The Older Woman (8 page)

To

nowhere.

He didn’t want to go back upstairs to his apartment. And he couldn’t hang with the church ladies when they were passing that magazine around.

He suddenly smiled to himself. What a day. Mrs. Bee should have charged admission.

The wind was picking up. The pines began to sway and sigh. He could smell the rain coming, and if he started now, he might make it to the house before the storm hit.

When he reached the porch, he headed for the back stairs. He could hear the ladies in the parlor. They were still having a good time. He could almost feel sorry for old Pitty-Pat. He wondered if she’d ever know how it was she came to lose her throne. He’d had occasion to see the woman in action the day the church ladies had dragged him into the parlor for cake and punch. He supposed that her regime had been on a downward slide even then, because she clearly hadn’t wanted the likes of him there. Mrs. Bee must have overridden the woman’s authority. The kingdom had been restless even then.

His mind suddenly went to Meehan. He didn’t understand the bagel guy’s return—but then he didn’t have to. And he didn’t have to worry about her anymore. She’d seemed happy enough—except for when he’d looked into her eyes, and that might have been his imagination. The love-life situation with the bagel guy must be going her way, or she wouldn’t have gone off with him.

He managed to get upstairs without any major pain events. He ate a peanut butter sandwich and drank some cold tea he had in a glass jar in the refrigerator. Then he watched television. The news. The weather.

And he was very careful not to go looking out the window to see if Meehan had come back home.

He realized at some point that the rainstorm he’d come inside to escape had never materialized. Sometime after nineteen-hundred, he heard the phone in the downstairs hall ringing and then Mrs. Bee calling him from the foyer.

“Calvin, that was a Specialist Will Baron,” she said when he hobbled to the head of the stairs. “He just wanted you to know that he’s your COC person—I think that’s right. COC. He left a number for you to call him if you need anything. I’ll leave it right here by the phone.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Bee.”

He hobbled back into his apartment and closed the door, trying to remember if he knew the guy. He did, he decided. A guy from Arizona, maybe Native American. He had relatives around here somewhere—a bunch of the guys from the unit had gone home with him to eat once. He was a…medic.

And Meehan’s heavy hand was all over this little gesture. COC. Chain of Concern. The Army’s unofficial answer to soldiers in distress. Well, he wasn’t in as much distress now as he had been, he was happy to say. He was just…

Too damn nosy for his own good.

And maybe this concern thing he had with Meehan was a two-way street. They were both so busy worrying about each other’s emotional welfare, it was a wonder they didn’t knock each other down.

He was tired suddenly, sleepy, but he didn’t go to bed. He sat in the chair in front of the television instead. He dropped off almost immediately, and he woke up on the floor.

“What…?”

“Lie still,” someone said.

Meehan?

“Meehan…what…is it?” he said, trying to understand, trying to sit up.

“Wait!” she said. “Let me see if you’ve hurt yourself.”

He stopped struggling and closed his eyes. He could feel her hands moving over him. When he opened his eyes again, he was still lying on the floor, and Meehan was kneeling beside him. Her hair was all wet.

“Is it raining?” he asked crazily.

“No. Mrs. Bee got me out of the shower.”

“Mrs.

Bee?”

“Yes. She heard you—she was worried. Does anything hurt? More than usual, I mean.”

“I…don’t understand,” he said, trying to sit up again. This time Meehan let him.

“What happened?”

“You were yelling.”

“Yelling? What did I say?”

“You thought you were on the Black Hawk,” she said quietly.

He took a deep breath. The Black Hawk. The goddamn Black Hawk. He could hear it suddenly, smell it, feel the heat. He realized that his hands were shaking, and he clenched his fists so she wouldn’t see.

“Then she heard you fall, but she couldn’t get the door open—so she came and got me.”

“How the hell did you get in?” he asked, because he realized that he had been lying up against the door.

She smiled. “I went out the window at the end of the hall and I came across the roof. You should have seen me. I was great.”

He couldn’t help but smile in return. “I’ll bet.”

The smile immediately faded, and he sat there with his head bowed.

“Are you ready to get up?”

“What?

Yeah…yeah…”

But he made no effort to do so. “Mrs. Bee came and got you?”

“Yes. She’s very hard to say no to.”

“Tell me about it,” he said. He gave a sudden sharp exhalation of breath. “They’re supposed to get better—the nightmares.”

“They will,” she said. “When you forgive yourself.”

“Forgive myself? For what? I wasn’t flying the damn thing.”

“For surviving,” she said. Her voice was still quiet.

Quiet.

And

so

sure.

“And you would know all about that, I guess,” he said.

She didn’t answer him.

“So what are you going to do now? Tell me everything happens for a reason?”

“Maybe it does,” she said.

He made a short derisive sound, but he was suddenly faced with a different, more pressing problem—the overwhelming urge to bawl. Like a little kid—only he never cried much when he was a kid. He’d just sucked it up and gone on his not-so-merry way.

He didn’t dare look at her. He turned away and tried to get to his feet. Her hand came out to help him at just the right moment, efficient and nonintrusive. Something she’d no doubt learned from years of practice. She handed him his cane.

“I’m okay now,” he said, struggling to walk to the bed. Meehan went with him, but she made no attempt to help. He sat down heavily on the edge of the mattress.

He could feel her looking at him, assessing.

“Then I’ll be going,” she said after a moment.

“Hey,” he said when she was halfway across the room.

She looked back at him.

“Sorry I interrupted your shower.”

“No

problem.”

“Hey,” he said again when she opened the door. “Maybe we could go get another steak and beer sometime. Or something.”

She gave him a small, sad smile and shook her head. “No.”

The no-frills, no-discussion, no-chance-of-misunderstanding answer.

No.

Chapter Five

S
he probably thought I wasn’t with it enough to know what I was asking.

It wouldn’t be hard for her to make that mistake. He’d been asleep. He’d apparently been yelling, and he’d definitely been falling—he had the bruises to prove it. So what else would she think but that his brain had been temporarily scrambled?

The only solution as far as he could see was to just do it again—when he was in better shape and she would
know
he was in better shape and not think he didn’t have a clue about what he was saying.

Sounded like a plan.

He went outside to the backyard when he thought Meehan would be getting home from work, taking up his post by the grapevine.

He

waited.

And

waited.

He had to suffer a lot of insect pests of one kind or another in the time it took her to show—clearly he was the specialty of the day. When she pulled into her drive, he stood up and walked as casually as he could in her direction. The only problem was that his casual gait looked a lot like his I’m-about-to-fall-on-my-face one. Thankfully, she saw him at some point and walked to meet him.

“Hey,” he said when she was close enough. “I’ve got a question.”

“Go ahead,” she said, and it occurred to him that she probably thought it was about something medical.

“Are you and the bagel guy on or off?”

She seemed about to say something, but apparently she thought better of it, probably deciding—given their history—that she’d save herself a lot of aggravation in the long run if she just bit the bullet and answered him.

“Off,” she said.

Hot damn!

“Okay,” he said. “So what do you think about you and me going out to eat again sometime?”

“The same thing I thought last night. No.”

“Why

not?”

“Why not? What is the matter with you? You should be going out with your—”

she hunted for a word “—military associates. Get busy and make some new friends. Or better yet, you should find yourself some nice girl to go places with.”

“I could do that,” he assured her. “But I haven’t got the strength.”

“You haven’t got the strength,” she repeated—as if she’d
heard
him just fine, but
buying
it was something else again.

“Right. See, if I go hang out with somebody from the unit, I got to be tough all the time—show them Bugs Doyle is one more steely-eyed, badass military man, and he can take it. If I go out with some girl, not only do I have to be tough, I have to be suave, too. You know how much work it takes to be tough
and
suave?”

“I haven’t got a clue,” she assured him.

“I didn’t think so. I’m better than I was, but I’m just not up for all that stuff yet. I don’t need a nice girl. I need a—”

“Baby-sitter,” she finished for him.

“No,” he said pointedly. “I need a friend—a bud. See, if
we
go out together, I don’t have to be bothered with keeping up my image. If I hurt, I can say so. If I’m all down about Rita, I can say so. And you won’t care. Same goes for you. I know about the bagel guy, so you can be however you want to be, too, because we don’t have any secrets. I thought we had a pretty good time the other night. I did, anyway. Going out with you was a big relief, and I wouldn’t mind going again. That’s all. See?”

“Yes.”

“So you’ll go?”

“No,” she said. “But that was a nice try,” she added. “You might even say

‘suave.’ Tell Mrs. Bee I’ll be over to see the magazine soon.”

She walked away, and he stared after her until she got inside.

Well, that went pretty well,
he thought. She didn’t threaten to report him to his commanding officer, at least.

He hobbled back to the house, going in through the kitchen instead of around to be back stairs. The telephone was on a table in the wide hall, and he toyed with the idea of calling his COC contact. For what, he didn’t know. He could think of something, he supposed—if he hadn’t still been occupied with Meehan and her civil but firm rebuff.

She’s just not getting this, he thought.

And he was going to end up on the six o’clock news for stalking, if he wasn’t careful.

He stood in the hall for a moment, then decided to hobble into the parlor. Mrs. Bee’s bookshelves were in there, and she’d said on more than one occasion that he could take a look and help himself. At the time, he distinctly remembered thinking that he wished the offer had extended to the downstairs refrigerator.

She had a lot of books, essentially her own private Bee Library. He stood holding on to a shelf and reading the titles, finally taking down a photographic history of World War I. He flipped through the pages, looking at the many pictures of no-man’s-land and the trenches and reading the captions.

Hell of a way to fight a war, he thought.

He put the book back and pulled out a thin red one with gold lettering. World War II—the history of the 963rd Field Artillery. There were a number of photographs in it, as well—men in little groups mostly.

He moved to one of the dining room chairs left in the church ladies’ “war room”

and sat down. He read for a time, then closed the book and sat thinking of the movie,
Saving Private Ryan
and the fact that maybe he wasn’t as brave as those men had been. He wondered if Meehan had been to see it, and if so, what she thought of it. He could always ask—

“Calvin?” Mrs. Bee said in the doorway. “Can I help you find something?”

“Ah…no, Mrs. Bee. Well, maybe. Have you got any books by John…something that starts with a
G.
Some kind of ‘saga.”’

“Galsworthy?

The Forsyte Saga?
”

“That’s

it.”

“It’s up there on the top shelf. Those three big books side by side, next to the end.”

Three

books?

“Okay, Mrs. Bee. Thanks.”

He had to work to get them, but he brought all three down. He was pretty sure Mrs. Bee wouldn’t have any idea that his interest had been sparked by
her
remark about his reminding her of Michael Mont, and he couldn’t
not
look at them after she had been kind enough not to ask what in the world he wanted with them—not when it was obvious to him that he had stumbled on to some seriously highbrow books here. They still had the book jackets on them, for one thing. Interesting, readable books never did, in his experience. Mrs. Bee had to know that this wasn’t his usual reading material, but she acted as if it was, and he appreciated it.

He skimmed over the blurbs and then began thumbing through the pages, trying to spot the name Michael Mont, until he ultimately decided that the middle volume might be the one.

He used to read a lot, especially when he was overseas. Nothing like this, of course. Cold War and spy things mostly, if he could get his hands on them. He hadn’t read much since the helicopter crash. He hadn’t been able to, and it had alarmed him enough to obliquely mention it to one of his doctors. He’d been relieved to learn that it wasn’t some kind of brain damage, as he’d feared, but “a decreased ability to concentrate due to post traumatic stress.” Fortunately he’d been able to concentrate long enough to read that in the doctor’s notes—upside down.

Post traumatic stress.

Maybe that was getting better—if he didn’t count the recent nightmare. He still couldn’t remember what he’d been dreaming about. He didn’t want to remember it.

He picked up all three volumes of the saga, juggling them along as he dragged the dining room chair closer to the bay window where the lace curtains were billowing outward. Then he sat down in the cross breeze and began reading.