Part 3
Grant turned toward the wall so nobody walking past could see his face.
“You can’t know that.”
“Dean came to me.” Vivian sounded reluctant now, each word carefully separated from the next. “He felt terrible. There were photographs.”
“Photographs of what?”
“The two of them. In bed.”
Grant shook his head, though she couldn’t see him. He tried to remember Nora’s last message and couldn’t make the words stay still.
“Send them.”
“No. You don’t need that in your head.”
“Then put Dean on the phone. Get him there. I want to hear him say it.”
“Sweetheart, that will only make this uglier.”
He slid down until he was sitting with one knee drawn up, the heel of his hand pressed against his eye.
Vivian kept talking. Nora had been lonely. Dean hadn’t meant to become involved. Nora had begged him to keep it quiet. Vivian said she had hoped the girl might show some decency and tell Grant herself.
“You’re wrong about her,” he said.
“I wish you could be right.”
He stayed on the phone longer than he remembered afterward. By the end, his mother had given him a reason for every unanswered call and every vanished account. Whenever he tried to make a question, she was there ahead of him with another explanation.
The next morning, he couldn’t stop shivering.
At the clinic, a medic checked his temperature twice and sent him to the military hospital. The fever climbed while the doctors investigated an infection, dehydration, exhaustion. They treated what they could identify and kept him under observation.
For four days, he lay with an IV in his hand while a nurse changed damp bedding and told him to drink. Once he woke certain his phone had sounded. It was on the table beside him, dark.
When he returned to his unit, he volunteered for work before anyone had to ask.
Hard assignments were simple. There was an objective, a standard, an end to the day’s misery. He could become good at those things. He could be useful to the men beside him. When somebody needed a steady pair of hands, they learned to look for Mercer.
He stopped talking about going home.
On holidays, Vivian complained that she hadn’t seen him. Arthur took the phone afterward and asked whether he was eating well, whether he had friends, whether his schedule might ease up soon.
Grant always found an answer involving duty.
He took leave, but never in Darrow. He spent it anywhere he wouldn’t have to turn a corner and find Nora with a child who might have Dean’s eyes.
Four years passed before Sergeant Leon Sutter tired of watching him avoid the subject.
They had come out of a long field exercise and were sitting near a fire barrel, their boots drying badly. Leon, who had grown up in a rural southern county, had a patient manner that could turn blunt without warning.
“You keep a woman in your pocket?” he asked.
Grant glanced at him.
“Every time home comes up, you look like somebody touched a bruise.”
“Leave it alone.”
Leon drank his coffee. “She dead?”
“No.”
“Then you’re doing a lot of mourning for somebody still walking around.”
Grant leaned forward to warm his hands. “You ought to offer counseling. Charge by the insult.”
“Friends get it free.”
For a little while, they listened to the fire crackle against the metal.
Then Leon said, “You’ve stayed away long enough to prove you can. Go see what’s actually there.”
“I know what’s there.”
“From whose mouth?”
Grant’s expression closed.
Leon didn’t push the question again. He set his cup down between his boots. “Get angry at a real person if you need to. Talk to her. Walk away afterward. But quit making yourself live the same day for another four years.”
Grant might have ignored him if Vivian hadn’t made a move of her own.
The following morning, his commander summoned him and pushed a letter across the desk. Grant recognized his mother’s polished wording before he reached the signature.
She claimed her only son had been prevented from visiting his family for four years. She expressed concern for his emotional condition. She requested intervention from somebody with authority over his leave.
The commander waited while Grant read.
“Have you been refused leave?”
“No, sir.”
“And you’ve taken time off?”
“Yes, sir.”
The commander tapped the paper. “Then I’m not sending your mother an explanation of our personnel policies. You’re going to visit her.”
Grant looked up.
“Ten days,” the older man said. “Whatever this is, deal with it.”
There was no invitation to argue.
Grant packed a duffel and boarded a homebound train. He planned an uneventful visit: a few meals, enough conversation to satisfy his father, enough restraint to survive his mother. He would leave before memory could do much damage.
The train paused in Elwick, Virginia, on an overcast October afternoon. It was a scheduled stop long enough for passengers to get out and stretch, and Grant stepped down because he had spent too many hours with his jaw clenched.
He bought coffee from a counter near the waiting room. Outside, somebody was trying to quiet a crying child. A suitcase wheel caught in a crack, and its owner swore under his breath.
Near the other end of the platform, a woman approached a traveler, said something, and received a quick shake of the head.
Grant looked away. Then he looked back.
She wore a washed-out rust-colored coat with one cuff folded unevenly. A small boy stood close to her leg, holding her hand. When she bent to speak to him, she tucked her chin in a way Grant knew before he understood why.
An older passenger stopped. He searched his pocket and dropped a few coins into her open palm.
She raised her face to thank him.
Grant’s cup struck the pavement, and coffee ran against the edge of his boot.
It was Nora…
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