His Road Home (8 page)

“Ten, meet Grace.” He put her hand on the vinyl and covered it with his bigger one.

If a car could have personality—and since boats were individuals with names, she conceded that some cars might have character also—this was a straightforward and masculine ride, despite being categorized like a hot woman. Grace decided she liked the looks of Rey’s 442, although that didn’t mean she could drive it.

He slid into the driver’s seat, twisted off one prosthetic, then the other, and piled them on the passenger side. “Sit.”

The seat was large enough to share if she scooted her back against today’s shirt slogan, “Reason #3 Amps Do It Better: Battery Power.”

“Please.” He patted the space between his spread thighs and raised his eyebrows. Whether challenge or question, she couldn’t tell.

There was no delicate way to clamber across his leg and settle her butt between his thighs, and no chance that the act of lifting herself up and over hadn’t thrust her intimately close to every part of him that occupied her thoughts.

Her hands reflexively locked around the steering wheel while her mind catalogued how each time he inhaled, his chest pressed her shoulder blades. The driveway and street became insubstantial. The only thing she knew was the solidity of his body behind hers and around hers. She shifted in a small circle, maybe a bid to adjust her hips, but she liked how the motion rubbed her lower back against his body. Like scratching an itch, except it created another.

So attuned to his body that she could feel him begin to lean to the left, she tensed with expectation of his lips touching her neck. Her hair ruffled by her ear, as if he was breathing that close to her, but then the car door thudded shut.

She’d forgotten to close it. Cradled between his arms and chest, distracted out of her mind, she probably would have driven out of the garage with the door open if he hadn’t taken charge. This wasn’t going to work. But she wasn’t going to stop, not until they incinerated.

Removing her right hand from the steering wheel, he placed it on the gear shift. “Hold,” he whispered. “Tight.”

No way she could learn to drive this car with his voice and his body making her want to push and rub against the bulge in his lap, so it was good she’d studied internet how-to videos on manual transmissions. It was better that he’d backed into the garage months ago.

He stroked one hand along her thigh. “Clutch, left foot.”

His thumb crossed the seam of her jeans, and she dropped a hand to her lap, but he intercepted her.

“Said hold.” He returned her palm to the wheel. “Listen up.”

The interior had felt spacious, but now it shrank as she focused on the row of houses across the street and tried to remember the video.

Forget the video. She had to remember to breathe. This early in the morning he smelled fresh from his shower. She wanted to wiggle around and bury her nose in his neck, especially now that she caught a rising hint of the musk of his body heat.

“Gas and brake.” His other hand spread on her right thigh, and she felt the need to tighten and lift her hips, but there was nothing to press against. “This foot.”

“The same as...same as my car?” She knew the answer, but she needed to speak, as if it would be a release valve for the tension in her chest.

“Push clutch.”

She did. She hadn’t noticed him insert the key and turn the ignition, but the car purred under her, its vibrations rocking them closer to each other. Her core moaned for her to abandon this lesson and turn and rub her body, especially her breasts, against his chest, but his left hand squeezed her thigh.

“Then shift.” His right hand covered hers on the stick and pushed and moved in a zigzag pattern. “First,” he whispered in her ear, and her imagination tacked on the word
base
and zipped right back to flipping over and kissing him.

“Gas.” He revved in his throat and squeezed her right leg, so she pushed the petal without considering the amount of force, and one of the dashboard arrows whizzed up. “Lift clutch.” He raised his left hand but pushed her right leg harder. “And
go!
”

She raised her left foot, and they bounced forward. Five feet. The force of the stop whipped her chin down and up, and the Perfect Ten choked and died.

“First stall.” He laughed in her ear. “I lived.”

“Barely.” When her heartbeat slowed enough to permit speech, she said, “I’m not sure this is the most effective teaching method.”

“But it’s fun.” And then he finally kissed her neck.

* * *

By Paducah, Kentucky, fourth gear felt natural enough that Grace wanted music. “If your historically accurate dashboard isn’t compatible with my digital music, what do you listen to when you drive?”

“Radio.”

“Seriously?” The chrome dials were gorgeous, but she doubted their usefulness.

“`Fraid so.”

“Then your mission is to find stations for the next two thousand miles.”

“May-beee.”

“You cannot imagine how deeply I regret sharing that ringtone with you.”

So they both laughed like crazy people who’d spent the morning parked in a garage kissing, not like respectable thirty-year-olds, but she realized the road trip was dissolving the boundaries she usually set on her behavior.

* * *

The Kansas City radio stations had blurred to static the next day as they cruised north through Iowa.

“Behind on your job,” she told Rey. Over hundreds of miles of greatest hits and pop stations, he’d proved he could sing. She joined him to finish out the fading bars of the ABBA song. Somehow, laughing, her foot depressed on the gas more than she’d intended and they surged up the wide middle lane.

Colored lights filled her rearview mirror.

“Oops,” she said. “Busted.”

As she moved right, he launched into the first line of the Janis Joplin song about Bobby McGee, but then he broke off and twisted to stare through the back.

“My fault.” She’d never had a ticket. She rode the bus to work and drove her car twice a week, tops, for groceries or to meet a friend in Ballard. “I can’t believe it. I’m so sorry.”

He started to laugh. “You look...don’t cry.”

“But I got us pulled over.”

The trooper left his vehicle as she struggled to manually crank the window. “Long way to Washington State, ma’am, but that’s no reason to be in a hurry. License and registration, please.”

When she took the papers from Rey, the officer must have put together the base parking sticker on the windshield, the folded wheelchair on the bench seat and the edges of Rey’s black nylon shorts flat without his prosthetics.

“Holy cow. Sir.” His voice snapped with respect.

“Sergeant.” Rey’s jaw moved until he found a sentence. “Work for living.”

“Roger that.” The trooper didn’t even look at the paperwork he handed back to Rey. “Here, put this away. Came home last August from Helmand with Marine Reserves. You?”

“Paktia.” It came out staccato, but he managed to add Fifth S-F-G, his old unit, and her chest filled with pride.

“Ma’am, you know you were doing eight miles over the speed limit?”

“I’m sorry. I learned how to drive this yesterday and I guess it got away from me.”

“Happens with these beauties. What year?”

“Se-ven-ty,” Rey answered.

“How fast can it hit a hundred? Not that I endorse driving at speeds in excess of the posted limit.”

“Four-teen.”

“Fourteen seconds?”

Rey nodded across her. Car lust, like military acronyms, was one more thing she did not understand, but the cop and Rey locked eyes and she could almost see the catalytic carburetor nonsense flow between them like charges from an electric eel.

“Man works hard to own a machine like this, he ought to enjoy it.” The officer was nodding to himself through the window, then his eyes met hers. “Think you could handle the wheel at ninety?”

“Not a—”

“You bet. She can.” Rey laid his hand on her leg.

She looked between the two men, the trooper with his hat tilted so he could talk closer to the window, his top lip tight to his teeth as if anxious for her to agree, and Rey, leaning forward in his seat with anticipation.

“I’ll hit the lights out front, and cars will move right. Let this beauty run for a couple of miles. Trust me, nothing better than speed.” He looked between them and winked. “Maybe some things.”

Another crazy dive out of her comfort zone thanks to Reynaldo Cruz. She owed him. Big time.

* * *

The chicken-fried steak had tasted so amazing, she’d eaten a truck-stop sized portion and a slice of famous pumpkin pie after they visited Wall Drug and the Corn Palace. Now it sat in her stomach, restless as the thoughts she worked to rein to her side of the bed.

On the busiest travel day of the year, they’d been lucky to get any bed. If Rey hadn’t stood beside her in the lobby with his metal legs showing from his shorts, they wouldn’t have had this one, but the clerk had said that since it was after four, she’d cancel a no-show reservation in their favor.

A queen-sized mattress seemed large until a woman had to share it with a handsome man and her principles. Alphabetical listing of fish species of the North Pacific, that was what she’d concentrate on. Cold, wet and slimy. Absolutely not hot, hard and at hand.

Chapter Seven

Last Thanksgiving Cruz had shared full-on turkey and fixings with the team, courtesy of Uncle Sam, but this year he and Grace faced the maw of the freezer section in Murdo, South Dakota. Frozen pizza would never fit in the motel lobby microwave, and the frozen burritos ranked lower than an Army meal ready-to-eat. Maybe they should have kept driving instead of trying to create a festive lunch and movie marathon.

“Hungry.” He pointed at a stack of meals, then at himself. “Man.”

“I get the picture.” She wrestled the door open and handed him boxes for the cart. “Promise you won’t tell me the sodium content.”

“More, please.” When he raised two fingers, his neck hair prickled.

“I only want one.”

“I know.” He spotted the lady staring at them from halfway up the aisle. In her sixties, she was as colorless as Chris Deavers, his former captain and a Minnesotan from his football to his beer. He wore a pair of loose jeans today, not shorts, so she wasn’t gawking at his C-legs. Guess here they didn’t see tan people cruising the frozen foods.

“You want three? Are you joking?”

“Leftovers.” He tossed a package of frozen whipped potatoes into the cart. He wanted to explain to the upstanding citizen pretending to read juice concentrate labels that he wasn’t raised with frozen spuds. He knew how to make the real kind. His mother had learned how to mash them with butter and milk, even if she put garlic and chiles in them, because she wanted her daughter and son to feel like Americans. To
be
Americans. “Thanks—trad—traction.”

“If you think I can turn leftover frozen dinners into casserole, you have the wrong woman. First, my mother makes turkey bibimbop after Thanksgiving. And second—” she tossed frozen green beans on top of the whipped potatoes, “—the stuff in those boxes does not resemble a real bird. It dissolves the second time you heat it.”

The lady over Grace’s shoulder edged closer. Air expanded his chest, lifted his shoulders, and what remained of his quick snap muscles tensed to jump. Yeah, that would work in a grocery store. Dial down, talk to Grace. Tell her something. “My mother.” Desperate, that was how he sounded. “Turkey empa—empa—
na
—da.”

Let it go. The aisle was not a dirt road. A juice can was not a remote trigger, and the old lady was not a threat. She was a lumpy retiree stuck halfway between Sioux Falls and social security, so if she wanted to be nosy, he had to let it fucking go.

“We could forget turkey and nuke lasagna.” Grace’s eyebrows pulled in, as if she sensed something wrong with him.

“Don’t care.” Cold air streaming from the open freezer didn’t stop sweat from sticking his T-shirt to his spine, and he knew he had to escape the surveillance before he freaked. Circling the cart was as awkward as a sixteen-year-old turning a car in a dead-end driveway, but he fled and left Grace to grapple with the stuck glass door.

Around the end of the aisle, he spotted a pyramid of yams. He focused on their shapes and tried to replace bad stimuli with neutral thoughts. They could microwave sweet potatoes. He thunked two in the cart. The noise brought him down a notch. Brown sugar, another thunk, and his alert level lowered enough that he could swipe a hand across his forehead. Next he added a bag of nuts. As he reached for marshmallows, the adrenaline crash made his hand shake like a bad axle.

Grace arrived. The delicate lines between her eyebrows had become furrows across her forehead. She rested her fingertips on his arm. “You know those are solid corn syrup?”

Up and down her fingers stroked, and he tried to match his breathing to her motion. He held his waistband away from his abs, daring her to look. “Five under.”

She sighed. “You might need to gain weight. I haven’t run in days. I’m as puffy as that bag.”

The motels they patronized didn’t have fitness rooms, but if they upgraded, he might see her in shorts and a sports bra, slick and sweaty.

“What do you think people here do to stay in shape in the winter?”

He lifted the bag of marshmallows to be level with her chest and waited until she looked to give them a squeeze. “Indoor. Exer-cise.”

She blushed.

Now the double-tap. “Need more cu-shion.” He whispered the punchline close to her ear. “For pu-shin’.”

As he expected, she gasped, her moist lips parted enough that he imagined how it would taste to cover them with his own.

Fuck. He’d dropped his guard, and there was the eavesdropper ten feet away, watching them, even though her cart already had carrots, canned beans and a plastic box of lettuce.

“Excuse me,” she began.

Grace wrapped her fingers on his arm as if she understood the source of his tension.

Here it comes.
He covered her hand with his free one, needing as much connection as he could create.

“Cold one out there, isn’t it? Are you two from around here?”

“No, ma’am,” he answered swiftly to control the territory, save Grace.

She nodded as if he’d hit the right buzzer. “Yah, I didn’t think so. You stopping tonight?”

No law required him to answer. He wasn’t a ten-year-old helping his mother read signs. He was twenty-nine, an American citizen same as her, with a Purple Heart and a personal letter from the president of the United States in his suitcase, so no one could make him out to be a migrant, not anymore.

“Would you...” The lady fumbled with her cart, letting her gray hair shield her face. “Would you like to share Thanksgiving dinner with me and my husband? If you haven’t made other plans, that is?”

Her invitation stunned him with its generosity. Result, he felt like a total jerk.

“This year it’s only the two of us. My daughter and her family live in California and my son...” She made eye contact for an instant, her eyes shiny in the fluorescent light, before swiftly shifting her gaze to the yams.

Grace met his questioning glance and nodded in agreement without speaking.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to...” Her shoulders shook inside her quilted coat. “Didn’t mean to bother you.”

“Yes, please.” His voice was smooth and normal-sounding, although he supposed he should have said thank you instead of please.

“We’d love to join you,” Grace added and squeezed his arm while she took over details like address and time.

Someday people might stop surprising him, but it wouldn’t be this year.

* * *

Finding the Andersons’ address was easy where roads ran as straight north to south as a laser sight, so Cruz relaxed and anticipated turkey, football and pie while he watched the yellow lights of the house on the horizon grow.

A double line of trees stood sentry to the north. Underneath the snow cover, metal-prefab buildings huddled with a wooden barn and small concrete-block structures. Lights from the two-story house illuminated the plowed drive and scraped sidewalk, but they didn’t push the grim northern afternoon far. The scene should look like a postcard, but old snow skipped across the gravel, pushed by freezing wind, and made him shiver.

He’d decided to use his cane and wear khakis, a match for Grace’s black pants and silver pullover sweater. Like this, he could pass as a slow walker with a limp. The sidewalk was dry and easy for him, and at the end he lifted his eyes to count the porch steps.

The decoration beside the front door stopped his heart.

Why they’d been invited, and why, despite the lights and maintenance, the place whimpered of loneliness, suddenly became clear.

There was a gold star screwed to the siding.

He reached for Grace’s shoulder and jerked his head at the porch. “Star.”

Her inquiring smile meant she didn’t understand, so he pointed at it.

“Gold star. Mother.” He heard the quaver and fought for words to make her understand that these people weren’t run-of-the-mill lonely folks inviting strangers to their table. These parents had lost a son or daughter in war, probably somewhere he’d fought. A different day, a difference of inches, and this could have been his mother.

Grace was a civilian. She didn’t know what the gold star meant.

Mrs. Anderson opened the front door before he could connect with Grace, and inwardly he crumpled, although he made sure he stood as straight as a dress mess uniform crease. One hand for the rail, one for his cane, and he ascended the steps beside Grace. Each clunk on the wood sounded like the drum beat of a procession. If he wasn’t even able to warn her about their loss, there was nothing in the depths of his inarticulate misery to offer the Andersons.

Grace smiled and assured them they’d had no trouble finding the address, and agreed the weather was cold but dry was better than snow, as she shook hands with the stoop-shouldered man next to Mrs. Anderson, whose first name was Marlys.

“Your home smells wonderful,” Grace added as the older woman led her away.

Glen was the husband’s name. “They’ll be in that kitchen for the Lord’s own time, ya betcha,” he told Rey. “We can watch the game in here.”

Cruz froze in the doorway to the television room. On the mantel was a triangular frame filled with the folded flag, the boxed Purple Heart and a large portrait of a boy who could have been him ten years ago, when he’d barely needed to shave and still had a skinny Adam’s apple.

He used to be a man who called in airstrikes, took the shot, assaulted through the ambush, but he trembled before stepping into this room. Fear didn’t matter when he had to go read the boy’s name and unit and acknowledge this. Words weren’t at his command, but he could make these metal legs move with his cane and his will and take himself there.

Lance Corporal Matthew Anderson, United States Marine Corps, would never be more than twenty years old.

He propped his cane on his hip and looked at his shoes to be sure they were positioned correctly, not too far apart, before he rendered a salute.

Mr. Anderson stood by an indented easy chair, watching him. “Thank you.”

His throat was too clogged to speak, so he nodded and settled on the couch.

Glen started the television. “Radio says record cold this early. Ten below in the Black Hills.”

Not much seemed to be expected other than agreement. “Cold.”

“Yep.” The older man chewed his cheek, but after the next play he said, “You got some sort of injury, dontcha?”

He nodded. No shame in revealing himself, not to these people, so he bent and lifted his pants legs to show the metal protruding from his shoes.

“Both, eh? Some folks hereabouts lose one in a combine, but can’t say I’ve seen two. You walk mighty well.”

He nodded. “Run too.” He glanced at the game and shook his head. “No football.”

His host snorted. They didn’t talk for two possessions, and then Glen fired out of the hills. “Matt was our surprise. Marlys was forty-one when he came along.”

“Oh.” He started to feel hot in his chest again.

“His sister was right easy, but Matt changed our world.”

His heart veered closer to panic, but listening was his best newfound ability.

“Always asking me about things we don’t have here. Like that wi-fi.”

“Yep.” Now he sounded like the people in South Dakota.

“He wanted to come back and teach science and math. Get farm kids into technology, help more stay around here. I know farm equipment, but if it doesn’t have a power takeoff, I can’t do much about it.”

Their son had had big plans, empty now, like these people’s house. Rey’s struggle to decide what to do next wasn’t much in comparison to a boy who would never teach, never fulfill that dream to help his hometown.

“He sent that to Marlys and me.” Glen indicated a box on a lower shelf. “So she could see the grandkids. You know how to run it?”

Video chat equipment. Probably every soldier knew how to connect and use it.

“Com-com-com-puter?”

“In the other room.” It was halftime, so Glen stood. “Come on then.”

This he could do, in his sleep, and maybe then he’d be able to breathe again.

* * *

“Your kitchen is lovely. Spacious.” Grace had no idea what to say or do while Marlys bustled at the stove. “May I help?”

“Peel the carrots if you like, but mostly I want company while Glen watches the TV. It’s so quiet here now—” The energy left her, and she leaned against the counter.

As she grabbed for a topic to discuss with a sixty-year-old stranger, Grace wondered if their presence was tiring their hostess. “At the grocery store you must have heard us talking about leftovers.”

“That’s what made me think to ask.” Marlys straightened. “Your young man clearly wanted turkey, and Glen and I have too many leftovers by ourselves.”

“So nice of you to ask us.”

“Last year I decided...I decided I’d take more chances. Meet new people.” She started chopping celery stalks. “It’s hard, on account of there aren’t many other people, and the young folks move away, but I couldn’t stay in my same life.”
Thwack
,
thwack.
“I don’t have that life anymore. So I up and asked you to dinner.”

“We appreciate it.” She was circling the same topics, but she doubted her hostess wanted to talk about fish or jogging.

“Saw your young man use a cane, so you must also know how fast life changes. It can all go away, just like that, can’t it?”

“That’s true.” The conversation had entered deep water, but Grace couldn’t see the way out. If she responded with another comment about food or weather, she’d sound like an idiot. “Very true.”

“Youngsters never listen to us old people.” The diced celery joined a tower of shiny red cranberry sauce in a bowl. “But if you love that young man, then don’t dither.” She covered her cheeks with her hands instead of tackling the apples. “I’m sorry, I’m being nosy. And silly. Glen would tell me to stop reading advice books.”

“It’s okay.” Grace thought she understood what Marlys was trying to say, but the homey kitchen didn’t erase the struggles she and Rey faced if they tried to build a future.

As the apples became slices, then chunks, Grace’s shoulders relaxed to the rhythm of the knife hitting the cutting board. The hypnotic flash of the stainless steel knife convinced her that Marlys wasn’t going to judge her, not the way her own family or Rey’s friends would.