Dorothy Garlock (12 page)

“You should worry less about a girl you just met and more about your job,” Robert shot back in answer. “Such a thing isn’t
becoming to a teacher. You have enough on your plate without running after Sophie Heller. All that’ll come of it is that you’ll
set tongues to wagging.”

The venom in his father’s words momentarily stunned Cole. The hope that he’d had that they would finally be able to find some
common ground on which to speak, to begin the slow process of healing their many wounds, vanished. It was as if his father
was itching for a fight and choosing his words to ensure that one occurred.

How can he possibly be happy being so bitter?

Cole’s blood began to heat up. Ever since the day his mother had been tragically taken from him, he’d felt as if he’d been
unfairly judged by his father. The fear in seeing his mother’s broken body had overwhelmed him. He’d been a child! Now the
anger and resentment that he’d felt upon returning to Victory rose with a vengeance. When he’d first voiced his displeasure
to his father on the staircase, he’d been met with a stinging rebuke. This time, he promised himself that he wouldn’t let
his father simply walk away.

“You’ve no need to speak to me that way,” he defiantly declared.

“I’ll stop doing so only when you’ve started to use your head.”

“I’m no longer the boy I was when I left.”

“You won’t be much different as a man.”

“How would you know?” Cole barked, his anger rising to color his face. “It’s only been a couple of days since I returned and
you still haven’t taken a moment’s time to talk with me!”

“And I told you then… I know exactly who you are, Cole.”

“No, you don’t,” he snapped, bringing his coffee cup down on the stove with a bang. “Don’t you dare suppose that you know
anything about me! I’m not a kid. Through nothing but my own hard work, I’ve clawed and fought to build my own life. I’m going
to be a teacher… something to be proud of. Why is it so wrong of me to expect you to respect what I’ve done?”

“Then why did you come back here?” Robert asked, setting down the paper and turning all his attention on his son, refusing
to answer his question and instead asking one of his own. “If you’d managed to build this new life, why not just stay in Chicago?
Surely you could have found a teaching job there. Why return to Victory?”

“Because this is my home! Because—”

Cole was cut off in midsentence by the sound of a car door banging shut and footsteps on the back porch, approaching the house.
Before the knob was turned, Cole knew who their visitor was…

Jason was home!

Jason Ambrose sprang through the back door with all of the energy of a summer storm. Tall, broad-shouldered, and every bit
as fit as a mule, he had blue eyes that sparkled beneath his close-cropped brown hair. Jason’s face was a younger copy of
their father’s, with higher cheekbones and a smaller nose. As soon as he saw his brother in the kitchen, an ear-to-ear smile
spread across his broad jaw and he dropped his bags on the floor with a heavy thud.

“Is that my little brother I see?” he shouted.

Before Cole could so much as lean away from the stove, Jason had bounded across the room and taken him in his thick arms,
hugging him so tightly that it nearly drove the breath from his chest.

“Are you so happy to see me that you’re going to kill me?” Cole wheezed.

“Quit your whining!” Jason kidded good-naturedly.

“I didn’t know when to expect you,” Cole said when he’d finally been set free.

“What are you talking about?” his brother asked with confusion. “I told Dad to make sure to let you know I’d be back from
Hallam Falls this morning. Heck, as soon as the draft board meeting was over, I lit out of there and drove half the night
to make sure I’d be here about the time you hauled your sorry butt out of bed. You always were one heck of a sleeper!”

“Still am.” Cole chuckled, but he wasn’t laughing on the inside.

He turned an expectant look toward his father, but the older man didn’t seem to be paying him any mind. A sickening feeling
spread across Cole’s gut. When he’d first arrived back in Victory, he had made a point of asking when Jason was supposed to
return, but his father hadn’t given him an exact time, only that he’d return later.

Does he really think so little of me… ?

Before he could even entertain the idea of mentioning his displeasure to his father, Robert rose from his seat and took his
plate to the sink. “I believe I’d best get myself to the store,” he explained. “I’m sure you boys have much to talk about
without me getting in the way.”

“But what about my induction date?” Jason asked. “You said we’d—”

“It’ll wait till evening,” Robert cut him off, and before either of the brothers could say another word, he grabbed his worn
hat from a peg on the wall and was already heading out.

“What’s his problem?” Jason asked as the door banged shut.

Cole wanted to tell Jason what had happened since his return, to ask his advice about their father’s behavior, but knew in
his gut that it was neither the time nor the place; it would have to wait. Instead, he simply said, “He must have gotten up
on the wrong side of the bed.”

“I figured he’d want to know how it went,” Jason said with a shrug as the pickup truck chugged down the drive and out of sight.
“Now let me get something to eat before I starve to death!”

“Don’t let me stop you.”

As Jason fixed himself a heaping plate of bacon and eggs, he told Cole all about his trip to the draft board in Hallam Falls,
of standing among all the other men seeking to join the armed services, and particularly of his excitement and nervousness
at signing his name to the dotted line that would induct him into the United States Navy.

“I never figured you for a boat,” Cole said.

“Me neither,” his brother heartily agreed. “But looking at all of those pictures of planes made me hope that I could be a
flyboy. According to the docs, I’ve got the eyes of a hawk. But hell, for all I know I’ll fail some other test somewhere down
the line and the only thing I’ll be good for is peeling potatoes!”

“I wonder if you could even do that right,” Cole teased.

“Keep laughing, funny guy!”

Cole couldn’t help but smile at his brother. Jason had always been confident and self-assured in ways that his younger sibling
could only imagine. People were instantly drawn to Jason’s warmth and wit. That strength of character had always served him
well. If Jason had set his mind on being a navy pilot, Cole had no doubt that he would succeed.

Jason frowned. “It’s too bad I’ve only got a couple of weeks before I have to report.”

“That soon?”

“I’m afraid so. Uncle Sam can’t keep Hitler and Tojo waiting, I guess.”

Cole frowned as well. He’d known that it would only be a matter of time before Jason was shipped out, like the soldiers he’d
seen on the train. Still, he’d hoped for more than just a couple of weeks. They’d seen each other infrequently over the last
couple of years and he figured they had much catching up to do. The idea that his brother was only months from facing enemy
fire was unsettling.

“Are you afraid to go off and fight?”

“Yes and no.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t say I’m too excited about looking down the barrel of some Jap’s gun or a Nazi tank,” Jason answered between bites
of egg, “but I know it’s the right thing to do. After Pearl Harbor, there isn’t any choice but to go off and fight for the
country I love. That feeling, the certainty that I’m right, makes the fear a little less.”

“I understand what you’re saying,” Cole said.

“I just have to do my part, is all.”

The familiar feelings of inadequacy that had plagued Cole for years returned with a vengeance at his brother’s words. While
able-bodied men such as Jason suited up as soldiers, pilots, and sailors, there was no uniform that he was capable of wearing.
His shame felt as sharp as a knife’s blade. “I wish I could do my part, too,” he muttered. “I wish I wasn’t a cripple.”

“Don’t you dare say such a thing, Cole,” Jason snapped. “Don’t you dare!”

“But it’s true!”

“The hell it is!” his brother spat back, his brow furrowed in exasperation and anger. “There isn’t a person alive that knows
you who thinks you wouldn’t fight if you could! You’ve got every bit as much heart as I do, if not a lot more!”

“A lot of good it’s doing me here.”

“Don’t think that I’m going to stand here and let you feel sorry for yourself, little brother,” Jason scolded him. “That leg
is only a handicap if you let it be one! Take pride in what you are, not in what you think you’re not. So you can’t be a soldier,
so what? Be what you are! You’re one of the smartest men I’ve ever known and there are a lot of kids who will benefit from
your teaching. Filling their heads full of numbers is going to do them more good than anything I could do for them.”

“Stop joking around.”

“Who’s joking?” Jason asked with a shrug of his wide shoulders. “We both know you’re the one in this family that got all the
brains! You’re just too stubborn to see it!”

From their childhood, Jason had been more than willing to look past his younger brother’s disability. When they were out with
friends and Cole had struggled to keep up, he had patiently waited for him, even if it meant that all of his other companions
ran off. When Cole had inevitably been picked on, Jason had been the first to defend him, even with his fists and even if
that meant he received the beating. They had rarely fought each other, choosing instead to be especially close, a closeness
that persisted to this very day.

“I still wish I could fight alongside you,” Cole said.

“That’s nothing to wish for.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Don’t worry. You’ll do your part.”

With talk of the war out of the way, they joked about Cole going back to their old school as a teacher instead of a student,
about how hard it must have been to leave a city as exciting as Chicago for one as quiet as Victory, about some of the gossip
around town, and even about how nice it had been to taste one of Marge’s cheeseburgers again.

“Even if you’re leaving in a couple of weeks, we’ll still have plenty of time to get caught up,” Cole said.

“You’ll get your share, but you can’t have it all.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I did that, Mary Ellen might never speak to me again.”

“Mary Ellen?”

“There are a couple of things that have changed since you left town.” Jason chuckled. “Do you remember Mary Ellen Carter?
I think she might be a couple of years younger than you.”

Cole clearly remembered Mary Ellen; when they had been kids, she was the only person that had been picked on more than he
had. Short, with stringy blonde hair, dumpy clothes, and eyes perpetually turned to the ground, she’d been teased mercilessly.
There had been many times Cole had wanted to console her, but every time he had approached her, she’d run away screaming.

“Pig Patch?” Cole asked, using the nickname with which she’d been saddled.

“If you call her that now, she’s likely to kick you.”

“So… wait… are you saying what I think you are?”

“Yep.”

“You and Mary Ellen?” Cole asked incredulously.

“She’s my gal,” Jason answered proudly. “She’s not quite the ugly duckling she used to be. Now she’s got curves in all the
right places with plenty of beauty and charm to spare.”

“Weren’t you the one that made her eat mud pies one summer?” Cole asked.

“One and the same,” his brother admitted.

“I can’t believe she forgave you.”

“That makes two of us,” he said, and they both laughed.

In that moment, Cole was truly glad to be home.

H
OW CAN YOU
stand this heat? It’s unbearable!”

Sophie wiped heavy beads of sweat from her brow with the back of her hand as she watched Walter Deets type words into the
hulking Linotype machine in the rear of the
Victory Gazette
building. Large and foreboding, the black metal contraption seemed to take up the whole room. They’d been at it for hours;
Sophie’s blouse clung to her body like a second skin and her knees felt wobbly, nearly as unsure as those of a newborn calf.

“You say that now, but come winter you’re gonna be pretty glad about it!”

“I doubt that very much.”

The newspaperman chuckled. “Trust me. When the snow flies, this is the place to be.”

Sophie sighed. For the past several days, she had been paired with Walter as he explained the ins and outs of his job at the
newspaper. In his early thirties with hound-dog eyes, an overbite, and a nature as easy as a Sunday breeze in June, he would
soon be shipping out for the United States Army and some distant foreign land, leaving behind responsibilities that someone
would have to assume. To that end, Sophie had been chosen.

Prior to the outbreak of the war, Sophie’s duties at the
Gazette
had been to run copy, do some proofreading, and even, on the rarest of occasion, take a grainy photograph or two. She knew
that the men who worked in the rear of the building were important to the well-being of the paper, but their jobs had always
seemed beyond her. Though she had often joked with Walter in passing, she’d had no idea what his work had entailed. Now, exhausted,
overwhelmed, and covered in sweat, she had begun to know all too well.

“You want to give it another try?” Walter asked.

“I suppose I can’t be so lucky as to hope it would just manage without me.”

“Let’s hope not.” He laughed heartily, his voice still loud and strong over the heavy clanks and bangs of the Linotype machine.
“Otherwise I’ll not have a job when I get back.”

“I already can’t wait to give it back to you!”

Taking the page of text that Walter handed her, Sophie sat down at the odd keyboard of the machine. Though she still wasn’t
completely sure of the process, she knew that the large contraption was essential to the publication of the newspaper. By
typing on the keyboard, which, to her chagrin, did not remotely resemble that of a normal typewriter, characters that created
sets of words and letters were selected and placed in the order in which they would be needed. Once a line had been completed,
a lever was pulled and the text was plunged into molten hot metal, a combination of tin and lead, creating a mold that could
be used for printing. Sophie’s discomfort came from the Linotype’s melting pot, many hundreds of degrees hot.