthy and robust, with the very devil in his sparkling eyes.
It was true that the photo had been taken several years earlier, but it was a far cry from the intensely grim, hollow-cheeked young man who’d fainted at her feet in Senator Howard’s office in January 1944.
As Charlotte had rushed to help him, Mrs. P. had started to phone for an ambulance. He’d revived almost right away, pushing himself up onto his hands and knees and insisting that he didn’t need to go to the hospital.
It was then that Charlotte found out he didn’t have a hotel room in the city. Apparently he’d been sleeping in churches. Lots of servicemen did, those days.
Those few men who didn’t spend the night in Sally-the-upstairs-tenant’s bed, that is.
And so Charlotte had done the only thing she could think of to do. She’d brought Private DaCosta home.
She and Edna Fletcher took turns sitting with him those first few nights. But the penicillin Dr. Barnes had prescribed won the battle with his infection, thank goodness, and it wasn’t long before the young Marine was resting more comfortably.
By Monday, he was doing well enough that Charlotte felt able to return to work.
But for the first time in years, she actually put on her coat at 5:00. For the first time since the early days of her marriage, when James had been stationed here in Washington, she was not merely ready but eager to return home when the evening rolled around.
And it felt wrong. It felt as if she were being unfaithful. As she got off the bus and walked those last few blocks home, it felt like a terrible betrayal to James’s memory.
By the time she went into the apartment and hung up her coat, she was good and upset.
And Mother Fletcher was singing—singing—in the kitchen as she prepared dinner.
Charlotte didn’t say a word as she went in to help.
“He’s much better,” Mother reported. “He actually ate quite a bit at breakfast and again at noontime. And he even asked me to help him shave just a short while ago.” She winked at Charlotte. Winked. “It’s a good sign when a young man cares enough about his looks to ask for a shave.”
“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 s
he 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 highpitched 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 wou
nded. I spent the night listening to him crying for his mother.”
Charlotte 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.
EIGHT
“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 raftload 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.”
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