A Chance of a Lifetime (5 page)

Lord, she regretted that decision. She'd never wanted to be a single mother, but having some tangible part of J'Myel would have been so much better than having nothing but memories. She had way too many of those.

Their usual waitress, Miriam, stopped by the table to deliver a glass of iced tea, a bowl of salsa, and a basket of chips. “It's good to see you, Bennie. What can I get for you?”

“Good to see you, too, Miss Miriam. Um, let me have a cup of queso and a cup of guacamole. And probably more chips, but I'll let you bring those when I've finished these.” The Three Amigos made their chips fresh, and they were the best Bennie had ever eaten.

Once Miriam left, Bennie skimmed her gaze over the group. “Now that I've ordered enough food to add a few unneeded pounds, let me look at all of you. Carly, marriage to Dane certainly agrees with you. You're glowing.”

Carly Clark glanced toward the bar, where her husband sat, and smiled demurely. “Thank you.”

“Jessy, you always glow.” The redhead was short, slim, green-eyed, and gorgeous, and those green eyes were clear and sharp. She'd been sober awhile now, and it made her
more
everything than before. Bennie was so proud of her.

“Thank you,” Jessy mimicked Carly, and she shot a look at the bar, too, where her cowboy sweetie, Dalton, sat with Dane.

“And Therese…” Bennie heaved a sigh. “You're lit up like a Christmas tree. I'm guessing that Keegan was here this past weekend.”

The kindergarten teacher's smile could have been mistaken for a self-satisfied smirk. “He got to stay an extra day, thanks to the ice. But he's back at Fort Polk now.”

Bennie grinned at Lucy, Fia, Marti, Ilena, Patricia, and Leah. “The rest of you ladies…we have
got
to get us some men! Look how they just shine with happiness and satisfaction, and us…Have any of us even had a date in the past year?”

“I've had a date,” Lucy protested. Then she shrugged ruefully. “Though he fell in love with someone else and moved away.”

“But he only fell in love with Avi
after
you broke up with him,” Patricia reminded her. She happened to be the mother of the man in question, a mother who'd been estranged from her children for twenty years. Those relationships had healed only in the five months since her second husband's death. Bennie knew it had been hard for Patricia, but she understood the children's position better. Her mother had abandoned her, too. She had no idea where Lilly Pickering was, if she was even alive, and if fate somehow brought her back to Bennie, she didn't know whether there was forgiveness for her in Bennie's heart.

“And why aren't you dating, Bennie?” Fia asked, then slyly added, “Don't tell me you haven't been asked.”

She
had
been asked. Just a month ago, a doctor at the hospital had asked, but she thought workplace romances were a bad idea. She'd been asked by a couple of guys she'd gone to high school with, but she remembered too clearly what hound dogs they'd been then to imagine herself with either of them now. The youth pastor at the church had asked her out when he'd first arrived in town, but…truth be told, she wanted a man she could be a little naughty with. How could she be naughty with a pastor?

“I'm just waiting for the right guy,” she said airily. Maybe. She'd had a lot of loss in her life: father, mother, husband, best friend. Obviously, some people were strong enough to take the risk of second chances—Carly, Jessy, and Therese had. But she wasn't sure, no matter how lonely she got, that she was one of them.

“Aren't we all?” Ilena said with a sigh.

“Speak for yourselves.” That was Marti, dipping a tortilla chip into salsa, shaking off the excess, then liberally sprinkling it with salt. “I loved Joshua dearly, and I loved being married to him, but I'm not looking to repeat the experience. I'm fine on my own.”

“I'm fine on my own, too.” Though Bennie wasn't really on her own. At least she had Mama to go home to every night. “But if Mr. Right came waltzing through that door right now,” she teased, “you can bet I'd be waltzing out with him five minutes later. And somebody take that salt shaker away from her. She's gonna swell up like a sponge.”

“But I'll be a happy sponge,” Marti replied as Fia laughingly moved the salt shaker out of reach.

When it came time to go, it was the same as usual: Bennie truly hated to leave them. There were hugs all around, then Jessy and Carly headed to the bar area while the rest of them left the warmth of the restaurant for the cold night.

“It's times like these that make me miss Florida,” Fia said with a shiver.

“Nah, honey, it'll pass. That warm sun's gonna come back.” Bennie hugged her close as they stepped off the curb. “You got a ride, doll?”

“Therese is taking me home. Her van is easy to get in and out of.” Fia smiled thinly. “My doctor's sending me for some special kind of MRI that they can't do here. I don't know when or where, but maybe it'll give us an answer.”

“Oh, I hope so!” Bennie said fervently. For the better part of the year, Fia had suffered mysterious symptoms that every doctor had lazily written off as normal strains and overuse for a twenty-something personal trainer. Last month, though, Jessy and Patricia had gotten involved. Neither had any medical knowledge, but they were both experts at standing their ground and intimidating lesser mortals. They'd demanded answers for Fia, and this doctor was doing his best to find those answers.

“You know, Mama and I pray for you every day, and so does her church group. Doctors are good, but sometimes they need the Lord's guidance to see the big picture.”

“I appreciate all the prayers I can get.” Fia grimaced. “I have a new respect for what Dane and everyone like him has been through. It's tiring.”

As she spoke, Dane and Carly came out of the restaurant. Like Fia, he was limping—probably the cold and damp—but normally, no one would guess watching him that his jeans concealed the prosthesis required by an above-the-knee amputation.

Bennie walked with Fia to Therese's van, called her good-byes, then hurried to her own car. As she started the engine and turned the heat to high, she watched her friends scatter to their own vehicles and smiled. She'd had her share of heartache—more than her share, it sometimes seemed—but at the end of the day, she was a lucky woman. A little lonely, a little heartsore, but very definitely lucky.

T
hough the week hadn't been as bad as he'd expected, Calvin was grateful when the weekend arrived. He'd filled out endless paperwork, been examined and interviewed by his care team—doctor, nurses, therapists, a social worker, and a career counselor—and he'd met the rest of the troops in the WTU company. Half of them, like Justin Stephens, had severe injuries, amputations and burns chief among them. More than half had traumatic brain injuries in varying degrees. Some seemed relatively normal, if forgetful. Others had misshapen heads, where portions of their skulls had been blown away, and had lost their communication and motor skills.

And almost everyone had some degree of PTSD. It should have made him feel better that he wasn't alone, but instead it just made him…weary.

He was weary this Saturday morning as he walked down the stairs from the barracks to the parking lot. His father's pickup truck was waiting at the end of the sidewalk, and Justice sat behind the wheel, grinning as he watched Calvin approach.

“You know, when I think of barracks, I always picture a huge room with double-stacked cots and fifty men to a latrine,” he remarked when Calvin got in. “This ain't bad.”

“The apartments help the guys adjust to what it'll be like when they go home.” Calvin always thought
guys
, but there were a dozen or so women in the company, too. “I could be in regular quarters since I don't have any physical disabilities, but they had space available here, so…” He didn't mention that he also had the option of living at home. He didn't want to try to explain that he just couldn't move home again and sleep in his old room, live with his old memories, and bear the scrutiny and worry of his parents and Gran anytime he didn't behave like the Calvin they knew.

The notion struck him hard, made his breath catch and his chest ache. He was no longer the son Justice and Elizabeth had loved, raised, taught, disciplined, and said good-bye to eleven years ago. Since he'd begged off on seeing them this past week, he didn't know if they'd realized that.

He didn't even know who he was now.

Feeling his father's gaze shift between him and the road as he drove, he forced his fingers to unclench and his jaw to loosen enough to talk. “How's Mom?”

“She's fine. Cooking up a storm for you.”

Yep, that was his mother: When in doubt, cook. “And Gran?”

“Oh, you know Emmeline.”

People had been saying that about his grandmother for as long as he could remember. Emmeline Wright was strong-willed—hard-headed, most people said—and independent and didn't give two cents what anyone thought of her. She had more quirks than the entire rest of the family put together, and anything she did, normal or not, could be explained by a sigh and a
You know Emmeline.

Last weekend's ice had disappeared by noon Tuesday. There had been a few relatively warm days, but today the sky was dreary, clouds hung so low to the ground that he couldn't tell where they stopped and the sky started, and rain fell at a steady rate. The thermometer display on the rearview mirror of the truck read 44 degrees, making the rain plenty uncomfortable but with no chance of ice.

“How's your week been?” his dad asked. “What have they got you doing?”

Everything in Calvin tightened. There were people he didn't have to tell a thing to, one of the medical team had told him, but those people generally didn't include family. Families who cared, who worried—family he intended to stay a part of in the future—deserved to know what was going on.

“Right now it's a lot of getting settled. Paperwork to fill out, people to meet, names to remember.” From all the talking he'd done this week, Calvin's voice sounded rusty. Once upon a time he'd been as outgoing and chatty as Justin. That was just one of the things he'd lost over the past three years. He would try to regain it because him being quiet was as unnatural as J'Myel being dead.

He flinched, and his right hand slowly knotted into a fist again. He slid it between him and the door so his dad couldn't see.

Justice glanced at him, then injected a deliberately careless tone to his voice. “Your mama's been fixing up care packages for your apartment. She's got lasagna, chicken enchiladas, meat loaf, pot roast, and biscuits, bread, and cookies, all ready to pop into the oven. She's also packed up sheets, quilts, afghans, and everything else. I reminded her that your last command is shipping your stuff here so you should have it any day, but she reminded me that ‘any day' isn't ‘today.'”

“The apartment came with furniture, some dishes, and linens.” About the only thing he needed was clothing. Besides the jeans and shirt he wore now, everything else he'd brought was Army-issued. But he forced himself to go on. “It'll be nice to have some stuff to make the place more like home.”

“Tell your mama that, and you'll make her day. Remember how she wanted to send your favorite quilt to basic training with you?”

The beginning of a smile curved the corners of Calvin's mouth. “Even though we told her no, she had to hear it from the recruiter.”

“We were lucky she didn't try to send herself with you. She was so worried about you boys that she hardly slept for a week. I kept telling her you were having a great time, and when you finally wrote and told her the same thing, she finally got back to normal.”

They'd turned off Main Street and now were entering the Flats. There was no official sign, no legal designation, but everyone who lived there or around there knew the borders: Cimarron Street to the south, Maple Avenue to the east, the Burlington Northern tracks to the north, and the pasture where Harley Davis kept his meanest bull to the west.

The neighborhood kids used to stand along that pasture fence and brag about how long they could stay on the bull's back if given the chance, but anytime the 2,000-pound animal showed interest in them, they had set speed records backing away from the fence.

Calvin wanted to close his eyes, tilt his head back, and breathe deeply a few times before they reached his parents' house, but he couldn't. Hyperarousal, they called it: gaze constantly moving, focus constantly shifting, making sure there was no danger here, there, or over there. It was a lifesaver in the desert. Back home, it just made him someone to be wary of.

When they turned onto his street, he deliberately shifted his gaze to the left, not looking at a single house on the right side of the street. Not looking at a white house in particular, one with a porch that filled most of the small yard, with bushes growing all along it. The azaleas and forsythias were a wild mess the better part of the year, Golda Ford used to say,
but, oh, when they're all in bloom, they're so worth it.

When his own house appeared ahead, he exhaled deeply. It looked exactly the way it had the day he'd left. The lawn was close-cropped, and the mailbox at the end of the driveway stood perfectly straight. The house had had a recent coat of white paint, the porch floor and ceiling pale gray, the shutters dark blue. The wooden rockers' deep red color had been updated, too, and sheer white curtains hung at every window.

Everything else in his life had changed, but home was the same, and that made his throat close up and his vision grow blurry.

 Justice turned into the driveway and followed it to his regular parking spot right next to the house. When Calvin climbed out, he looked over at the cottage, a hundred feet behind the house and a hundred feet to the west. Unlike the house, it hadn't received a coat of paint in probably twenty years. That last one had been pale yellow, and more of it had flaked off than remained. Gran liked it that way, though.
An old house for an old woman. We've both lost most of our shine.

Before he had a chance to lift his foot to the first step, the screen door was flung open and his mother burst out onto the porch, followed by Gran. “It's so good to see you, sweet baby of mine,” Elizabeth said, her smile lighting the whole area.

His grandmother slipped past her—she was pretty agile for seventy-six and arthritic—and came to the top of the steps, where she was on eye level with him. She studied him hard for a moment, her eyes narrowed, her mouth thinned. Shaking one thick-knuckled finger at him, she said, “Don't you never again—”

With a deep breath, she cut off the words, then reached out. He expected her to grab his ear—she'd been famous for tweaking the ears of anyone who displeased her—but instead she wrapped her hand around the back of his neck and pulled him close. Hiding her face against his neck, she whispered, “Lord, it would have broke my heart,” then squeezed him tighter than an old lady her age should be capable of.

The lump came back into his throat, and his eyes grew wet with tears. He wasn't ashamed of crying. There'd never been any of that men-don't-cry garbage in his family; they were as emotional as the women were. He'd cried when he'd seen his first buddy die, and the second and the third. He'd cried over every one of them…except J'Myel. Something had broken inside him then. His throat had swollen shut, and his chest had grown tight, and he'd literally ached to let the tears flow, but they wouldn't.

That was when he'd learned some hurts were just too deep for tears.

“I've missed you, Gran,” he murmured against her wiry gray hair.

“Of course you have. I'm one of a kind. No one could ever take my place.” After an extra-tight squeeze, she let go and smiled up at him. A few more cares lined her face, and her eyes were cloudier than he remembered, her glass lenses even thicker, but her smile was still as broad, her voice was still as strong, and—he gave her a quick scan—her sense of fashion was still just as skewed. She wore an orange Halloween-decorated sweatshirt under denim overalls, with a pair of high-topped hot pink tennis shoes.

He climbed the steps, gave his mother a hug, then let Gran twine her arm through his and lead him inside. “Just wait until you see all the goodies in the freezer for your new place. We've been cooking all week.”

Behind her back, Elizabeth quirked one eyebrow. “We?” she mouthed.

Calvin acknowledged her with a nod. Everyone knew Gran didn't cook so much as take credit for it.
Taught Elizabeth everything she knows in the kitchen,
she'd always bragged, while her kids insisted that if one of them hadn't learned to cook, they would have starved, because Gran's talents ran to opening cereal boxes and burning toast.

“Lunch is almost ready, son,” his mom said, bumping shoulders with him. “You just relax here with your daddy for a bit while Mama and I get it on the table.”

He nodded, then turned to look around the living room. They'd gotten new furniture since the last time he'd been home, though Justice's beat-up old easy chair still sat with good views out both the front and the side windows. The TV wasn't new. He hadn't seen one that boxy and heavy in years.

Justice followed his gaze and patted the television on his way to his chair. “It's not as bad as those giant old console TVs from my younger days.”

“But it's close.”

“Your mom and me, we don't need the newest, trendiest digital stuff. This TV works, and that's what matters.”

His parents had always been tight with a dollar. Fiscally prudent, his mom called it. Use it till it broke, was their motto, and when it broke, fix it. If it couldn't be fixed, then and only then did they buy a new one. The upside was that they were well prepared for retirement, and for them, there was no downside.

Calvin's gaze continued around the room, so familiar and full of memories, then finally stopped on the pictures that covered most of one wall. Some were black and white, and on some, the years had washed out the colors. A few were posed, like the thirteen portraits covering Calvin's school years, but most were candid shots. There was at least one picture including every member of the extended family—and that was saying a lot, given that Gran had had seven children, and there'd been four on his father's side—but most of them were of Calvin, J'Myel, and Bennie.

Grief spreading through him, he walked to stand directly in front of one picture in particular. It had been high school graduation, and he and J'Myel stood on the football field out behind the high school, their arms around Bennie, the three of them in blue gowns with blue and gold tassels on their caps. Bennie wore a gold shawl with her gown, the reward for her perfect grade point average and being valedictorian, and they'd all been so… relieved. Excited. Happy.

Yet he remembered being sad, too. Thinking that after that night, things would never be the same again. That it really was a turning point, the end of being a kid, the accepting of responsibilities, the beginning of becoming an adult.

“She still lives down the street with Mama Maudene.”

Calvin stared at the picture a moment longer before glancing at his dad. Justice was folding the Tulsa
World
into quarters so he could do the crossword puzzle. Then Calvin looked back at the photo, this time focusing on Bennie. The days of going natural with her hair had long since passed by senior year; she'd straightened the hell out of it then. Her eyes, like his own, were dark-chocolate brown, her skin a creamier version of his and J'Myel's. He remembered the day he'd looked at her and realized for the first time that she was more than a great fisherman, a fast runner, a daredevil on a bicycle, and an outstanding first baseman: She was a
girl
, and a pretty one. They'd been in tenth grade, and Calvin really hadn't known how to handle that realization. When he'd said something about it to J'Myel, J'Myel had snorted.
Bennie? Get outta here. She's our buddy. You know, like, a guy.

And then ten years later, J'Myel had married her.

There were no more pictures of Calvin with Bennie, but there were plenty more shots of him and J'Myel. The two of them in basic training, at infantry school, in Mosul, Bagdad, Kirkuk.