Butternut Summer (43 page)

The expression on his face then was deeply satisfying to Caroline. He had not seen this coming. It was hard to shock Jack Keegan, she thought. But she'd done it.

“You sure about this?” he murmured.

“Oh, I'm sure,” she said, the sensation of warmth spreading deliciously through her whole body.

Only a moment later, it seemed, they were in Jack's room, and Jack was turning off the overhead light and leaving on a small bedside table lamp to glow softly and throw faint shadows against the wall. And then he was laying her down, carefully, lovingly, onto his bed. But he didn't immediately move to join her. Instead, he looked down at her, speculatively, almost worriedly.

“Jack, what is it?”

“Nothing. It's just been a long time, that's all.”

“A long time since you've been with me?”

“A long time since I've been with anyone.”

“How long?”

“Since I stopped drinking.”

“That was two years ago, Jack,” she said, her heart knocking against her rib cage.

“I know.”

“Why, why so long?”

“You were the only woman I wanted to be with.”

“Oh, Jack,” she breathed, amazed and, to be honest, a little afraid. Afraid because there was a time when it would have been unimaginable for Jack to go two days without making love. But two years? She could only guess at the level of his need. And more than guess at hers. She felt it now, surging through her.

When Jack moved, it was with deliberate slowness and infinite patience, like the calm before the storm. He knelt on the bed, leaned down, and kissed her gently, then pulled away and smiled at her—that slow smile that was pure Jack, and that made desire unfurl within her, where it rippled and shimmied like a flag in the wind. She
loved
that smile, Caroline decided. It was a great smile.

W
ill, can you believe it? Frankie and Jessica, falling in love right in front of my eyes and I never even noticed it?”

“Yeah, I can believe it,” Will said, reaching out to tuck a stray strand of Daisy's strawberry-blond hair behind one of her ears. “Because if you were like me this summer, Daisy, you've been a little distracted.”

It was the next day, right after closing time at Pearl's, and they were sitting in one of the back booths talking. Or at least Daisy was talking. Will, who had come here to tell her something, something important, was finding it easier to listen than to talk.

“You're right. I
have
been a little distracted this summer. I can't imagine why,” Daisy said, leaning over and kissing him on the lips. Will smiled at her, relieved that in the week since her surgery, she'd started to look like herself again. Still pale, yes, but a soft, creamy pale, not the worrying grayish pale of her hospital stay.

“You know, Daisy,” he said now, running a finger down her cheek. “I didn't just come here to flirt with you. I came here because there's something I need to talk to you about.”

“Will, you look so serious,” she said, frowning slightly.

“Well, this
is
serious,” Will said, his mouth suddenly dry. He didn't know what he was more nervous about, her reaction to what he was going to say or
his
reaction to
her
reaction to what he was going to say. Until this morning, it had all felt somehow unreal. Watching her face now, though, as the first shadow of anxiety flitted across it, it suddenly felt very real.

“What is it, Will?”

“I, I don't know how to start,” he said, fiddling with the Coke Daisy had just brought him.

“Start at the beginning,” she said, her jaw tightening. And Will realized his nervousness was contagious. He sighed. This wasn't going to get any easier for either of them. He needed to get it over with. Now. He took a deep breath.

“Okay, I'll start at the beginning. And actually, Daisy, it
wa
s the beginning. For us, anyway. It was the morning after our first date, our first real date, the one at your apartment, and I'd driven up to Duluth to pick up a car part. While I was there, I . . . I walked by this army recruiting office. I swear to God, I've walked by that place a hundred times, and I've never even thought about going in there before. But that morning, for some reason, I went inside. I have no idea why. But I started talking to the guy there, the recruiter. At that point, I wasn't thinking about joining the army. I was just . . . just curious, I guess.”

He was watching Daisy for a reaction, but she didn't have one. Yet. She just looked alert, tense.

He took a quick, nervous sip of his Coke and kept going. “So the guy there, the recruiter, talked to me about all the job opportunities the army has to offer and how I might qualify for some of them with my background in mechanics. He suggested I take the army physical and vocational test. And I thought, ‘What the hell,' right? I mean, what did I have to lose, really? So I passed the physical test and I did really well on the vocational test. I couldn't believe it. I've never done well on a test in my life. But the counselor at the processing center said, based on my score, I'd be good at aviation mechanics. The mechanics part didn't surprise me, I guess. But the aviation part did. I mean, I've read a lot about airplanes, but I've never worked on one. It didn't matter, though. The test measures your aptitude for something, not your knowledge of it. And he said the military would train me in aviation mechanics, and after my time was up, I could stay in the military or work in the private sector. I mean, it's so cool,” he said, his enthusiasm breaking through his nervousness. “Here I've been working mostly on people's old, broken-down trucks and cars, and I could be working, one day, on airplanes or helicopters that cost millions of dollars to build.”

Daisy didn't look like she thought it was cool, though. She looked like he'd said something to her in another language, something she was trying to translate into English for herself. “Are you saying, Will,” she said, finally. “Are you saying that you . . .”

“That I enlisted? Yes.” He nodded, looking into her eyes, her blue, blue eyes, and willing her, somehow, to be okay with all of this. “That's exactly what I'm saying, Daisy.”

“Why . . . why would you do that?” she asked, and there was something about her expression that told him she still didn't really believe him.

“Because it makes sense, Daisy. It makes a lot of sense. I know it may not seem like it now, but it does.”

When she didn't say anything, Will tried again.

“Look, Daisy, I can't just keep doing what I'm doing at the garage. I mean, I spend most of my time babysitting Jason. And I'm just barely eking out a living doing it. I did think about other ways to get ahead. I thought about going to college or vocational school. But you know college is out, Daisy. My grades were lousy. All that time I spent in the bleachers, smoking cigarettes, I guess.” He smiled at her, but she didn't smile back at him. “And I looked at some of the programs at the vocational college in Ely, too, but most of them have a two-year waiting list, at least. And I don't want to wait that long. I don't want to wait any longer than I have to.”

“But when, when are you leaving?” she asked softly, and he saw that her complexion had gotten paler.

“Sooner . . . sooner than I thought,” he said. “Originally, I signed up for the Delayed Entry Program, and they told me I had several months before I needed to report. That's why I didn't tell you right away. I thought I had more time. But then, the day you had your operation, I got a letter saying that my ship date had been moved up, and that I had to report to the Minneapolis processing center and then fly to Fort Benning, Georgia, for basic training in ten days. So I'm going sooner than I thought I'd be going.” Will stopped talking. Something about the expression on Daisy's face made him stop.

“Will, that means you have to be there in a few days,” she said.

“That's right,” he said, nodding slowly. “I have to be in Minneapolis the day after tomorrow; I've already got my bus ticket.”

“The day after tomorrow?” she echoed, and the last of the color drained from her face.

“Daisy, I know. I'm sorry. I didn't expect them to push up my ship date by almost six weeks.”

“But, still, you waited until now to tell me?” she asked, her voice quiet.
Too quiet
, he decided.

“Yes,” he said guiltily. “I waited until now. I know it was cowardly, and wrong, not to tell you sooner. But I knew as soon as I told you, it would hang over us. And you were so happy. And so was I. Then, we were going to Mr. Phipps's cabin, and I didn't want that to be about this, about us saying good-bye. I wanted it to be about us being together. I was going to tell you after we got back, but by the time I read the letter saying they'd moved up my ship date, you were in the hospital, and then, when you got out, it didn't seem fair to spring it on you right away.”

“But now? Now it seems fair to spring it on me?” she asked, her voice almost a whisper.

“No, it doesn't seem fair.”

Daisy looked away from him then, out the window of the coffee shop, and shook her head, slowly, and Will saw her eyes glaze over with tears. “So . . . so this is it?” she asked, looking back at him. “This is it, then, for the two of us?”

“
What? No
. God no, Daisy,” he said, reaching for her. She let him take her in his arms, but her body didn't relax, didn't yield against his. “Is that what you think? That I'm breaking up with you? Because I'm not. Look, basic training is nine weeks. After that, I have something called Advanced Individual Training. That's where I learn my skill. But after six months, I'll get two weeks off, and I can be with you again. I can be with you for every single second of that two weeks.”

“So we're going to be apart for six months?” she asked, pulling away from him. Her voice was trembling, and when she blinked, a single tear slid down her cheek.

He nodded, and he felt it too, the awful realization that he'd have to go for that long without seeing her. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “It's a long time. But we'll write, and text, and talk, and do whatever we can do to stay in touch.”

“But what happens after the training?”

“After that, I'll owe the army two years.”

“Do you know where you'll be stationed?”

“No, I don't, and I won't have any control over that. But, Daisy, we can find a way to make this work. Other people do it. They do it all the time.”

But she only shook her head. “I don't understand, Will,” she said, her voice breaking. “I know we never talked about what would happen after this summer. But I thought . . . I thought . . .”

“You thought I'd stay here, and keep working at the garage, and see you on the weekends? Come down to Minneapolis, or have you come up here?”

“Something like that,” she said, pulling a napkin out of the napkin dispenser on the table and wiping her eyes with it.

“But, Daisy, don't you see the problem with that? Only one of our lives would be going forward. Mine would be standing still. Or worse, it'd be going backward.”

“Okay, but . . .” He saw her searching for another reason his plan wouldn't work. She found one. “But, Will, you said once you hated high school because there were too many rules. The army is
all
rules.”

“I know that. But the reason I hated the rules in high school was because I didn't know what they were for. In the army, I'll know what they're for and why I'm there, Daisy. I'll know what I want.”

“What do you want, Will?”

“I want you.”

“You
have
me,” she said, with a sob.

“No, I mean, I want you . . .” He paused here, struggling with how to say this. He'd never said anything like this to her before. “I want you for the long run, Daisy. That's why I have to have something to offer you, something more than I have now. Because I want you for good. I want you for the rest of my life.” He kissed her gently.

She blushed immediately, as he'd known she would, but he kept going. He was desperate to make her understand. “Daisy, do you know what I've been thinking about since we got back from that night at the cabin? I've been thinking about what it would be like to live with you. To fall asleep with you every night and wake up with you every morning. I never thought I'd want that with anyone. But I want that with you. I mean, do you remember, at the cabin, when we were getting ready to go and I told you I needed to go check on something?”

She nodded, a little uncertainly.

“I lied. I went down to the dock, and I looked out over the lake, and I looked back up at the cabin, and I thought, what if we had a place like that one day? A place that belonged to us? Only we wouldn't have to lie then, or rearrange our schedules, or anything like that. It would be ours, and we'd live there together. That would be our life.”

“Will, we can have a life together
now
,” Daisy said, a little desperately. “Come back to Minneapolis with me,
please
. My roommates won't mind. You can share my bedroom with me and when I start classes you can—”

“I can sit on the couch in your living room and wait for you to come back between classes so I can make love to you?”

“Well, y
es
,” Daisy said. “For starters, yes. That sounds like a good plan.”

Will couldn't help but laugh. Because the truth was, right now, it
did
sound like a good plan, or at least the part about making love to Daisy did. But he realized then that he was getting sidetracked. They both were. If Daisy, for once in her life, was going to underthink this, then he was going to have to overthink it for her. Or maybe not
overthink
it. Maybe, instead, think about it just the right amount.