Of course, anyone watching could certainly see.
Mary Lou jerked back away from him and he instantly let her go. And there she stood, staring up at him in shock.
He’d kissed her. And she’d kissed him back.
And she wanted to kiss him again.
She couldn’t look at him. She had to turn away. Her head was spinning.
“This is why I must not be your sponsor,” he said in his same musical, gentle voice, as if whatever had been left of her uncertain world hadn’t just collapsed into rubble and dust. “My friendship for you is no longer just a friendship. So you see, it would be inappropriate for me to offer you guidance or counseling of any kind. I could not trust myself not to take advantage of your trust. You need a sponsor with no ulterior motives, Mary Lou.”
She didn’t know what to say, what to do.
“Go home,” he commanded her. “Go and talk to Sam. Tell him the truth and then figure out a way you both can be happy. If you truly let him know you, I’m certain that he’ll come to love you, too.”
She turned, and ran for her car.
“So,” Vince said. “Hawaii, 2003.”
Charlie looked up from the kitchen table, where piles of papers were spread out around her. She was, quite possibly, the only person in America who did her taxes in early November, because once the holiday season started, “things got too hectic.”
Hello! January, anyone?
But no. That tax return had to be sent as close to January the first as possible, in order to properly conclude the previous year. And if she did most of the work now, then all that was left to do during the busy holiday months was just wait for the bank’s and other documents to arrive.
And hope to hell that if they finally did win the lottery, they’d earn enough to be able to afford to pay an accountant to fill out those forms all over again.
But really, how could he complain? All he had to do was sign his name on the line that Charlie pointed to. God bless her for doing all the work, for taking care of the details of their lives, for doing the things that would have made him pull out all of his remaining hair.
“You really want to go to Hawaii next year?” she asked him, those little worry lines appearing on her forehead between her eyes.
“We’ve never been,” Vince said. “Maybe it’s time, huh?”
She was silent, just looking at him, and he felt a stab of doubt. Maybe she really didn’t want to see Pearl Harbor, to see where James had died, to visit his grave. Maybe—even after all these years—that would be too hard for her.
Maybe he was the one who needed her to go there to see those things. Maybe he was the fool who needed to be sure James Fletcher truly had been laid to rest.
All these years, and he could read Charlie’s mind. Except when it came to James.
Ignore him and maybe he’ll go away. And if he doesn’t, well, just be glad that out of the three people in the room, you’re one of the ones who’s still alive. Vince had lived for years with that philosophy.
Don’t mention him, don’t talk about him, don’t think about him if you can help it.
There had actually been weeks—months, even—during which Vince hadn’t had a single thought about Charlie’s first husband.
But James had always come back.
James had been there, in spirit at least, at every crucial, important moment in Vince and Charlie’s lives.
It was James who had finally gotten him in to talk to someone important about Tarawa, about his hopes that a special team of swimmers could be formed to keep such disasters from happening again.
He’d woken up that morning—the one after that night with Charlotte that had been such a mixture of sheer pleasure and pain—to find she’d slipped a note under his door.
He’d reached for it with dread, praying it wasn’t another apology.
Vincent, it said in Charlie’s no-nonsense handwriting. Please get dressed today in your uniform. We have an appointment at eleven o’clock.
He was probably the only man on earth who’d walked into a meeting with FDR, disappointed to be at the White House.
He’d hoped, right up to the minute that he and Charlotte had climbed into the taxi, that they were going to Maryland, where a marriage could be performed without any delay.
But Charlie had had something else in mind.
Apparently when James had won that posthumous Medal of Honor, there was a big ceremony at the White House honoring all of the heroes of that terrible day. Charlie had been supposed to attend, but she’d had the flu. President Roosevelt had extended an invitation to her to visit him at the White House at her convenience—provided his schedule allowed.
And that January morning in 1944, his schedule apparently allowed.
“Be concise and to the point,” Charlotte instructed Vince quietly as they were escorted to the Oval Office.
“Thank you for doing this,” he said. He knew his words were inadequate. She was giving him a chance—a slim chance, but a chance nonetheless—to participate in this war in a way that could make a difference.
And probably get him killed.
He saw that in her eyes, loud and clear, despite the fact that her face was a calm mask. “Yes,” she said. “Well. No doubt I’ll regret it.”
And then there they were. Face-to-face with the President.
Vince could remember reaching across the huge desk to shake FDR’s hand. He had no idea what he’d said.
Tarawa. He told President Roosevelt about what it had been like at Tarawa. He told him about growing up the son of a Cape Cod lobsterman, and about his idea—to use his strength as a swimmer to provide information for island invasions.
He remembered the glint of light against the president’s glasses, the smell of his cigarette smoke, the aide who stepped forward to rush him and Charlotte out of the room when they’d overstayed their allotted time, the slight gesture from Roosevelt that made the man stop and back away.
He remembered being offered a seat on a sofa, as Roosevelt pushed himself out from behind his desk and joined him at a small sitting area. The president told him about a team of men already formed and training in Fort Pierce, Florida. Underwater Demolition Teams or Combat Demolition Units, they were called. It was Vince’s idea almost exactly, already set into motion.
Somewhere during the conversation, after FDR asked him if he’d be interested in joining this team of men, after Vince had told him a heartfelt “Yes, sir,” Charlotte quietly excused herself from the conversation and left the room.
It was a victory, but it was bittersweet. He was to leave for Florida almost immediately.
He’d gotten what he thought he’d wanted.
Except the one thing he wanted most of all, more than anything, was a woman who didn’t want him.
At least not until fate intervened.
“Yes,” Vince said to Charlotte now. “I really want to go to Hawaii. Will you think about it?”
“Why is it so important to you?” she asked.
And suddenly he knew.
It was because he’d lived James’s life.
Vince had lived the life that should have been James Fletcher’s. He needed to make this pilgrimage to pay his respects to the man whose death had made Vince’s happiness possible.
“Just think about it,” he said. He grabbed his car keys from the box by the door. “We’re out of milk. I’m going to go pick some up.”
She put down her pencil. “Vincent—”
He fled.
And he realized, as he pulled out of the garage, that for all these years, it hadn’t been Charlotte who didn’t want to talk about James.
It had been him.
TWENTY-ONE
“DO YOU HAVE a minute, Lieutenant?”
Muldoon looked up to find Joan standing in the open doorway of Sam Starrett’s office.
It was clear, however, that the lieutenant she wanted a minute from was not Sam.
“Hey, Joan.” Sam couldn’t have missed her frosty tone
, but he pretended not to have noticed. “Come on in. I’m on my way out.” Yeah, right. He had just told Muldoon his plan to spend the next few hours tackling some paperwork. “Make yourselves at home.”
He closed the door behind him as he made a hasty exit.
And there they were, Muldoon pulling himself to his feet.
He should have been the one who had bolted. Just looking at her made him angry all over again—angry enough to say things he definitely shouldn’t say, neither aloud nor in mixed company.
“I really only have a minute,” he lied. “So if this is going to take longer—”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “You are hiding from me, aren’t you? At first I was worried when you didn’t show up, because you promised me you’d give my grandparents this tour—”
“Was there some kind of problem with Steve?” he asked. “He’s the one who usually gives our VIP tours. I didn’t think you’d have a problem with having someone more knowledgeable on hand.”
“He was fine,” Joan said. “But…well, you know, I was kind of looking forward to seeing you. I mean, hey, I didn’t spend the night with Steve.”
It was supposed to be a joke, meant to lighten the mood, but he didn’t laugh. “I’m sure we could arrange that for you if you like.”
Joan probably wouldn’t have looked more shocked if he’d reached out and slapped her across the face. And after the shock came anger. Her eyes actually flashed as she glared at him.
“What is wrong with you?” she asked hotly. “What an awful thing to say!”
It was. But god damn it, he was angry and frustrated. And hurt. Really hurt. “If you were looking forward to seeing me, you could’ve called me, Joan. Like last night, for example. Like hours after Brooke had her press conference and told the world that there was nothing going on between the two of us. Like after there was no longer any reason on earth why you and I couldn’t be seen together—except maybe your own insecurity about your career.”
He’d waited hours for Joan to call, assuming she was in meetings or up to her ears in making arrangements for Brooke’s admission to that rehab center. But no. She’d been in the hotel bar, kicking back with some of her White House friends.
Pathetic asshole that he was, he’d gone looking for her, like some kind of creepy stalker, desperate for just a glimpse of her smile.
Joan’s silence last night had been a very clear message to him, letting him know that their night together had meant far more to him than it had to her.
Jesus Christ, you’d think he’d learn. What a loser.
Oh, yeah, he was feeling really good about himself today….
“You’re the one who stood me up—in front of my grandparents, no less—and you’re mad at me for not calling you?” she clarified. “What’s that about? You couldn’t call me?”
“I told you very specifically that the next move was yours,” Muldoon told her tightly. “You want to see me again, you call me. That’s how it works.”
“Well, excuse me for not knowing the rules! I’ve never dated a gigolo before!”
Silence.
She didn’t meet his gaze. Or maybe he was the one who couldn’t bring himself to look at her, because, God, it was hard to maintain eye contact with a knife in the gut.
“Well,” he finally managed to say. “At least we now know what you think of me.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“I think you did.”
“Look, I should have called you,” Joan admitted. “I’m sorry. I was scared. I’m confused about this.” She gestured between the two of them. “About us. I don’t know how we can make this work, Mike, and it’s completely freaking me out.”
“Yeah, well, we can’t make it work,” he told her, looking out of Sam’s window. “It won’t work. I mean, yeah, we can see each other as often as we possibly can for the next few weeks, and, sure, it’ll be fun. We’ll talk and laugh a lot and make love for hours.” He sighed. “And then you’ll go back to D.C. You’ll tell me you’ll call me, that we’ll get together soon, and you’ll get on a plane and…that’ll be it. That’s the last I’ll hear from you.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is.” He turned to look at her, angry at her all over again for not admitting it. “I’ll call you, and your assistant or secretary or someone in your office will tell me you’re busy and take a message. They’ll even take my name and phone number—at least they will the first few times I call. But you won’t call me back. And then, when I call again and again, they won’t even bother taking my number, and eventually I’ll stop calling. Eventually I’ll stop bothering you. I’ll become a distant memory—part of the good time you had on your last vacation. I’ll be just another barely remembered name on your ‘guys I had fun fucking’ list.”
Color was spreading across her cheeks, and her lips got tighter and tighter with each word he spoke. He’d offended her with his language, there was no doubt about that. But damn it, she’d offended him, too.
“Well, I guess we now know what you think of me,” she said. “You know, this kind of insecurity and…and…cowardice is pretty unappealing in a grown man. But wait, I forgot. You’re only twenty-five.”
He felt his own face flush at her particularly low blow. “I thought women liked honesty. Because, hey, I’m just being honest here—call it whatever you want. And you know what? Right now I’d just rather skip it all. Maybe if we can both manage to be honest, we can cut out that entire month of me pitifully hoping you will call back. We can just skip ahead to the part where the lightbulb comes on and—God, I’m a fool—I realize too little too late that you were just another lousy mistake in a long string of lousy, god-awful, goddamned mistakes.”
Joan didn’t slam the door on her way out. She closed it gently behind her, with a tiny but entirely too final sounding click.
Mary Lou was in such a fog, she almost didn’t recognize Bob Schwegel, Insurance Sales, when she saw him.
“Hey,” he said, his blond hair and white teeth gleaming in the sunlight. “Wow, that’s good timing. I was just coming in to see you. Are you on break?”
He was standing there in the parking lot of McDonald’s, and he followed her back to the Dumpster, to her car.
“I just took my break,” she told him. Which was a relief. She would have hated spending her entire fifteen minutes with Insurance Bob breathing down her neck. She was already too rattled by yesterday’s conversations with both Sam and…
Ihbraham.
Whom she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about. Not for one minute in the past eighteen hours.
She’d actually gathered up her nerve and called him, just a few minutes ago, from the pay phone back by the bathrooms.
She’d pretended that everything was normal. That nothing had happened. That he hadn’t kissed her, that she hadn’t kissed him back.
“I’m going to a meeting tonight,” she’d said, leaving a message on his machine. “Give me a call if you want to go, too.”
It was a friendly enough message, without a hint of sexual invitation. Because what she really wanted was to go back to that place where they’d been friends and only friends.
Anything else was too frightening to think about.
Even though she’d been able to think about nothing else.
“I guess my timing’s bad then.” Bob watched as she unlocked the front door of her car and put her book bag onto the seat.
“Sorry,” she said, not sorry at all as she relocked her car and slipped her keys into her pants pocket.
He blocked her way back to the restaurant. She hadn’t realized he was quite so tall and broad. Or maybe he’d just never stood that close to her before. “You can make it up to me. Have dinner with me tonight.”
“I’m sorry, I’m busy tonight.”
“Tomorrow night, then.”
“Why?” she asked.
Her frank question caught him off guard, and he blinked at her.
“What could you possibl
y see in me?” she persisted.
A few more blinks and then he laughed. But then he got serious. Really serious.
“I see someone who’s been neglected for too long,” he said quietly. “Someone who’s as lonely as I am.” He backed off. “I’m sorry if I came on too strong. I didn’t mean to scare you or upset you or…I just…I haven’t met a woman I’ve liked as much as you in a long time.”
“I’m married,” she said. And completely unable to stop thinking about someone else.
“I don’t care,” he told her, still with that same disarmingly quiet sincerity. “Maybe that makes me a bad person, but I think if you meet someone you’re meant to be with, you should do whatever it takes to wind up together.”
“You think you’re meant to be with…” Me. Mary Lou looked at him again, focusing this time on his face, his shoulders, his legs in the suit he was wearing. He was even more beautiful than Sam, and he thought…
“I think I’d like to get to know you better,” he said. “So what do you say? Just dinner. No pressure. We can take it slow, see where it goes.”
Mary Lou shook her head. “I don’t think—”
“Don’t think,” he said. “Just say yes. Do something crazy for a change, Mary Lou.”
She laughed. “Bob, I—”
“Okay, do think about it,” he said. “Think hard, sleep on it, and I’ll call you tomorrow.” He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her.
She watched as he got into his car—it was parked right next to hers—and pulled out onto the main road that went through the base.
It was only then that she wondered.
What was he doing here?
Vince had been oddly quiet all day. Even Joanie had commented on it, during their tour of the Navy base this morning.
“Is everything all right with Gramps?” she’d pulled Charlie aside to ask. “His health’s okay, isn’t it?”
Charlie sure hoped so. He was turning eighty this year. That was something to celebrate, considering many men in America didn’t live to see that particular milestone of life.
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