He didn’t start trying to make the food until he lived on his own during grad school. Somewhere along the way, he’d begun equating homemade food with being cared for, and since he’d never quite found someone else to care for him—to be perfectly honest, he’d never really looked—he’d decided to care for himself. Except it only ever ended in disappointment and flames.
Driving, though. Driving he was good at. He’d missed driving, he discovered, zipping up 9 Highway in the comparatively light, middle-of-the-night traffic. He’d have to see if Edgar would let him drive more often. Edgar was very attached to the Mercedes, and Lee could see why. The W218 CLS handled like a trained panther, powerful but pliant, and it shifted like a dream.
Bobbi didn’t ask any more questions about their sudden road trip. She seemed to accept his reaction to her gift as normal behavior; then again, Bobbi had drunk at least three glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon, and perhaps that was the point at which late-night road trips with your boss made perfect sense to young people. He saw her texting as they drove out of the city; probably her girlfriend, who was spending six months in Ecuador building hospitals. Bobbi then shifted her concentration to drinking water and trying to stay awake. She lost the battle somewhere around Cornwall-on-Hudson; Lee looked over and she was fast asleep, her hair squashed against the side of the seat, glitter twinkling in waves as they passed under lights.
Lee almost envied her. He didn’t sleep more than three hours a night anymore. As he drove, his thoughts turned to the memories that often visited him at 2:00 a.m., memories that had spurred this whole insane trip. Christmas Eve in Vietnam, 1969.
He’d been a driver in Vietnam, and he always blamed himself for the M35 breaking down that day, though logically he knew there was little he could have done to prevent it. The transport vehicles in ’Nam were not new; some of them were left over from Korea, and even the new ones were five years old by the time Lee got there, and Southeast Asia was not kind to motor vehicles.
They had been driving to the base in Buon Ma Thuot, taking a circuitous route to recce the Cambodian border, seeing if the PAVN/VC forces stationed over the line seemed to be making any serious movements in opposition to the impending Christmas ceasefire.
He hadn’t known then what a timing belt sounded like when it went out—he thought he’d driven over a mine. Once the smoke enveloping the engine cleared and everyone realized they weren’t dead, they all piled out of the truck and clapped Lee on the back, whooping and cheering as if he’d actually saved them from something. He and the ten other guys decided to walk the rest of the way. The ceasefire was scheduled to begin in less than six hours, at midnight on Christmas Day.
They made it two miles down the muddy track on foot before the shooting started.
THE LOW fuel indicator in the Mercedes dinged. Lee turned off the highway at the nearest exit and pulled into a Gulf station. He shut his door quietly and tried to fill the tank with as little noise as possible, so as not to wake Bobbi. On the other side of the pump, a tired-looking man bundled up in a plaid barn coat and a long white scarf got gas while his wife and five kids slept in the minivan. The father gave him a nod and a smile. Lee nodded back. The tank was full; he got back in the car and back on the highway. Thirty-four miles to Kingston.
THE MESS cook found him crouched under a table in the farthest corner of the empty tent. Lee was squeezing his hands together rhythmically, one inside the other, over and over, wanting so badly to ignore the bloodstains on his hands and his uniform but finding it impossible to look away.
“Heya,” said a soft voice. A young man in olive pants, a white T-shirt, and a half apron crawled under the table and settled next to him. “You come in with the boys from the ambush?”
Lee nodded, and then made himself stop nodding before it became another tic. “I was driving. We broke down. It’s my fault.” These were the words looping on repeat through his mind, in time to the ceaseless squeezing of his hands. I was driving. We broke down. It’s my fault. I was driving. We broke down. It’s my—
The young man placed his hand over both of Lee’s and gently held them still. “Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Look at me.”
It was a request, not an order. Lee looked. The young man smiled to see his face. He had the loveliest smile Lee had ever seen, genuine and easy, with a deep dimple appearing on either side. “I’m Karol,” he said. “You got a name?”
“Lee.”
Karol slipped his hand into Lee’s and held on. “Lee, it wasn’t your fault.” Lee started shaking his head and Karol shook his right back. “It wasn’t. I promise you. Not your fault. You did what you could, what you were trained to do, right? You got your friends here. They’re going to be okay. Heck, as soon as the helo gets here tomorrow, they even get to go home!”
“Not all of them,” Lee whispered, looking down at their clasped hands.
“Oh, baby.” Karol wrapped him in a hug and pulled him close, safe under the table. No man had ever called Lee “baby” or touched him like this, with free affection. Lee had barely even considered the possibility that one might. He didn’t even like to be hugged, usually, but Karol’s strong arms and soft voice and the way he smelled like cinnamon and sweat and warm cotton—Lee didn’t ever want to leave the shelter of the table and Karol’s embrace.
“I need your help now,” Karol said after a few minutes. “You like sweet potatoes?”
“Yeah?”
“Great, because Uncle Sam, in his infinite wisdom, gifted me with forty pounds of sweet potatoes in the Christmas rations, and I need an extra pair of hands for peeling duty. We’re making sun cakes.”
“What are sun cakes?” Lee asked, sitting up.
Karol bounced his eyebrows. “Guess you’ll find out.”
SUN CAKES, it turned out, were very similar to the potato pancakes Lee’s mother’s Jewish friends made for Hanukkah, except that they were thicker and made of sweet potatoes and condensed milk. “My grandmother created this recipe—well, not this exact recipe, a better one with yogurt and herbs and stuff—and she passed it on to my sister, who passed it on to me because I am a wizard in the kitchen,” Karol said as they worked side by side to peel, grate, mix, and shape. “Devra may be a witch, but she is definitely not a kitchen witch, bless her.”
“Your sister’s a witch?”
“Yeah. You know, Wiccan. Pretty cool stuff when you start to read about it.”
Together they made enough sun cakes to feed the whole camp, along with green beans and something Karol promised was meat but that he disguised with a heavy gravy all the same. Lee helped Karol serve, enjoying the way the men joshed with Karol, calling him “Yuletide Karol” and asking what Christmas miracle he was going to work with the food tomorrow.
Lee considered it a Christmas miracle—if he believed in such a thing; he wasn’t sure—that he and Lt. Danvers found this place. It seemed to appear out of the jungle like a fairy-tale village, right when they needed shelter. Supporting and watching over their five injured comrades, running scared—the memories, only a few hours old, made Lee’s heart race and his hands sweat and his head spin, and he looked to Karol, lovely, calm Karol, who caught him looking and winked.
After dinner, they cleaned up and washed the small mountain of dishes, taking turns scrubbing and drying, the radio playing low in the background, set to an Army station that played hits from home. Lee felt he needed to say something, to explain something, but he’d never been good at articulating his thoughts, and it took him the better part of a sink of dishes to figure out how to begin.
“When you found me, I was—I was thinking about—”
“I know. I saw your revolver on the floor.” Karol flipped the damp dish towel over his shoulder and picked up another one to keep drying. “Don’t worry. I got one of my guys to pick it up. It’s in the barracks. People drop stuff all the time in the mess tent, he won’t think it’s strange.”
Lee’s hands fell still in the soapy water. “You
don’t think it’s strange?”
“I think it’s a perfectly natural reaction to what happened to you.”
“You’re not going to tell anyone?”
“’Course not.”
“But I was going to—I almost—”
“But you didn’t. You made sun cakes with me instead.”
Lee meant to say you saved my life. What came out was “Sun cakes saved my life.”
Karol laughed and turned up the radio. “Dance with me.”
Van Morrison started singing “Brown Eyed Girl” over the wires and Karol swung Lee into a jaunty two-step, spun him out and back, and Lee caught himself on Karol’s chest, and they swayed to the music filling the kitchen. Karol touched the corner of Lee’s eye and cupped his jaw. “My brown-eyed boy,” he murmured, and Lee leaned in to kiss him.
Karol pressed his thumb to Lee’s mouth to stop him. He smiled, but his eyes were sad. He traced the line of Lee’s bottom lip with his thumb, and Lee shivered. “Not here,” Karol whispered, and Lee flushed, suddenly conscious of the dozens of other men in the camp, surrounding them and judging them and ready to turn them in.
“I’ll kiss you when the war is over,” Karol said, and it sounded like a poem, like a promise. “When we get home. I’ll make it out and you’ll make it out, and it’ll be just like a movie or something. I’ll find you.”
“You better,” said Lee, cheeky for pretty much the first and only time in his life. “You owe me a kiss.”
THE HELICOPTER came at dawn on Christmas Day to transport Lee and the six remaining men from the M35 back to base. They made it to Buon Ma Thuot by lunchtime. Lee never saw Karol again.
LEE AND Bobbi arrived on the outskirts of Kingston around five. They’d run into a knot of traffic around Poughkeepsie, and after safely navigating them through that, Lee had pulled into a lay-by near a state park. He was exhausted, but Bobbi was still asleep and he wasn’t about to wake her. He’d tried to take a cat nap in the driver’s seat for an hour or so, but his mind wouldn’t let him rest and in the end he’d just pulled back out onto the road and kept driving.
The sky was still a deep bluish-gray, but the edges of the town, full of the usual suburban stores and gas stations, were already waking up. Bobbi was finally awake and fully sober. They both needed something to eat, and Bobbi was discreetly jiggling her leg up and down after all the water she’d drunk, so Lee kept going until they found a McDonald’s, one of the few places open this early and already very busy. Bobbi bolted for the ladies’ room and left Lee facing an unfamiliar menu with so many items, the screens had to keep changing to show them all. The last time he’d been in a McDonald’s, there were about ten items on a single light-up board. Now there seemed to be a hundred, and he was informed of their calorie content too. Lee considered that was one of the last things you wanted to know about the food at McDonald’s, right before what it was made of.
He settled on two coffees and two english muffin sandwiches and took the tray of food over to a high-top table to wait for Bobbi. She emerged a few minutes later and dove gratefully into her sandwich. She’d managed to unsquish her hair, and the glitter she’d dusted into it for the company party now sparkled on her cheeks and hands and dress.
“So, any idea where we’re headed?” Bobbi asked, after she’d demolished half the sandwich. “Are we just going to drive around…?”
Lee, who had been picking at his sandwich but mostly staring out the window, snapped out of his reverie. “I have his last name now. I suppose we could ask if they have a phone book here, or at a service station.” He slipped his phone from his pocket. “Or I could try googling him, see if anything comes up.”
“Nah, I got you.” She pulled out her own phone. “I signed up for one of those online white pages, find-a-person sites when I started at Union. Executive assistant’s best friend.” A few swipes of her fingers and she looked up expectantly. “Okay, what’s his name?”
“Karol Walenty. K on the first name, Y on the last.”
“This should be easy. How many guys are there in New York named Karol Walen—okay,” she amended, as the results loaded. “There are a not insubstantial number of guys named Karol Walenty living in New York State.”
Lee’s fingers tightened around his thin foam coffee cup. “Any around Kingston?”
“One… second… aha! We have a winner!” She showed him the phone screen. “There is a Mr. Karol Walenty living in—” She turned the phone around and frowned at the listing. “I think that’s a retirement community? Here in Kingston. And as a backup, there’s a Karol Walenty living out by the Ashokan Reservoir. But that’s halfway to Woodstock, so probably not. Hey,” she added, gathering up their trash. “Did you go to Woodstock?”
Lee laughed. “Not my scene. Besides, Rhode Island, remember?”
“People drove! It’s not that far!” She dumped the tray and came back for her coat and phone. “Speaking of which, I’ll drive now.”
“That’s okay, I can—”
“You’ve been driving all night.” She snapped her fingers and held out her hand. “Keys.”
He handed them over. “Yes, boss.”
BOBBI NAVIGATED them to the other side of Kingston and pulled into visitor parking at the Sunset Hills Assisted Living and Memory Care Center. The sun still hadn’t risen. Lee was afraid the front desk would tell them visiting hours did not start until later, but it was a different problem they encountered when they asked to see Mr. Walenty.
“Mr. Walenty doesn’t see visitors,” said the large dark-haired woman at the desk. She wore scrubs covered in Christmas puppies and her name tag read “Welcome! My name is BRANDI.”
“Should we come back later?” Lee asked.
“No, hon, Mr. Walenty doesn’t see visitors any time.” She lowered her voice. “He’s in the memory care unit.”
“Oh.”
“Are you… family?”
“Old friends,” said Lee. “I think. I—think I knew Mr. Walenty in the Army, during the war, and I was hoping to reconnect.”
Brandi gave them an appraising look. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t think either one of you was alive during the war Mr. Walenty fought in. He’s ninety-seven,” she clarified. “He fought in Europe? Liberated Paris, all that?”
“Oh, right. Yes.” Lee cleared his throat. “No, that’s not—I’m sorry. Thank you for your—have a good day.”
Lee suddenly needed to be very far away from the smell of bleach and good intentions. He strode out to the Mercedes, coat flapping in the cold wind coming down from the mountains. He had long-term care insurance, of course. It only made sense, but the thought of having to end up in a place like this, however well maintained and cheerfully staffed, chilled him far worse than the piercing wind. Alone, no visitors, possibly not even remembering who or where he was….
Bobbi dropped into the driver’s seat and started the car. “Ashokan Reservoir?” she asked, one hand on the wheel, eyeing him with something like understanding.
“Ashokan Reservoir,” Lee agreed after a moment. “Might as well.”
THE DRIVE out State Highway 28 to Ashokan Reservoir took half an hour, and the undersides of the snow-filled clouds were just beginning to be edged in pink by the time they reached the listed address of the second Karol Walenty.
The gray stone farmhouse appeared out of a gap in the trees like a fairy-tale cottage tucked deep in winter woods. Snow from last week’s storm lay mostly untouched across the front lawn, although the bluestone walk was clear. Even this early in the morning, all the lights in the house were on, and there was the suggestion of great activity inside and out back.
Across the two-lane highway, a barren field dominated by a large dilapidated red barn had been converted into a rough parking area for close to thirty cars, with about ten more parked precariously along the verge. Bobbi slowed down and pulled the Mercedes into a parallel slot left between two aging station wagons. Lee stared at the house, making no move to get out of the car. Several
minutes passed.
“So are you going to go say hi,” Bobbi asked, “or are we just going to creep on your old Army buddy from out here?”
THE FRONT door was opened by a small androgynous child who seemed to be wearing a glorified nightgown and a Christmas wreath on their head. They all stared at each other for a moment, and then the child offered them a limp Twizzler.
“No, thank you,” said Lee, and peered over the child’s head. “Are your parents home? Grandparents?”
“Ev’rybody’s here,” said the child, somewhat indistinctly, gnawing on the rejected Twizzler. “Who d’you want?”
“Ah, Mr. Walenty? Mr.… Karol Walenty?”
“Papa!” the child screamed, so suddenly that Bobbi stumbled back and almost fell off her shoes. Lee steadied her. “There’s people at the doo-oor, Papa!”
The child disappeared, leaving the door wide-open. The old house smelled distinctly Christmasy, as if a Hallmark store had recently exploded inside. Lee spared a brief thought for the odd sight the two of them must present, standing there on the porch: a petite young Black woman, clearly dressed in last night’s party clothes, and a slim silver-haired white man in a rumpled three-piece suit. He glanced back at his slate gray Mercedes, parked between the two bumper sticker–encrusted Subarus, and when he turned around, there was a man standing in the open doorway.
He was shorter than Lee, and his tawny skin was peppered with moles and freckles and age spots. His tightly curled gray hair had receded to the back of his head and merged with a neat beard and mustache. He was fat, and he was wearing a voluminous white-and-green cowled robe. He looked nothing like the young man Lee had known—and then he smiled.
Finding Yuletide Karol Page 2