Flying High (6 page)

“We’re not having beans, Unca Nelson, ’cause I only shelled three.” He held up three fingers. “I was in Miss Lena’s way, so I drew this for Audie.”

He looked at what he supposed was a tree with a bird in it. Ricky always drew birds. He’d have to take the child to a bird sanctuary. The thought that came to him brought a smile to his face; if
he
had to draw something for Audrey, it would probably make her blush. How did you draw a kiss? He brushed his fingers over Ricky’s hair.

“You did good. Never let a woman forget that you think she’s precious.”
And never forget where that leads,
a niggling voice reminded him.

* * *

Audrey had looked forward to Nelson’s call, but she had anticipated talking with him after she had finished her dinner, enjoyed a long, delicious bath and could lounge in comfort while they spoke.
There I go, wishing for trouble. It’s better this way.

After dinner, she called her younger sister. “Wendy, did Aunt Lena call you today?”

“Yes, and I’m suspicious. Aunt Lena thinks something’s wrong with you if you don’t have a man in your life.”

“You telling me? I’ll bet she was a femme fatale in her day.”

“I’m sure of it. She painted such an idyllic picture of Nelson Wainwright, his home, and his little nephew that before I knew what she was doing, she’d inveigled me into spending all day Saturday with a five-year-old. Not a five-year-old ready to turn six, mind you, but one who’s having his fifth birthday between now and then. I can hardly handle those ten-year-olds I have to deal with every day much less a five-year-old.”

“Not to worry, sis, five minutes after you meet Ricky, he’ll have you eating out of his little hand.”

“Girl, you’re fantasizing. Why’d you refuse to do it? Don’t tell me she didn’t ask you first, ’cause I know she did. There’s an eligible man over there. Pam’s married, and you’re next. What happened? Did he lay an egg with you?”

She stifled a laugh. “I’d be surprised if Nelson Wainwright had any experience with eggs other than what he found on his plate. That man does not inspire disrespect, and mentioning him and eggs in the same breath is tantamount to exactly that.”

“Whew! He must be some brother if he made that kind of an impression on
you!
I gotta see this one. Aunt Lena can definitely count on
me
. Be over there Saturday morning on time.”

“You do that. If you’re smart, you’ll leave your heart in your car.”

“I’ll leave my... What do you mean? Do you have a stake there, or is he bad new for a gal who wants a family?”

She pondered that for a moment and decided to let it pass. If she answered truthfully, she would say yes to both, but she’d keep her thoughts to herself. In any case, she knew she could depend on Nelson to steer her sister in the right direction.

“You’re on your own, and you be sweet to Ricky. You hear?”

“Of course I will, and I’ll give you all the details, including what I think of the Colonel.”

For reasons she couldn’t fathom, after hanging up she wanted to call Nelson. Wanted it badly. She cleaned and polished the bathroom mirrors, dusted the Venetian blinds, washed the lingerie and stockings she’d worn that day and wrote out a check for her credit-card bill. As she wrote, she had a sudden understanding about her desire to phone Nelson. Proprietary as sure as her name was Audrey. That call would be an act of possessiveness, of establishing her right to phone him, detain him and talk with him. And why? Because another woman, a very good-looking woman, would ring his doorbell Saturday morning at eight o’clock.

I’d laugh if I thought it was funny. And I’m getting off this merry-go-round before the thing starts turning.

As if she’d never made that pledge, she got in bed with a copy of Thomas E. Ricks’s study of Marine Corps life,
Making The Corps,
and fell asleep reading it.

* * *

Two afternoons later, when Nelson reached home after his day in the office, he parked in the garage in order to get Ricky’s birthday present into the house without his seeing it. He’d have to maneuver that when Ricky’s attention was centered on something. Audrey. That would do it. He’d bring it inside when she came.

As usual, Ricky greeted him as if he were the most special person on earth. It gave him a feeling of relevance that neither flying that Super Cobra AH-1W copter nor crippling or destroying enemy targets gave him. Nurturing and caring for his nephew for only four short months, receiving and returning the child’s love, had sustained him as rain nourished plants, and had made his life meaningful. Somehow, responsibility for Ricky validated him.

He picked up the boy, tossed him in the air, caught him and delighted in his happy giggles. “You stay down here with Miss Lena while I change my clothes.”

“Will I have a birthday tomorrow, too, Unca Nelson?”

“Sorry, no. We get one birthday a year. Your next one comes when you get to be six years old. Stay where Miss Lena can see you.”

“Okay. I could help her, but she said I have to get a little bit bigger before I can make biscuits.”

The seriousness of Ricky’s expression made him suppress what would have been a laugh. He ruffled the child’s hair. “That’s a fact.” He dashed up the stairs.

“And Unca Nelson,” Ricky called up after him, “she said I don’t have any business downstairs in the family room. I stayed up here.”

“Good boy. I want you to obey her.”

“I do, Unca Nelson. Just sometimes she talks so much I can’t remember everything I’m supposed to do.”

“As you get older, you’ll manage,” he said, and ducked into his room as laughter finally escaped him. When she put herself to it, Lena could really talk. He’d have to tell her that giving a five-year-old ten different instructions in five minutes confused the child and guaranteed his disobedience.

He changed into a collared yellow T-shirt, khaki trousers and a pair of Reeboks, and got downstairs just as the doorbell pealed. As he opened it, he worked at settling his pounding heart. He wanted the caller to be Audrey.

“Eeeow,” Ricky squealed when he glimpsed Audrey. “Eeeow! Audie! Audie!”

“Ricky, darling!” She knelt and gathered him into her arms, stroking and hugging Ricky as he plastered her face with kisses.

Nelson gazed down at them, his heart constricting in his chest. Steeling his willpower, he shoved his hands in the pockets of his trousers and shifted his gaze to the carpet on which he stood. “I wonder how long I’ll manage to stay out her?” he asked himself, knowing he couldn’t count on her, that she lost herself in him whenever they came together. “It’s hooked both of us.”

“Hi.” She smiled up at him. He couldn’t bear it and, in self-defense, looked toward the door where he saw two girls and a boy about Ricky’s age edge into the half-open door, evidently having tired of waiting for their cue to enter. Behind them, a red-nosed clown followed. Audrey released Ricky so that he could see who she’d brought with her. Obviously curious, but pleased as well, Ricky gazed up at the clown, a twelve-year-old boy who lived next door to Audrey’s sister Pam. When the children introduced themselves to Ricky, joyous noise signaled the beginning of the party.

As he observed Ricky’s self-assurance and his ease with the other children, he thought of the child he’d brought to his home a mere four months earlier: solemn, sad, withdrawn and fearful. He knew then the miracle of love. Only the love and caring Ricky had received from Lena and himself could have changed the boy in so short a time.

“I love you, Audie,” he heard Ricky say. “I love you a lot.”

“Y’all, let’s go downstairs now,” Lena said to them.

Ricky stared up at her, his face mirroring his confusion. “But Miss Lena, you said I couldn’t go down there.”

“You can now.”

“When did you do all this?” Nelson asked Lena as he looked at the balloons floating from the ceiling and rising—on strings—like trees from buckets of red, green and yellow sand.

“Audrey helped me this afternoon while Ricky was taking his nap.” She gave each child a paper hat and a noisemaker.

He figured Ricky’s sense of awe matched his own, as the child stared in wonder at his surroundings. Nelson went to the baby grand piano, the material possession he cherished most, and played the first two bars of “Happy Birthday.” Lena, Audrey and the children joined him in singing it. If he had ever been happier, he didn’t recall it.

A delighted Ricky opened gifts from each child, a covered wagon train set from Audrey, and a wigwam from Lena.

“You not supposed to overlook your Indian side, son,” Lena said. Ricky thanked her, running in and out of it, laughing and bubbling with joy.

“You’re right, Lena. My maternal grandmother was a Seminole, and my mother was proud of that heritage.”

He looked at the wealth of gifts surrounding Ricky and decided to give him his present after the children left; he didn’t know their financial circumstances and didn’t want them to feel as if they lacked something.

Ice cream, cake, lemonade, the tooting of horns and the strumming of little fingers on his precious baby grand gave him a strange, unfamiliar high, something beyond contentment and a desire to share his blessings. He would take any risk to protect his country’s children, to provide a safe haven for their innocence and their development into mature individuals. He wondered if his fellow Marines knew why they wore the uniform, if they had a personal reason—as he did—for wanting to defend their country. He hoped so. He hoped that every one of them knew the love he witnessed in the children and in Lena and Audrey as they showered each child with affection.

After an hour and a half, Audrey told him she had to take the children home. “I promised their parents I’d get them home by seven, and it’s six-thirty.”

So much that was inside of him wanted to spill out, words that would let her know his feelings and, because of their power, would demand that he know hers. But it wasn’t the time. Too soon. Maybe ill-conceived. Maybe just not appropriate. Maybe it was only the moment, seeing what she did for Ricky and, by extension, for him. He hoped she couldn’t read his thoughts, but it seemed to him that if a discerning woman looked at him right then, as careful as she was, that woman could see the pattern of his soul. He settled for thanking her for helping to make Ricky’s birthday so splendid.

Instead of holding her as he wanted to, he knotted his left hand into a fist and caressed her cheek with it. Her eyes sparkled, and he wasn’t sure, but it seemed as if her head tilted toward his fist returning his gesture. He stepped away from her and jammed his hands into his pockets. Yet he didn’t doubt that his eyes mirrored both his desire and his ambivalence, his feelings as well as the effort he was making to control them.

“We’ll talk,” he said, not trusting himself to say more. She nodded, hugged Ricky and left after the children got Ricky’s promise to come and play with them.

Ricky hugged his leg in loving tribute. “Do I have to eat dinner, Unca Nelson? Can’t I just have some more ice cream and cake?”

Nelson couldn’t help grinning as he looked down into the child’s face. Five years old and already aware that if you had things going your way, that was the time to make demands.

“You’ve got one more present coming after you eat your dinner.”

The child’s face bloomed into a smile. “Okay. What is it, Unca Nelson?”

“You’ll know after you eat you dinner.”

He needed a few minutes to himself, some time to sort out his feelings, to understand what was happening to him. He ran up the stairs, went into his room and closed the door. He had always been honest with himself and with others. In his head, he meant to avoid emotional involvements and to see to it that no other woman made him the butt of a painful joke. Swearing eternal love and fidelity, accepting his ring and letting him find her in his bed with the guy who would be best man at their wedding. Oh, no. He let the closet door have the brunt of his fist.
Oh, no. I’m not going there. Period.

After dinner, he gave Ricky his first bicycle and watched him master it within five minutes. Observing the child’s happiness reminded him of the birthday party, and he had to struggle to keep his feelings about that and about Audrey in abeyance.

“I think I’ll turn in,” he said to Lena.

“Yes, sir. I expect you got a lot to think about.”

He stared down at her. “What do you mean?”

“It was Ricky’s party, but you the one that got the message. Your life ain’t normal, and now you know it. Y’all sleep well.” She walked off singing her favorite hymn, and he wondered if she had some magical powers that let her see inside of him.

His steps fell heavily on the stairs, and when he reached the landing his body sagged as if he’d just run miles. He still thought of himself as an unattached man, free to do as he willed, to go and come as he pleased. But he could no longer lock the door, throw his duffel bag into the trunk of his or a USMC car, and go off without a care or a thought as to when or whether he would return. He was father to Ricky and responsible for Lena’s well-being, neither of which he minded, and he didn’t shirk responsibility. He wanted to watch Ricky grow and to shape him into a man, but how could he do that while fighting for peace in first one part of the globe and then another? He was the delight of Ricky’s life, his anchor. What would happen to the boy in his absence? He doubted that Lena would be able to comfort him. One more stumbling block in his path toward the top. But he’d get there.

* * *

“I’m developing backward,” Audrey said to herself that evening, in a moment of self-reprimand for her failure to discourage Nelson’s gestures signifying the existence of more than a platonic relationship between them. The tenderness with which he’d stroked her face while his eyes told her things that reduced her to a pile of mush... A long breath, more a wish than a sigh, seeped out of her. She had to stop thinking about Nelson. Hadn’t she daydreamed herself into what had proved to be the most devastating experience of her life? What was it about Nelson Wainwright that she seemed unable to resist?

She answered the phone praying that it wasn’t Nelson, but she didn’t want to speak with her Aunt Lena, either.