Sam nodded. “I know that, sir. I’m thinking about asking for a transfer. I think it might be a good idea if I went overseas.”
The expression in Jacquette’s eyes was impossible to read. “That would be a serious loss to this team.”
“Thank you, sir, but I don’t know what else to do.”
“I’ve heard the rumors, but…” Jazz cleared his throat. “You married her because she was pregnant, is that correct?”
Sam laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Gee, I thought that went from rumor to verified fact a long time ago. Yes, sir, it is correct.”
Jazz nodded solemnly. “Sam, I’m speaking to you not as your XO right now, but as your friend. You married the girl because she was pregnant, but she’s not pregnant now, is she?”
Sam understood the implication. As unsavory as it was, the possibility of divorce had popped into his thoughts way more than a time or two. But, “Am I supposed to just ignore Haley? She exists. I’m her father. If I divorce Mary Lou, I’ll be divorcing her, too. There’re no two ways around it.”
Jazz bounced the eraser end of a pencil on the file on his desk. “You know, from the way I hear it, you already are pretty much ignoring Haley. Of course, that could just be a rumor, too.”
Sam clenched his teeth over a completely inappropriate reply to an executive officer.
Another deep sigh from Jazz. “Sam, these past six months now, your head has been somewhere else. I don’t know where you’ve gone or, really, what’s going on with you, but I do know this. I don’t want you transferring out of this team. I want you back. I want my best officer back to giving a hundred and ten percent, not this half-assed fifty or sixty that you’ve been delivering lately.”
His best officer. Holy fuck. Lieutenant Jacquette didn’t use words like best. Ever. Sam didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. So he just stood there.
“Tell her to stay away, Lieutenant,” Jacquette said. “Next time I see your wife in this building, I will call the shore patrol and they will physically remove her and charge her with trespassing. You might want to warn her about that, because it will not be fun for her.”
Jesus. “I’ll tell her that, sir.”
“Good.” Jazz was already once more buried in his files. “By the way, if you tell anyone that I called you my best officer, I will deny it completely.”
Sam had to smile. “If I told anyone, sir, trust me, they wouldn’t believe me.”
“Depends on whether or not they knew you, Lieutenant,” Jazz said. “If they’ve served with you, they’d believe it.” He looked up. “Don’t you have things to do?”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “I’m just temporarily overcome by a case of the warm fuzzies. I thought I’d bask in the warmth of your love a little bit longer, sir.”
Jazz didn’t smile. In fact, his legendary glare was pretty damn daunting. “Let me put it into language that I know you can understand. Get the fuck out of here, Starrett.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Sam got. But as he walked away, he could have sworn he heard Jazz Jacquette laugh.
TWELVE
CHARLIE SAT IN the lounge chair on Donny’s screened-in porch.
She and Vince had bought this furniture for their grandson several years back, and at the time, she’d protested. When would he ever use it? The porch was off-limits to him because, although there was a ceiling and roof overhead, apparently aliens were capable of squeezing their way through the tiny holes in the screens.
But Vince had just smiled the same way he’d always just smiled all those decades they’d been married. “The chairs are for us, Charles,” he’d said.
And, indeed, she’d spent quite a bit of time sitting out here since then.
Inside the house, Donny was still sleeping, and Vince was still standing guard, as he’d promised.
Of course, aliens could attack and Vince would never hear them coming. Unless they brought a marching band with a big bass drum with their assault team.
She should talk. Her own ears weren’t what they used to be, either.
Sixty years ago, she could hear every word spoken—no, whispered—from well down the hall.
“I, well, I just wanted to come over here to thank you for what you did last night—you know, coming to my rescue like that.”
Charlotte had been lying down in that spare bedroom, in that apartment she’d once shared with James, exhausted from the explosive events of the night before, when the sound of quiet voices awakened her.
It was no wonder she was so tired—she’d sat with Sally until the police arrived, and then she’d brought Vince back to bed and cleaned and bandaged his feet, cut from the window glass he’d shattered to get inside Sally’s apartment.
Then, before she went back to her own bed, she’d insisted he show her his wounds. She wanted to see with her own eyes that his trips up and down the stairs hadn’t torn out his stitches.
It had taken her bursting into tears to get him to comply—an outburst that had been as completely unexpected to her as it was to him. She was not prone to such emotional demonstrations. In fact, she hadn’t even cried—not noisily like this—when that telegram about James arrived.
Idiotically, she cried again from relief when she saw that Vince had, indeed, not injured himself any further.
He’d reached for her then. Somehow he knew to say nothing, just to hold her and stroke her hair.
And when she was done crying, Charlotte lay there, on her bed, wrapped in the arms of a man that James wouldn’t’ve given a second glance. An enlisted Marine, without a college education. A lobsterman from Cape Cod, with the kind of name—DaCosta—that wouldn’t go far in the political arena to which James had always aspired.
Charlotte lay for hours in Vince’s arms, staring out the window at the night, listening to him breathe.
Exhausted himself, he’d finally fallen asleep, and when he did, he pulled her closer to him. As much of a gentleman as he was in the daytime, in sleep his body betrayed him, reacting unmistakably to her nearness.
Dear Lord Almighty, give her strength. It was all she could do to keep herself from reaching for him, the way she’d reached for James when she’d awakened in the night to find him wanting her.
Although maybe she should just fall asleep, too, and let their two desperate bodies do their will, because, oh, James, forgive her, she wanted to lie with this man. If she hadn’t before tonight, well, seeing him charge up those stairs to come to Sally’s aid with such little regard for his own health and safety had clinched it.
Hearing Vince’s words of warning, his quiet, almost matter-of-fact threat that revealed that the worst of his wounds from Tarawa were not wounds to the flesh but rather wounds to the soul, cemented her longing.
She wanted to share the same sweet intimacies with him that she’d shared with her husband. She wanted the laughter that came with it, and the hope and promise and the joy of giving and taking. The connection of hearts, the touching of souls.
She wanted something she couldn’t have, because how, how, how could she ever laugh like that again while knowing that James was lying cold in his grave a half a world away?
Charlotte started to cry, deep welling sobs of a grief that she’d held in for much too long, and Vince woke up, holding her even closer, trying to comfort her. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Charlie, I’m so sorry.”
“Help me,” she sobbed. “Please…”
“I will,” he said. “I want to. Just…tell me how. Tell me what to do. What can I get you? How can I help?”
But there was nothing he could do. Nothing anyone could do. “I don’t want to live without him,” she wept. “I’m so tired of living without him.”
“Oh, Charlotte, don’t say that.” He tried to hold her more tightly, but she suddenly couldn’t stand to feel his arms around her and she struggled to get away from him, pulling so hard that she tumbled off the bed and onto the floor. She hit with a jarring thud, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore.
&
nbsp; “Charlotte.” Vince followed her to the floor, but she swatted at his hands.
“Don’t touch me! Just go away!”
He went, but the light went on in the hall, and he came back a few moments later with Edna Fletcher.
“Oh, dear. I knew sooner or later it would all have to come out. She was so stoic when we got the news.” Her mother-in-law’s hands were warm against her back. “Just cry, sweetie, just go ahead and cry,” she crooned. “That’s a good girl.”
Somehow, sometime last night, Charlotte had made it back into the narrow little bed in the spare room. She woke up in the morning feeling horribly hungover from her tears, but she forced herself to dress and go in to work. Her job for the senator was an important one.
But by lunchtime it was clear that she was doing no one any good, so she returned home, crawled into her bed, and slept deeply and dreamlessly.
Until a voice woke her. A female voice. Sally’s, from upstairs.
“I also wanted to let you know that Morton’s wallet was found,” she was telling Vince. She was here with him. In his bedroom. Charlotte’s bedroom. “That was his name. Lt. Morton Peterson from St. Louis, Missouri. The police called to tell me they found it outside of the Golden Goose bar. That’s where we met—he must’ve dropped it before we left. You can call the police, if you want, to verify that I didn’t—”
“I know you didn’t steal anything,” Vince interrupted. He sounded both so matter-of-fact and so quietly certain. Charlotte could picture his gentle, reassuring smile. “I don’t need to call anyone.”
“Well,” Sally said. She cleared her throat. “That’s…refreshing.”
“You need to be more careful in choosing the company you keep,” he said, again without a trace of judgment or disapproval in his voice, as if he harbored not even one negative thought about the woman. How did he do that?
Last night, even as Charlotte was helping Sally put ice on a very painful-looking and swollen eye, she had found herself thinking, You reap what you sow.
“I…I know,” Sally said now. “I will. I just…” She laughed. Or maybe she was starting to cry. Charlotte couldn’t quite tell. “And so I tell myself the very same thing every day. But then I get out of work, and the evening stretches out ahead of me, like the entire rest of my pathetic, lonely, miserable life and…” She was definitely crying now. “I can’t help it.”
“Hey,” Vince said. “Shhh. It’s okay.”
He was comforting Sally, no doubt holding her the way he’d held Charlotte just last night.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Apparently it was the refrain of war widows all across the country.
“It’s all right,” Vince said. He should go into business, charge a fee for the comfort of his arms. “Where’d he die?” he asked her gently. “Your husband.”
“He was in the Merchant Marine,” Sally told him between snuffles. “His ship went down in the Atlantic, torpedoed by a U-boat.” She made a sound that might’ve passed for laughter if Charlotte didn’t know just what she was feeling. “No one ever asks about him, you know. Sometimes it feels like I imagined him. Like he was never really real.”
“What was his name?” Vince asked.
“Frankie,” she told him. “Not Frank, Frankie—isn’t that a hoot? He had all these tattoos—such a big, burly man—and he insisted on being called Frankie because that’s what his mother called him right up to the day she died. Oh, he loved his mother, my Frankie did.”
“I’d bet a year’s pay that he really loved you, too,” Vince said.
She laughed. This time it was definitely a laugh. “Sugar darling, you’d win that bet. He was the sweetest man.” She was silent for a moment. “An awful lot like you, you know—although you are a young one, aren’t you?”
“No one’s young anymore,” Vince said quietly.
“It’s a crying shame. The only boys who stay young are the ones who come home in a box. And they never grow another day older, do they?” She was silent for a moment, then she laughed. It was forced, ringing with the same kind of false merriment Charlotte recognized from all those nights she’d entertained upstairs. “Well, there’s a reason, if I ever heard one, to live for today. What do you think about that, sugar darling?”
Vince laughed, too. It wasn’t forced, but it was definitely odd. Embarrassed, maybe. “Well, I—”
There was silence then. But not quite total silence.
Charlotte sat up in her bed. Was he…? Were they…? Dear God, was she going to have to sit here and listen to Sally and Vince…?
But then Vince spoke. “Wait,” he said breathlessly. “Whoa. Whoa. Hold on.”
“Shhh,” Sally said. “Just relax, hon. I’ll make you feel good.”
He laughed again. “You know, actually, I’m feeling just fine already today as it is, so—”
“Yeah, I can see how fine you’re feeling, big boy. How long’s it been since you…?”
Vince laughed again, even more uncomfortably this time. “Look, Sally, I appreciate the thought, I really do, but—”
“Oh, my goodness gracious,” she said. “You’ve never…” Her laughter was incredulous now. “You haven’t, have you?”
“Well, no, not exactly, but that doesn’t mean—”
“Hush up, sugar, and let me thank you properly for what you did last night. It’s about goddamn time someone taught you a thing or two.”
After all those nights of intimate noises coming through the thin ceiling and walls, someone—namely Sally—already had taught him quite a bit.
Charlotte sat there, more upset than she had the right to be, telling herself that this wasn’t jealousy she was feeling. She was upset merely because Vince had never been with a woman. He’d faced the horrors of war without having known how beautiful love could be.
And that wasn’t fair. Nothing about this world, this war, was fair.
“Wait,” he said now. “Stop. I’m serious, Sally. Stop.”
“What are you so worried about?” she said. “You told me there’s no one else home right now, that the old lady and the frigid nun are both off at work.”
Nun? Sally thought of her as the frigid nun?
“Who’s going to care if we make a little noise?” Sally persisted. “Who’s even going to know?”
“I will,” Vince said quietly. “I’ll know—and I care. And you’ll know. And you care, too. I know you do, as much as you pretend otherwise. And just so you know, Charlotte’s not a frigid nun.”
“Ahh,” Sally said, drawing the word out. “I see. Charlotte, huh? She lets you call her by her first name? How daring of her.”
“That’s not funny,” Vince said.
“Yes, it is.” There was a pause. Charlotte could picture her gathering up her jacket and purse. “Well, I’ll just let myself out. No point in staying where I’m not wanted.”
It was a good idea, one of which Sister Charlotte definitely approved.
“Please don’t be offended,” Vince said. “It’s not that I don’t find you attractive. You’re a very beautiful woman, a very generous woman—maybe a little too generous at times, but—”
“But you’re saving yourself for Charlotte. Which is very sweet, but, honey pie, I feel obliged to tell you that last night—you know when she was sitting with me in the powder room?—I’m sorry, but she made it very clear to me that there was nothing—absolutely nothing—going on between you and her.”
“Her husband’s name was James,” Vince said. “He died at Pearl. She loved him very much.”
There was silence for a moment. Real silence, and Charlotte used it to try to make sense of the conversation she’d just heard. Vince didn’t want to be number four hundred thousand and three in a steady stream of soldiers and sailors who appreciated Sally’s charms because of…Charlotte?
Then Sally said, “You think if you wait around long enough, she’ll get over him.” She laughed, but this time it was flat, totally devoid of humor. “Well, guess what, sugar darling? She won’t. And t
hat’s going to make you the oldest virgin in the Marine Corps, because she’s not the type to mess around—not without getting married first. Those knees are glued together, and they won’t pop open until she says I do. Which’ll never happen, mark my word. You don’t really think she’ll marry you while in her heart she’s still married to her James, do you?”
Vince was quiet. “I can hope, can’t I?” he finally said.
“You can indeed,” Sally agreed. “But, honey, if you change your mind before it’s time for you to go back to the fighting and this time maybe get yourself killed, well, you know where to find me.”
Charlotte heard the sound of Sally’s heels as she clicked her way down the hall, down the stairs. The front door opened and closed; the screen door banged.
And then the house was silent. So silent she could hear the infernal ticking of that blasted clock of Edna’s from down in the parlor.
From the other room, she heard Vince shifting in his bed. There was a thud, and Charlotte realized that he was coming down the hall, heading for the bathroom—and to get there he’d have to walk right past her open door.
She didn’t have time to lie down and pretend to be asleep. She didn’t have time to do anything but sit there like an idiot and stare back at him as he caught sight of her and froze.
“Oh, Christ,” he said, his voice cracking slightly with mortification. “I didn’t know you were home.”
“I am,” she said inanely.
He closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them, he forced himself to look at her. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that you didn’t hear all of that…?”
Charlotte shook her head, feeling her face heat with a blush. She couldn’t hold his gaze.
“Yeah,” Vince sighed, but then forced a smile. He was blushing, too. “I didn’t think so.”
She made herself look back at him. “I can’t marry you, Vincent.”
“I know,” he said. “I do know that. I just…Well…A guy’s allowed to dream, right? Excuse me,” he added with a nod, and headed for the bathroom.
Mary Lou had been driving her husband’s truck as she left the base, and, wary after she’d found his parcel in the trunk of her car that morning, Husaam Abdul-Fataah spent the afternoon ready to run.
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