by Mandie Tepe
“He’s about to catch hell, isn’t he?” He glanced at his watch. “It’s going on four o’clock in the morning out there. Are you sure you don’t want to wait until tomorrow?”
“No, I think I really miss my brother and I need to talk to him now,” she said sarcastically.
Sonny snorted, “Please . . . whatever you do . . . don’t tell him I ratted him out. Because I didn’t, you know. You figured it out yourself. I’d appreciate not being thrown under the bus.”
Gracie laughed. “Of course I won’t. Friends never throw friends under the bus. And you’ve spent all night on an excruciatingly painful leg convincing me that we’re friends. Right?”
She reached behind her and pulled the car door open, winked at him and slid inside. After he watched her pull out of the lot and drive away, he chuckled and gimped toward his truck to head home. As he hoisted himself up and crammed his injured leg into the cab he realized he’d probably need that pain pill tonight after all.
CHAPTER 4
It was early Sunday afternoon and Gracie was a little bored. She’d finished her laundry on Saturday before she had to be at Savannah’s. Cleaning her tiny apartment took no time at all. She’d finished clipping coupons from the Sunday paper and was glancing over the movie listings. There was nothing worth seeing for the high price of admission.
She’d had a bit of a guilty twinge since the day before, because she couldn’t work up enough nerve to call and check on Luca. He’d been in obvious pain when she last saw him in the wee hours of Saturday morning—all because of her. Coming out to the bar had been a favor to Mathias. But staying so late had been a favor to her. It was obvious he’d pushed himself too far and should have been home taking care of his leg. The least she could do was call and check on him. For all she knew he was flat on his back with his knee swollen to the size of a watermelon.
She finally picked up her cell and searched through the contacts for his number. He’d entered it into her phone on Friday night so she could reach him if she ever needed anything. She took a deep breath and hit the send button.
Luca connected on the third ring. “Hello?”
“Um . . . hey, Luca. It’s me . . . Gracie Laurent.”
His voice brightened a bit. “Gracie! Hi! Is everything okay?”
“Oh, yeah! I’m fine. I’m just calling to check on you. How’s your knee? I know it wasn’t doing very well when we left the other night.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, well . . . I may have pushed it a little hard the last couple of days. But I’m resting it today. Just vegging out on my couch.”
“Oh? You should have called if you needed help with something yesterday. I didn’t have to be at Savannah’s until seven.”
“No, it wasn’t like that. I had a birthday party to go to yesterday afternoon.”
Gracie giggled. “Really—a birthday party? Couldn’t miss the beer keg and the strippers, huh?”
Sonny snorted. “Not that kind of birthday party. I’m talking cake and ice cream . . . balloons . . . and about fifteen five-year-olds.”
“Oh, good. I like those kind of parties better.” She smiled. “So do you have a lot of five-year-old friends?”
“It was my XO’s son’s party. I thought I’d go fill in the best I could for him ‘cause he’s still in Afghanistan. It’s hard on the kids when their dads miss these things. I know it’s not the same, but . . .”
“That’s really nice, Luca,” she said softly. “So you’re laid up today, huh?”
“Yep. I guess I haven’t been following doctor’s orders too well and I’m paying for it today. The swelling is really bad. I don’t want to delay starting rehab, so I’d better start taking better care of it. You know, stay off it.”
“Do you want me to bring you carry-out for dinner? Or I could go by the grocery store if you need provisions.”
Sonny laughed. “Are you kidding me? I have so much food here it’s insane. I could start my own humanitarian refugee camp for the Red Cross with all the food I have here. Hey! I know what you can do for me, though . . .”
“Anything you need . . .”
“Come over and help me eat some of this stuff. It’s all home-cooked and really good. The guys’ wives have really outdone themselves. We could have a smorgasbord. I was just perusing the pay-per-view movies and you could keep me company. I’ll let you have first dibs on the leftovers and pick the movie.”
“Sounds good, but you’ll rest better without me there.”
“No, I won’t. You’ll be here to police me. Every time I try to get up, you can stop me. And when my ice pack gets too warm, you can switch it out with a fresh one.” He wheedled, “Come, on Gracie, I’ll even let you fix my dinner plate for me and bring me a tray. What do you say?”
“Well . . . the switching out the ice pack part is really tempting. But how can I say no to the extreme privilege of bringing you a dinner tray?”
“Ple-e-e-ase?”
“Oh, alright!” Gracie laughed.
Sonny gave her directions to his place and she hung up. She glanced at herself in the mirror. She had on old shorts and a tank top. Maybe she should change, but she didn’t want him to think she was trying to impress him, because she really wasn’t. She decided the shorts would be fine, but changed into a pink baby doll t-shirt. There . . . still really casual, but not too grubby.
Gracie pulled a liter of lemonade and one of Diet Coke out of her ‘fridge on the way out the door. Luca didn’t seem the type to stock diet drinks in his refrigerator. She grabbed her handbag and keys and headed out.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Twenty minutes later, she was walking up the steps to the apartment building. An older woman with an impossible shade of red hair was just coming out the front door. She smiled at Gracie and nodded toward the bottles cradled in her arms.
“I haven’t seen you here before, but you must be one of the wives. Luca’s is the first door on the left at the top of the stairs.”
“Um . . .” Gracie didn’t want to mislead her, but she didn’t know what to say. Turns out it didn’t matter, because the magenta—red seemed too mild a word—haired woman had kept going, and was already up the sidewalk.
Gracie went up the stairs and found his door. It was cracked open, but she knocked anyway.
“Come on in, Gracie,” he called.
She pushed the door open and entered his living room. Sure enough, he was propped up on the soft leather sectional sofa that took up a huge amount of space in the room. There was a low square black coffee table in the center, with the sectional forming a U around three sides of it. He had a really nice flat-screen TV mounted on the wall opposite the sofa.
“Hey!” he said brightly.
“Hi,” she answered “Some red-haired lady sent me on up.”
“Mrs. Farraday—my landlady. Please forgive the mess.” He was stretched out in a plain white t-shirt and gray cotton shorts. He had the brace off his knee, but it was covered by a bandage and an ice pack. She could see garish scars and angry bruises shooting out around the bandage. The swelling was so bad it seemed the skin should be split wide open. His leg was discolored from thigh to ankle, and there were countless smaller wounds on that leg, as well as some on the other. She guessed those were shrapnel wounds from the RPG.
“Wow . . .” She looked from his leg, up to his eyes. “Luca . . .” she choked out. Now she could see for herself how badly he’d been injured.
“Hey . . . don’t do that,” he said as he saw her eyes tear up. “It looks a lot worse than it is.” He stretched his arm out toward a blanket thrown across the back of the sofa and dragged it toward him.
“No, don’t cover up. It’s just a little shocking to see it for the first time. I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.”
She briskly set her handbag and bottles on the coffee table and pulled the scattered newspaper off the sofa and stacked it tidily on the table. She took the blanket from him and folded it neatly over
the back of the sofa again.
“There. What mess?” she asked.
Sonny grinned at her. “Brought your own drinks, huh?” he asked nodding toward the bottles on the table. “You probably think all I have here is beer.”
“No, but I didn’t think you were the diet soda type.”
“You’d be right about that.”
“What can I get you, Luca?”
He nodded toward the glass next to him. “Nothing. I’m drinking iced tea. If you want some, there’s a pitcher in the ‘fridge. You can put your stuff in there too . . . if you can find room.”
When she opened his refrigerator, she could see what he meant. It was stuffed full of plastic storage containers and foil-wrapped packages. Wow! She found a space big enough for her bottles in the door, grabbed a clean glass resting in the drain board, and poured a glass of soda over ice.
When she closed the refrigerator doors she noticed several photos attached to them. She stopped to study them. There was one of a group of men, in battle dress uniform, all cradling assault rifles against their chests. They looked like they’d been ridden hard and put away wet. She studied their faces and found Luca—second from the left—looking nothing like she’d ever seen him look before. That must be his “warrior face.” It was a fearsome thing to see, but they all were wearing that expression. She studied the background and it looked like the most desolate, depressing place she could imagine. She wondered if it was Afghanistan or Iraq—maybe somewhere like Somalia. God knew there were a lot of desolate places in the world.
The next photo was taken on a beach at night, near a fire pit. It was Luca and two other men. All three were grinning at the camera, their arms slung around each other. She looked from this photo to the first one and recognized one of them as one of the other scary guys cradling his rifle.
The third photo was the most touching. It was a wedding picture. Luca looked gorgeous in his dress whites standing with a man—the groom—who was in both of the other photos. That man looked over the moon, with the beautiful bride in ivory silk tucked under his arm. She had a tight grip on the groom, but was laughing up into Luca’s face, as if he’d just said something that caught her off-guard. Gracie could tell the three of them were very close and were enjoying sharing a special day.
Sonny called out, “Did you get lost?”
She leaned around the corner to look at him. “Sorry! I was just looking at your photo gallery here. I guess you caught me snooping.”
“Oh.”
She pulled the photos off the ‘fridge and brought them over to lean against the back of the couch near him. She held one of them up. “Who are the bride and groom?” she asked.
“That’s my best friend, Trace McKenna, and his wife, Meg. They got married last fall.”
“She’s beautiful. So’s he.”
Sonny laughed. “I’ll be sure to tell him you said that. That’ll go over big. But he’ll be the first to tell you that she is. Meg’s a professional dancer. She used to perform all over the world, but it got to be too much, I think. She’s the head of the contemporary dance program at the San Diego Dance Institute.” He chuckled. “I can say that and understand what it means now. I’ve learned a little about dance since Meg came around.”
Gracie held up the campfire shot. “I know this is you. And this is Trace. Who’s the guy with the Howdy Doody red hair?”
“That’s my other best friend, Charley. That picture was taken behind Trace and Meg’s beach house. Every so often they throw some fun parties out there.” He took the photo from her and studied it. “I can’t tell you how much I miss those guys.”
Gracie reached over and squeezed his shoulder. She started studying the third photo.
“That’s my SEAL team.” She could hear the pride in his voice.
He handed the beach photo back to her and she glanced at it again. They looked so happy it made her smile. “What does Charley do?”
Sonny looked confused. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” she answered holding up the SEAL team picture, “I know you and Trace are SEALs. But, what does Charley do?”
“He’s a SEAL.” Sonny still looked confused. “He’s on our team too.” He pulled the photo out of her hand and pointed to an intense man, kneeling in the center of the shot. “That’s him, right there.”
Gracie took the photo, held it closer to her face and studied it. “No way. That can’t be the same guy.”
“Yeah. It is.”
“This goofy red-headed guy is also this scary, intense ‘I’d-as-soon-kill-you-as-look-at-you’ guy?”
Sonny laughed hysterically. “I can’t wait to tell him about this conversation. This will make his year!”
“I just can’t believe it.” She shook her head.
“He’s on the job in that picture. He’s just Charley in this one.”
“Well . . . looking at you in that photo, I don’t feel I know you, either. Game faces on, I guess.”
“Pretty much.”
She took the photos back into the kitchen and put them where she’d found them. She grabbed her glass off the counter, and went back to sit on the sofa next to Sonny. She kicked off her flip-flops and pushed them under the table, curled her feet under her and turned toward him.
“So, Luca, I meant to ask . . . how are your grandparents?”
“They’re both gone now.”
She looked stricken. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I knew she had cancer, but she was always such an Energizer bunny, I guess I never thought she wouldn’t beat it.”
Sonny smiled wistfully. “Well, Gran did good. She fought for almost five years. She made it easier for me and Gramp—never let us get too down about it. She went with dignity and peace. I don’t think I have as much courage as she did.”
“What about your grandfather?”
“I lost him a couple of years after Gran. We thought he had some kind of bug he couldn’t shake. Turns out he had cancer too. He didn’t linger too long after we got the diagnosis, and I always thought he just let himself go . . . to be with her. It was sad how much he missed her. Not that he ever talked about it. But I could tell.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. There wasn’t much else she could say except . . . “Do you know what I remember about your granddad? Remember that time you and Matty found that bird’s nest under the tree with all the baby birds in it? And the mama was nowhere to be found. He taught you how to nurse those little birds until they got big enough to fly away. Then he put that nest up on a branch and stood back, willing those birds to jump out of the nest by flapping his arms. Like he was showing them how it was done. I never laughed so hard in my life. But it may have been the sweetest thing I ever saw too. He was a wonderful person.”
Sonny started laughing until his eyes teared. “I’d forgotten about that.”
“And I remember your grandmother’s Christmas cookies. She brought them over every year. She knew how much I loved them. I got the chicken pox one summer and was stuck in bed and she brought me Christmas cookies—in mid-July. I’m talking cookies shaped like Christmas trees and angels and snowmen—all iced in red and green, white and yellow with sprinkles. Boy, did that make me feel special.”
“Really? I never knew that.”
Gracie stretched her leg out and nudged him with her toes, tipped in the same deep purple as her fingers, a dainty ankle bracelet around her ankle. “That’s probably because she had to bake them on the sly so you and Matty wouldn’t steal my get-well cookies.”
“You’re probably right about that.”
Gracie was looking at something behind him. “Hey, Luca, when was the last time you freshened the water in your flowers?”
“What?”
She nodded toward the large window sill behind the dining table which held several get-well-soon flower arrangements, as well as a couple of potted plants and a balloon bouquet that had lost most of its helium and was drifting toward the floor.
“Oh. I didn’t know I was supposed to,”
he admitted as he looked over his shoulder at them.
Gracie stood up and walked over to them. “Are you finished with your newspaper, or do you save it?”
He looked more perplexed. “I’m finished with it.”
She took it over to the dining table and started pulling out dead blossoms, placing them on the spread out paper. One by one she took the vases over to the sink, drained the water and refilled them. She shuffled the flowers around and made them look like new—less full, of course, but like brand new arrangements. When she’d finished with that she poked her fingers into the soil of the plants, tsked tsked, and watered those too.
Sonny watched in amazement. “Wow. I thought I was just supposed to look at them until they died. No one gave me instructions.”
Gracie laughed and rushed toward him as he started pulling himself up off the couch leaning on his crutches. “Whoa! Where do you think you’re going?”
“To get a fresh ice pack.”
“Here. Sit back down.” She held her hand out for the old one, placed it back in the freezer and pulled out another one. “Do want more tea?”
A little embarrassed, he picked up his glass and handed it to her. “Thanks.”
She rolled up the dead flowers in the newspaper, stuffed them in the trashcan and wiped the table down. She brought him his tea, fluffed the pillows under his knee, and placed the ice pack on it. Just after she’d refreshed her soda and sat back down next to him there was a knock on the door.
A little voice called out, “Hey, Sonny!”
Gracie looked over at him as he answered, “Come on in, Drake!”
The door burst open and a little body came barreling in and launched itself on Sonny.
“Whoa! Slow down, buddy,” Sonny laughed.
A tall strawberry blonde walked through the door. Her legs, tanned and toned, appeared to be miles long beneath royal blue athletic shorts. She was wearing a gold t-shirt with “Scorpions” emblazoned in blue across the front. The little boy was wearing the same colors and was dressed for a soccer game with shin guards on his skinny little legs.