Teeth chattering, Trudy began to shiver, her gaze drawn to the red and yellow weaving she’d left hanging on the east wall a few weeks ago. Bogey’s God’s eye stared back at her, daring her to believe.
After a moment, her mother walked toward the archway. “Wouldn’t that be just like your daddy, trying to send us a signal from the other side.”
A knock at the side door sent Trudy’s heart skittering. She whirled, half expecting to see a tall lanky fighter pilot jiggling his car keys in the air and grinning — wishful thinking — or a nightmare… Cousin Dub standing there, his face glistening and accusatory.
But it was Hector… back from lunch.
By late afternoon, everyone in the family, along with close friends, had been notified of the news. In a text to Georgia right after lunch, Trudy wrote: Now we wait.
Georgia replied: Sis, we’ve been waiting for 44 years. I’m not holding my breath. Mom sounded good when she called. A little hyped up though.
Aunt Star texted Trudy moments after Jewel’s phone call with the news: For the sake of your momma, I hope the DNA matches. Jewel needs closure. Glad you’re with her. Make sure she eats and gets some rest. Keep an eye on her blood pressure. Her cuff should be in the back bathroom or in her nightstand.
After Trudy took her mother’s blood pressure, she reported the reading to her aunt: Momma’s BP is 120/70. She’s taking a nap. Hector brought her a pair of earplugs when he came back from lunch. He felt bad about all the noise.
No sooner had Trudy made a cup of hot tea and burrowed into the worn recliner when Aunt Star fired back: Glad her BP is normal. Mine’s sky-high. I just saw on KOB News about some varmints painting swastikas at Gold’s Department Store in Pardon. It’s only going to get worse. I could use a set of earplugs myself every time the Orange Cheese Puff opens his trap.
Trudy sipped hot tea and typed to the roar and grind of power tools reverberating throughout the house: Anybody give you any lip over your upside-down flag?
Her aunt’s quick comeback made Trudy chuckle: Nah, my fake shrunken heads are still on the porch rail from Halloween. Those bad boys should scare off any troublemakers.
A sweet message from Lupi followed: Trudy, your sister sent me a note on Facebook about the call your mom got. I’m thinking of y’all. Tell your mom the next time she stops by the diner, her meal is on the house. BTW, your parents’ photos are hanging on my new Honor Wall. They add a little class to the joint. LOL.
You are so thoughtful, Trudy wrote back. I’ll let Momma know. BTW, I saw your post on Facebook earlier but didn’t comment. Georgia calls me a lurker. ;) I feel violated, too, on many levels. I keep thinking about my dad. What he would say about all this. I think he’d be one pissed-off fighter pilot.
A few minutes passed before Lupi responded: Thanks. And if the Russians are involved, well…Benny said it’s time to organize like they did in the sixties. Later, got customers to feed.
And if the Russians are involved…
Trudy swayed to and fro in the rocker, recalling a phrase she hadn’t thought about in years. The Russians are Coming used to put fear in her heart as a kid growing up during the Cold War. Damn, she thought, scanning over Lupi’s text as she took another sip of tea. What if they were already here!
A text from Clay appeared on her mobile screen as she set down her cup. Hearing from him helped ease the anxiety roiling in her chest: Babe, I’ll stop by when I get off work. Hope you don’t mind, but I told Cinda about your mom’s phone call. She said to tell you she’s thinking of you.
Oh my, so Clay told his daughter. Trudy got the feeling Cinda had grown up hearing all about the pilot’s daughter whose dad disappeared over the skies of Vietnam.
Pocketing her cellphone, she set her cup in the sink and moseyed down the hall to check on Hector. The tap-tap-tapping of an old-fashioned hammer echoed up the hall, a welcome relief from the racket of power tools.
“Sorry about all the dust,” Hector said, glancing over his shoulder when she entered the room. Perched halfway up a ladder, he wielded a hammer and drove another nail into a small section of new drywall that formed the wide archway.
Clasping her hands under her chin, her eyes watered as she gazed around her brother’s former bedroom. The walls and terracotta floor were bathed in a golden light that flooded in from the sunroom through the new archway. “It’s heavenly,” she told Hector.
“Glad you like it, but I can’t take credit for the light. That’s the sun doing its trick.” His eyes swept over the space. “It reminds me of an interior courtyard. Just needs a few plants.” He picked up a nail and hammered away.
With her hands still clasped in front of her, she breathed in the smell of new sheetrock and approached the archway. A seam in the floor still divided the original foundation from the one her dad poured for the sunroom. If Hector couldn’t find matching tile, he said he would get creative. The light filled her with a sense of wonder, the way it shone from one space into another, even spilling behind her into the hallway.
A sense of peace enveloped her as she flung her arms wide and crossed from one room into the other. She took a few steps forward then twirled around and gaped through the new opening. “Daddy and Bogey,” she whispered, her voice thick with emotion. “I’d like to think that somewhere out there beyond the horizon, you two guys have joined up.”
Hector watched her from his stance on the ladder. His brown eyes softened as he lowered his hammer. “May I ask you a question about your dad?”
She walked back toward him. “Sure.”
“Is his name on The Wall in D.C.? Even though…you know…” He glanced at the section he was working on then picked up another nail.
Stuffing her hands in her pockets, she regarded him. “Yeah, it’s there all right, along with fifty-eight thousand others, give or take a few.”
He started to lift his hammer. “So his status, then. He’s no longer listed as MIA?”
“Um” — she paused and pursed her lips from side to side — “Officially? The Air Force declared him dead years ago. But since his body was never found, he remains missing in action in our family. That could all change though after today. We’ll have to wait and see once they run the forensics.”
Hector gave her a thoughtful nod and drove another nail into place.
She walked under the arch and crossed the room. At the doorway, she hesitated and glanced back at Hector. “I know this is just a job for you. But what you’ve done here today, joining these two rooms together…” She choked up. It took her a moment to regain her composure. “It means a lot to my mother. It’s symbolic, you know.” She offered a slight smile.
Shifting the hammer to his other hand, Hector sniffed and rubbed the tip of his nose with his thumb. “It’s an honor to do this for your family. I’ll be back tomorrow to texture the new section and repaint the walls.”
She gulped back a lump in her throat and nodded. “Be careful, Hector, Momma may try to adopt you after today.” He laughed and she turned and headed down the hall to peek in on her mother.
By six that evening, Hector had the whole archway framed and all the debris from the demolition cleaned up and carried off. As Trudy went to show Hector out, Jewel rushed up and gave him a hug.
“I had a dream this afternoon while I was taking a nap,” she volunteered, her voice croaky as she held him at arm’s length. “Shep taxied his jet up to the back of the house, opened the cockpit canopy, and gave a big thumbs-up.” Before Hector could respond, Jewel turned to Trudy. “Darling” — her blue eyes sparkled — “Bogey was sittin’ in the backseat, grinning from ear to ear.”
Trudy’s vision was still cloudy long after Hector backed his big red truck out of the driveway and headed into town. After Jewel went to make dinner, Trudy meandered down the hallway to put some clean towels away in her mother’s bathroom. Passing her dad’s closet, she set the laundry basket down, and pulled open the door.
A whiff that was part musky, part musty greeted her. A row of fores
t green Nomex flight suits hung limp on hangers where they’d spent the last forty-plus years in limbo. After the Air Force returned her dad’s personal effects, her mother slipped each flight suit onto a hanger with the belief that sooner or later Shep would return. Some of the flight suits still had salt stains under the armpits.
One flight suit stood out near the back: a red short-sleeved nonregulation number covered in colorful embroidery and unofficial irreverent patches. The hangers skidded on the metal rod as Trudy quickly pushed the heavy uniforms out of the way to get to it. Daddy’s party suit! All the combat pilots had one for special occasions. They were made out of lightweight material and promoted an esprit de corps among the pilots in a squadron. She reached for it and smiled as she read the nametag out loud on the chest pocket: Clusterfuck. Major Shep Cutterbuck’s call sign amongst fellow fighter pilots when they were horsing around. She fingered the nametag before letting go of the party suit and plunging her arms deep inside the long sleeves of one of the regulation flight suits her dad wore on a regular basis.
“Major Dad to Ground Control,” she called, flinging her head back and thinking of her mother’s dream. “Can you hear me? It’s Trudy.”
The sound of loose change jingling in a pocket filled the air. There was no mistaking that sound: loose change jingling in a legpocket of a flight suit.
“Daddy?” She spun around.
Clay stood in the doorway in a charcoal gray suit, a blue dress shirt opened at the collar. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his dress slacks, the source of that familiar jingle of coins she’d mistook for her dad’s. “You okay?” He looked around. “I could’ve sworn I heard you talking to someone?”
She blinked at him a second, trying to clear her head. “I never heard the doorbell,” she managed hoarsely.
Clay looked so handsome, but she stood frozen in place, mute, up to her elbows in green sleeves.
Clay glanced over his shoulder toward the hall then back at her. “I knocked in case your mom was resting. She let me in. She asked me to come back here and check on you.” His eyes honed in on her forearms buried in the sleeves. He removed his hands from his pockets, letting his arms dangle at his sides.
Embarrassed, she bowed her head, unable to speak and released her arms and let the flight suit fall back in formation with the others.
“Trudy?” Clay’s voice rustled around her, a gentle caress in her ears whenever he said her name.
Lifting her gaze, she watched him open his arms.
“Let me hold you,” he said. She turned away from the closet and they walked toward each other.
As he encircled her in his arms, she hid her face in his chest. All her fears fell away as Clay rocked her in his arms and let her weep for her lost father, her baby brother, a daughter she only knew in her dreams, and for the four decades she’d spent running away from home. From everything that was sacred.
Then slowly, she lifted her chin to him and they bridged a forty-year gap with a kiss that sealed them together beyond anything physical.
CHAPTER 19
Eject! Eject! Eject!
MUFFLED VOICES and the clatter of cutlery faded into the background when Clay glanced up at the photo hanging above their booth at Lupi’s. “Do you think your dad would’ve approved of me?”
Trudy held her mug halfway to her lips. Her focus shifted from Clay’s handsome face to the photo of her dad, a smaller version of the one that hung in her mother’s living room. It was Saturday morning, around ten-thirty, the day after Veterans Day. Clay had the day off, and they’d just finished brunch and were lingering over coffee. “Of course he would’ve approved of you. You two would’ve hit it off. Why do you even ask?”
Clay studied his hands before looking at her. “Don’t get mad at me, okay?”
She set her mug down. “Uh-oh, here it comes.” She scrunched her face in mock pain.
“That fancy doctor guy, your ex? Would your dad have liked him? I hear surgeons make a lot of money. A lot more than cops.”
Not fair! She wilted under Clay’s gaze. Her shoulders drooped as she stared across the booth at him. Her mind scrambled for a response. “My dad was never impressed with status. He would’ve seen right through him.” She kneaded that spot between her eyes. “He doesn’t matter anymore. He’s ancient history.”
Clay shrugged and took a sip of water, crunching the soft ice. “Is he? ’Cuz sometimes I get the feeling…” His voice went flat, but his question hung between them.
Was it that obvious? She’d been divorced fifteen years. Fifteen years trying to recover from an abusive relationship. Gulping, she refused to look at Clay and picked up her water glass and sipped from her straw and watched Lupi chatting with a tableful of customers.
He nudged her with his voice, keeping it low. “Trudy, it’s me, your old friend, Clay. What did that guy do to you?”
His question shattered her confidence, the confidence she’d worked so hard to rebuild over the years. She felt exposed; unable to speak of the pain and humiliation she’d endured. Instead, she averted her eyes and breathed in the aroma of warm sopapillas, puffy fried pastries being delivered to a table a few feet away. A little boy in a booster seat clapped his chubby hands in anticipation as his mother filled the sweet treat with honey and passed it to him. The boy took his first bite and giggled as honey dribbled down his chin.
“Did he hurt you…physically, verbally, what?” Clay’s question drew her back, and she glanced at him, unable to dodge the probing look in his eyes as he waited for her to reply.
“He screwed with my head,” she blurted in a raspy whisper that gushed out of her like a cleansing wind. There, she’d finally admitted it. She’d never told anyone, not even her lawyer or the judge who presided over her divorce. Mostly she hid the truth from herself, because it was too painful to admit, especially since she’d stayed way past her expiration date.
But Clay didn’t even budge. He’d probably heard everything in his job.
Biting the side of her mouth, she cupped her chin in one hand and sighed. “In the early days of our marriage, he treated me like a princess. But then, as time passed...” She stopped and reached across the table and gripped Clay’s arm. “Please don’t tell anyone, especially Momma. I don’t want her to know.”
His eyes narrowed on her. “It wasn’t your fault. The way he treated you.”
“I know, it’s just that…well, I don’t want to hear anyone tell me, ‘I told you so.’” She let go of his arm and took another sip of water.
Clay shifted in his seat. He picked up his spoon, twirled it between his fingers. Then he set the spoon down and pushed his plate aside and glanced across the booth at her. “He the reason you lost the baby?”
Oh God! A furnace blasted through her system. Picking up her napkin, she dabbed her forehead. Finally, she looked at him. “I’ll never know for sure. I don’t like talkin’ about it. All I know is I should’ve left him then. But I stayed on three more years, like an idiot.”
Clay chewed the inside of his mouth. His chest rose and fell as he regarded her across the table. “Sounds to me like you might have suffered from Stockholm syndrome. You ever heard of it?” There was no judgment in his voice.
Slowly, she nodded. “Yeah. Isn’t that when a victim feels empathy for her captor?”
Clay lifted his glass and crunched the last flakes of ice. “Yes. I’m glad you got out in time before he did more damage.”
The boulder sitting on top of her chest rolled away. She breathed easier. “Can I tell you something? I don’t want you to think I’m weird.”
“Babe, you can tell me anything you want.” He gave her that lazy grin, the one she’d fallen for in high school.
She propped her elbows on the table. “One time right after nine/eleven when the world felt upside down, sorta like it does now, I’d just come home from a trip. As I went to pull in the garage, I heard my dad yelling, ‘Eject! Eject! Eject!’ I rushed inside and started packing. I only took what would fit
in my car. Before I fled, I found an old prescription pad and left the doctor a note that said, ‘Take two painkillers, and call your lawyer in the morning.’”
Clay scratched his temple then rubbed his chin. “So you’re saying your dad came to warn you to get out?”
Trudy nodded and tilted her head and gazed up at her dad’s photo. “I believe in my heart that he did. And another thing,” she said, glancing back at Clay, “my ex hated it when I talked about my dad. He was jealous of his combat medals.”
Clay frowned and shook his head and cracked his knuckles. “That says it all right there. Any man who’s jealous of a genuine war hero is no man at all. He’s a coward.”
Lupi bustled up with a coffeepot in her hand. “Who needs a refill?” Her eyes darted back and forth between them.
“None for me.” Trudy smiled and held her palm out. “But you can bring me the check whenever you’re ready.”
“No way,” Clay objected, wagging his finger.
Lupi propped her hand on one hip. “Listen, Detective. This is an equal opportunity zone. If the lady wants to pay for your meal, let her pay.”
Clay laughed and threw his hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay. You’re the boss around here. Nobody messes with you, Lupi.”
“Damn straight,” she nodded and grinned at Trudy. “You like the Honor Wall?” Setting the coffeepot down, she gestured to a collage of photos grouped under a banner that read, “Pardon’s Best and Brightest.”
Trudy scooted to the end of the booth to get a better look. Glancing sideways, she scanned past the photo of her dad by his jet and one of her mother being crowned Miss Pardon New Mexico. Directly beneath the banner, the formal portrait of the diner’s founder, Guadalupe Belen, hung front and center. Her dark hair coiled in a beehive from the sixties, she could’ve been Lupi’s twin, not her grandmother. Trudy’s gaze swept past other local dignitaries, including Mayor Benny Trujillo standing behind a podium, some judge cloaked in a black robe, gavel in hand. A framed yellowed newspaper clipping captured the moment Mr. Milton Gold cut the ribbon at the grand opening of his department store. She paused at the photo of a soldier with serious dark eyes, his green Army uniform contrasted against the red, white, and blue of an American flag. “Who’s that on the end?”
The Flying Cutterbucks Page 17