Wrote a very little stream of consciousness thing for Jo and Bucky based on some nosebleedclub prompts ☆⊹ ࣪ ★ ⋆.˚ ⊹ ࣪
eyes in the dark — Final weeks of summer — first frost
What does it mean, she thinks, to know someone’s alive? Except it’s not someone. It’s Bucky, it’s John. He never calls himself that, and maybe if Jo doesn’t think too hard she’ll convince herself it isn’t a betrayal to think of him as John. The name he grew up with, shouted from the kitchen window. The name he shed as soon as he was far enough away.
What does it mean to know he’s alive, when anything could change at any second?
She tries to keep the headlines from her mind, kept at bay like snarling dogs with a whiskey pour this side of too-heavy, with a record that isn’t one she ever danced to with him, tries not to cry.
She dreams again about wandering in the dark, the grass high at her elbows, dandelion leaves at her heels, something scratching. Towards a copse of trees in the dark, the one a ship had lit ablaze two weeks after she’d arrived.
The last time she’d had that dream was Norfolk, half-woken by it in a tiny bed, nuzzled into him, his naked chest. He’d kissed her shoulder, right by his mouth, let her cup his cheek. Let her twine her cold thighs with his.
His mop of warm curls. Too dark to see the fresh-nutmeg freckles on his nose. Maybe she loved him more than she ever thought she’d be allowed. She wonders if he ever thinks about her. Of course not, she thinks, bigger things to-, and they make her want to throw up.
That cottage. The last time before the last time, before the earthward-spiral of late summer, the autumn shock. His blue eyes in the dark, like a storm on a lake. When she thinks of quiet, she thinks of him. When she thinks of anything, she thinks of him. A sorry state for a reporter to be.
It’s been getting colder. Another thing she fears, useless and fidgeting- frost on mud, and treads, and dirty boots. Rat-bitten rations. She prays for a potbellied stove and a log, a sweater that fits. Socks. Thoughts that carry him the way hers can’t. Prays for a dead sleep.
Even worse is the bottle of elderberry liqueur Chuck hands him, heavy black lettering and colored glass. Too floral. Floyd never liked the taste. But it's what they have here in Austria, words he can't read but can guess all the same. It tastes like a church bake sale, reminds him of flower-print dresses and his hand halfway up Sadie Workman's thigh.
Chuck looks like he's holding back a grimace, like he's wishing for something else. Tab would tease him, ask if he's secretly thinking of England's lukewarm beer or the apple brandy they'd found in Normandy, mud-soaked and exhausted, but he doesn't.
hollowed-out pianos in the dark (tab/chuck, rated e)
Genuinely can't believe this is year six of @blind-dates-fest!! Even though this is a little late I couldn't handle not participating. Also, this is the first thing I've written in...quite a while. It's good to get back to it even if I feel pretty rusty.
I've been marinating in a lot of 40s Vogue articles, Lee Miller photographs, and general London-ness, but all inaccuracies (and any leftover typos) are my own. Title from Tiny Ruins' song of the same name.
Without further ado, meet Hester!
you've got the kind of nerve i like
There are things to do back at the office, and errands she could run, but it's Friday — the muted thud of surprise in her chest at the realization shouldn't have been one at all — and it's her lunch break.
Hester doesn't usually indulge in café tables. Though, she notes, it's hardly one of the fancier establishments, not like the places her mother used to lunch at with friends before the war. There are asterisks to the coffee now too, roasted from dandelion roots, and to the slice of carrot cake, leaning heavily on its namesake for sweetness. But an hour of reading time with her magazines and a book — that was the real treat. The fresh air is too, and it smells like rain.
She glances at the sky, past the green and white-striped awning, the soft gray like cotton wool shading darker towards the east, the slivers of light. Everyone else is headed towards something else, walking down the street. Maybe it's too chilly for them still, in early May, leaving her with her jacket and the only spot on the patio, her bike leant against the other chair at the little table.
She hangs her bag off the back, a handsome leather messenger embossed with her initials. A gift from Eric at her birthday last year, one of the nicest things she owns. It's full of clippings and scrawled to-dos and random items now, hairpins from when a model's flyaways can't be tamed — from her own braid actually, honey-brown hairs plucked from the pinch of them — a last-minute roll of film, the ribbon from a bottle of perfume chased down for a product shoot, half a biscuit left from wrangling a starlet's cavalier spaniel across the parquet floor. And, always, a past issue or three of the magazine. Of course.
Her heart beats with fondness just a second too long, looking at that monogram, the patina of the leather. Eric always liked — likes — fine things. And now her brother is far away from all of them, somewhere in the jungle.
Half a page of her magazine, a sip of coffee, a bite of cake, a wish it was a Chelsea bun, three pages, another sip. She notices a chip in her manicure, though it's only clear, meant to keep her from biting. Boring. She thinks of the bottle on the beauty editor's desk, new nail varnish in Elizabeth Arden's "Burnt Sugar," meant to complement khaki duds. A breeze starts up, and she pulls her jacket closer. It protects her, her father's old hunting jacket, though she'd belted it like the newest styles over a sweater and skirt, affixed gold-tone button covers to it this morning for a little shine. She likes the weight of it on her shoulders.
A voice above her brings her chin and her eyes up in a start. "This is a hot commodity where I come from," he says, his hand resting not quite gingerly on the leather seat of her bike. "You oughta keep an eye on it."
She should say, I was, but she knows that's a lie. She opens her mouth before she can stop herself. "How do you know I didn't steal it?"
His own mouth twitches into a smile, amused, and his eyebrows go up, like he's expecting a good story. "Did you?"
She only looks a little sheepish. "No." He's awfully tall, this stranger, ducking under the awning. Stranger, soldier. Well, not exactly. An airman. She knows the wings, the dull light still catching on his chest. It makes the insignia gleam. "Did I get your hopes up?"
"A little," he says. He seems, she thinks, like a boy who grew up on adventure novels. "But I'll survive." He looks preoccupied with something in the vicinity of her shoulders. "Where'd you get that jacket?"
Before she can answer, she finds herself ushering him into the seat across. It would be rude, she thinks, to let him stand. "Please," she says. And then, "...my jacket." She looks down at the perfectly-worn canvas like she's never seen it before. "My father's closet." He'd bought it sometime before the war. The first one.
"When did he visit the States?"
This time, she doesn't make a joke. "He's American, actually. No visit." Just..seeing.
"Really?" He looks truly surprised.
Now she does laugh. "Hardly something one lies about here, don't you think?"
"Oh, really?" His eyes practically dance with it, the most expressive face she's seen since nights out with Eric's theatre friends.
She'll be brave about it, now. 'What's your name?"
"Bucky."
"It's like you're straight from central casting," she says, but her voice is full of warmth. She sounds half like her father, that brassiness, the boy with an Arkansas twang and motor oil on his hands, who courted an English rose and stayed, and half like that English rose herself, green-citrus parfum and white lace, opals on her fingers. Hester wonders who she is, sometimes, between them.
"I'd've said you were too," he says. "Nice English girl. But now I know better." His blue eyes dart, but the smile on his face is kind. "John," he adds, when he sees how her expression asks for more of the story. "Major Egan, if I'm in trouble. From Manitowoc, Wisconsin." He leans back in the tiny café chair, at least as much as he's able. "What team does your old man root for? If you say cricket I'll weep."
"The Cardinals." She says it like she means it, like she knows more than she does.
"Enos Slaughter-" he says, a little loud, elongating the name like the man's an Old West gunfighter and he's got a personal grudge. "'42 Series. Now, if Bonham had just thrown that bunt to first-"
He looks like he'd take salt and pepper shakers to construct a reenactment if she offered them. "I take it your team didn't win?"
"No. But we'll get to that. What's your name?"
"Hester."
He smiles like she's proving him right. "Very English." It only occurs to her after she's told him that maybe she should have made something up. "Where's he from, the Cardinals fan?"
"Arkansas." Her father and his American accent are several miles away in West Hampstead, in a suit. Maybe in his study, but likely not. Her mother copes with it all with the women's auxiliary and gardening, the occasional tipple of Dubonnet and soda, and lime juice when she can get it, her father with work and civil defense and the bottle of milk of magnesia Hester needs to pick up from the chemist's.
Bucky looks down at her magazine, the swooping hand-drawn titles, photographs of gowns and suits and plaster casts and props. "People keep telling me to go to Madame Tussauds. You go for any of that death mask stuff?"
Hester remembers walking by the ruins back in 1940, fall, her and her friend Amy pretending to do anything other than gawk. "I'm afraid I've never been." She found it all rather ghoulish, actually, even before the bombs. There are photographs that ran in the magazine, the contact sheets filed away, fashioning the damage into something new. Something she could look at.
"Sounds like a lousy night out to me, unless you want your date fainting into your arms." He moves his mouth like he's just now considering it. "On second thought-"
"Cheeky."
"My middle name." Her half-laugh half-snort is audible, the scrunch of her nose. "John C. Egan, you can look it up."
"I might." She pushes the half-eaten piece of carrot cake towards him, but he holds up his palm. She weighs asking her mother about having a guest for tea. "Does the Army let you out of their sight for long?" Not meant in the way Britain warns its servicemen, posters everywhere, meant in the way she remember her father's stories, the hurried returns and sneaks and near-misses.
"Forty-eight hours. I thought I'd see what all the fuss is about."
"Have you?"
"So far?"
"Yes."
"I'd say so."
Something in her cheeks surfaces, warm and rosy. "You're quite wasting them with me," she says, sounding like a schoolmarm, someone prim and decided. "Your forty-eight hours."
"Well, I don't think so." He sounds honest, unvarnished. Everything she loves about the country she's never met. And it's like he's read her mind, his next question. "Have you ever been to the States?"
It's the simplest answer, and she sounds almost surprised, all of a sudden. "No." Her father talks about America with respect, not with fondness. There's no family there for him, at least not one she's ever heard about.
"Really?"
She shakes her head.
"So you've never been to a baseball game?"
"If I say no, will you still want to be seen with me?"
He considers the question, even more animated than he was before, pointing in her direction. "Hester, all this tells me is that we need some basic remediation. I mean, it's not like you said you've never had a real ice cream cone."
"We do have ice cream in England." Had, at least. She remembers her mother making it with her and Eric when they were children, milky and sweet, tinged with rosewater.
"Favorite flavor?"
"Chocolate."
"Next thing you'll say you've never seen Lake Superior. And chocolate's the right answer, by the way."
She's laughing now. "Is it?"
"And I can tell you right now, you've never had a real cup of coffee." He gestures to the cup between them. "That's an imposter."
"I can't argue the second bit." He smiles. "But you do know Italy's closer to England than America, right?" Her father abides Italian coffee, Scottish whiskey, English suits, and American gadgetry.
"They teach us navigation in flight school, Hester." She'll have to tell him her last name, won't she. "And the best coffee's in a camp mug in America. Or a diner counter. After a winning game. With a home run. Either one." His calf is so close to hers under the table that she can feel the static of the olive wool, her knee hovering a hair from his.
"What's your favorite?"
"After the Yankees win."
She tilts her head just a little. "You can see why I haven't offered you any, then."
"I won't take it personally."
Beyond the awning, she sees the first brushstrokes of rain on the sidewalk. He sees her notice, turns his head. "You all like your rain here, huh."
"It doesn’t always. Summer's rather nice." The rain starts to quicken, as if to prove his point.
"When it's not raining."
"If I say something, it will get worse." She's a little worried about the magazines, extending past the edge of the table. "Could you pass me my bag, please?"
He turns around at her motion at the back of her own chair, looks resigned to getting up. "Sorry to keep you so long."
"Oh, no, no, I just wanted to pack these up." She doesn't want to look at her watch.
"And I'm changing my answer," he says. "About the coffee. Lakeside. Around a fire."
Suddenly, a stab of wanting. Campfire coffee and woodsmoke, a hunting jacket over a heavier sweater, this man she's only just met. And he's still talking with her, still looking at her like she's interesting. Like she's staving something off inside him, in his head. He shifts in his chair, knee pressing up against hers. She doesn't move.
"You know," she says. "I'll need someone to show me around, when I visit America."
He sounds honest again. "You will, huh?"
"Of course. The ballpark. Lake Superior. The best chocolate ice cream."
"And coffee."
"And coffee."
"Is there anything else you'd add to the list?"
He's leant on his elbow, swipes his thumb across his lip. "You ever had a real American kiss? Now- don't swat at me-"
"I wasn't," she says, but she can't help her laugh. "You had to try, didn't you?"
"I did."
"Do you think all English girls fall for the American pilot thing?"
"You're still talking to me." Her mouth falls open in mock-shock. "Besides," he says. "Americans are the best at kissing."
"Does any version of this debate involve me not kissing you?"
"Hey, you said it." She could bottle that smile and sell it. "Should I be offended you just said that?"
She tries to fix him with her best stern look and fails miserably, letting it dissolve from her face like fog. "Hold it against me as an American, and not as an English girl," she says, and steadies her elbow on the table, gently cups his hand with hers, presses her lips to his cheek. Close to the corner of his mouth, still smiling. His eyes are even more blue up close, like a spring sky full of rain. If we weren't quite literally in the middle of the street- she thinks, and when she hears his laugh in her ear, loud and sharp and warm, she realizes she's said it out loud.
"I like you, Hester," he says. "I'm going to work on that list."
Another little stream of consciousness thing for Jo and Bucky to keep the writing going this week!
dawn chorus — lucky streak — night terror
Somehow, he spots her before she spots him. The look on his face says it’s not a hard thing, now that there’s a band of light on the horizon, something to reflect off the wet grass and texture the bark on the trees. His boots crunch on the gravel, nearing hers. “You’re up early.”
Now it’s her turn to look half-puzzled. “Can’t tell the readers I came here to sleep in,” she says. Not that anyone could have, when the Clubmobile girls were up in the early blue dark to start their work, when the blackbirds and wrens and warblers had chirped her back awake. He’s up to see them off and back. His boys.
“You need coffee?” Major Egan’s shadow fidgets, looks towards the row of bikes parked outside the mess. “I don’t mean you look like you need it, but-” I do look like I need it. Quiet nights leave more room, don’t they. He’s talking, she’s happy to let him talk. “And it doesn’t deserve the advertisement, but it gets the job done.”
“I won’t tell General Spaatz’s daughter you said that.” Yes, she does need coffee, but she’s not about to tell him that. She’ll go hang around after the planes take off, get some then.
“Nah, me and Tatty are like this,” he says, crossing his fingers.
She tugs at the hem of her jacket in the morning chill, waves a hand. “I’ll sort it myself, don’t worry. Thank you,” she says, before it sounds like she’s trying to brush him off. He cares. She’s only known him a week and it’s the thing that radiates off him, if you didn’t count a song. If she had one sentence — and she might, she often does — that’s the thing she’d say. “I won’t keep you.”
The light licks at the dark circles under his eyes, the bruises on his knuckles. You had a bad dream too, didn’t you? How could you not? “Let me know if you can’t find some, we’ll sort you out.”
It’s a watch-tick brighter even in just the minutes they’ve stopped and talked. She wants to ask him a hundred questions. If he slept. If he believes in lucky streaks. What he carries in his pockets. She’ll get to that last one.
But all she does is smile, tells him she appreciates it. Watches him nod, and go on, towards his planes and his boys.
Another-another little prompt(s) fill for Jo and Bucky for your Sunday, and more here ✮⋆ ⋆｡°✩
“a letter came for you” — recklessness — city at night
It’s a rotten little note that comes for her in London. He could have called to tell her he’d gotten the ring back — like a grownup. Jo pictures him sat at his Remington Noiseless, stabbing out the letters in dying blue ink, correcting the date on that wartime onionskin paper they all hate. Like it’s to his fucking editor.
Entirely William, she thinks. Suddenly, every moment she spent in his arms comes back to her like a bee sting. No sparkling stones on her finger, like the afterimage of bright lights. Good riddance. She wasn’t meant for them, anyway. Diamonds or spinels or white sapphires. Paste stones, maybe. Cut glass.
It might be fun to pull out her lighter and set it on fire. The letter. The words about how maybe he’d overstepped, in what he’d said, but that she couldn’t deny what it looked like. What what looked like? she wants to ask, even though she knows exactly what he’s talking about. Doing my job? Doing what every man here does? Being a little ruthless like you? Like he’d like to be, anyway. Easier to make up stories in his head about what he thought she did to get a story.
A knock at the door — she has a phonecall.
Kay would say he deserved another sock in the jaw for what he’d said about his mother being right. God, that’s another thing she can’t think about, scampering down the stairs behind the bellboy in her trousers and half her sweater set. William wasn’t enough of a coward to go whining about it to anyone, although the idea that it would have made it very far up any ladder is laughable. He did have shame somewhere underneath all that pressed cotton.
The night clerk eyes her warily, hands her the receiver.
“Josephine?” The voice she recognizes instantly, somehow contained inside a machine. “Jo Brandt?”
“This is she.”
“What kind of hotel’s your paper springing for that doesn’t give a lady her own phone?” The crowing voice inside the wire all the way from the airfield. She exhales like a laugh, like it’s a little punch to her chest. “Good, I’ve got the right girl.”
“The one and only.” Oh, does she sound bitter.
“I’m glad you picked up.” She turns, leans a bare arm against the wall. “Listen,” he says. “I should say I’m sorry, but-”
She can see his hand in his hair, the jacket and his shoulders.
“Don’t-”
“I won’t,” he says. “Because I’m not.” Maybe he should, maybe he shouldn’t. “My mother will be delighted to know she was right after all.” Maybe she wouldn’t have minded if he’d loosened a few of William’s teeth. “But I will ask that your next drink’s on me.”
She could use a drink right now, staring down a stack of proofs and Kay’s contact sheets and a red pencil. The best she can do here is some weak tea. “The next time I’m in town, sure.”
“Maybe a little sooner than that, I hope-” She shifts her weight to her other foot, listening. “I’m in a phone booth outside Liverpool Street Station.”
“You’re serious?”
“Serious as the bobby outside this booth giving me the eye.” It’s like she can hear him looking outside. “Say yes and get me out of here, Josephine.” She huffs a laugh again. “Call it. Call it an apology.”
“Only if you don’t,” she says, before she can say no.
Five years of Blind Dates?! Five years of Blind Dates!! Created and run by the wonderful @mercurygray at @blind-dates-fest. I just really love this event, guys. And this year I wrote for MotA!
I took several more liberties than I have in past years, inspired by a name generator, my great-aunt's service in the WAC, and the story of T/5 Ilene Hall. Title half-stolen from Glenn Miller's "Guess I'll Go Back Home (This Summer)."
Without further ado, meet Mollie!
This Summer
Dear Sis,
Aunt Rose says I can’t have more dessert until I write you this letter. I don’t think that’s fair considering I was going to write you anyway. Have you met any pilots yet?
Mollie can see Aunt Rose coming out of the kitchen in her nice dress, the rose-print one she wears for holiday meals and outings with the matching belt. She’s holding a little china plate, rose-print too, along the edges, with the prized seconds. She smiles too at the thought, Mollie does, because Aunt Rose doesn’t let you leave the table unless you’ve finished everything she’s made. Especially on a holiday, especially when times were what they were. Mollie had finally succeeded in giving up on it the past few years, the second special bite of cheesecake you got on Shavuos and rare times else. Uncle Sy’s already rolled up his sleeves to start the dishes.
She can see Max at the table, one hand with his pencil and the other reaching for the plate that hasn’t landed yet. He’s a straight shooter, her little brother. Max Jacobs liked adventure novels, his sister, and the Boston Red Sox, in that order. He’d be in heaven here, surrounded by green fields and tall heroes.
But she doesn’t have time to reply just now. The jeep in front of her needs looking at before the hopeful returns, making some kind of noise even the sergeant who’d driven it over looked baffled by. She’s gotten good at diagnoses the past month and a half, engine problems and gear shift gremlins and things she’d only half-paid attention to over a decade and change of hanging out at the back of Uncle Sy’s garage, helping with paperwork and holding tools. The Bee-One-Seven mechanics have been joking about kidnapping her for weeks.
She doesn’t know what feels bigger — the thought of a crew’s life in her hands or the driving work of the depot men, soldiers who crisscross bombs over country roads to get to each base and each ship.
One last bobby pin in her pocket isn’t quite enough to re-secure her braid at the back of her head. But it’s all she’s got, so she’s got to make it work — nimble fingers and the metal end digging into the back of her neck.
She knows she ought to cut it. One of the WAACs who works plotting the bombing routes cuts hair on Sunday afternoons after she gets back from church. She’s sure Lieutenant Bergstrom would be delighted to give her a new style. She’s sure the neighbors would hear Aunt Rose’s scream if her beloved niece came back through the door with short hair.
She tucks her necklace back beneath her shirt and wills the pin in place, to keep the telltale strands of reddish-brown out of the motors and carburetors and things that go vroom in the night. A few minutes of tinkering has the noise licked, just like she’d hoped. She’s glad she’s the only one in here this time of day, so she can sound all the little exclamations and curses she wants. Until she hears a motor cut, shoe-steps approaching, early afternoon sunshine and shadow on the poured concrete from the sliding workshop door.
“Corporal Jacobs?”
She looks up to see her sergeant standing there. It isn’t surprising, considering how Sergeant Lee likes to see how all her girls are doing. She’d even volunteered to write Aunt Rose and let her know that Mollie was getting on just fine here in England. Mollie had tried not to turn pink from embarrassment, but the fact was that she was just freshly twenty, the baby of the group by far, and it had taken a signed permission from Uncle Sy to even get her into the Army. So she’d politely demurred, and made sure to say thank you.
“Yes, sergeant?”
“It’s about time for the boys to be getting back in,” she says, the note in her voice too familiar by late June. Two other bases before they’d made real camp at this one. “But you know that. I just thought I’d see if you needed anything out here.”
Mollie smiles, and wipes a hand on the rag from her pocket. “Just a cup of coffee, ma’am, but that’s hardly your responsibility.”
“Tell you what- I’d say we’ve got enough time to swing by the mess before you need to be ready with your truck.” The one she uses to ferry crews to interrogation and out to the waiting planes, kept closer to the airstrip. It’s sure better than the little bike she’s got propped up outside, the one she and a fellow mechanic had wheedled out of a radio gunner during a game of craps. He’d been a good sport about it too, and it was only after they’d been assured the next day that he had another one well in hand that they felt alright to take it. “Hop in and I’ll scurry you over there. There’s a few things I need to check with the supply officers about.”
“Sure thing!” She sounds so chipper she almost winces. Maybe I don’t need that coffee after all.
But Sergeant Lee just smiles. Maybe with her attitude the mission will be the kind they hope for, each time.
The crew she drives is smiling too, the taste of coffee on her tongue as she pulls her sunglasses down behind the wheel. Fidgeting and tired and the sweat cooling at their temples, damp collars, heavy flight jackets unzipped in the summer warmth. She can only guess it went well, thinking of Maxie’s letter as she makes one of the turns towards the interrogation hut, watches the distance close.
Adventure novels, his sister, and the Boston Red Sox, and she moves up a slot when she doesn’t call him Maxie. She’s seen pilots, but she can’t say she’s properly met them. She drives them, quiet witness to the quiet of the morning, the sweat of the afternoon and evening. Says a prayer or three in between. She tells Aunt Rose that she goes to services. It’s not a lie, not really. The boys don’t look askance when she sneaks in back, the navigators and the gunners and the bombardiers, only a few years older than Max. She won’t be there when he’s bar mitzvah’d. She talks to the chaplain when she can.
The pilots have swagger, the magazines say. She sees it herself. They wear their caps jauntily, and if they don’t quite yet they’re watching those who do, mimicking the walk or the lean or the staccato movie-talk with wide, drinking eyes.
They thank her with nods out of the truck, her deposit finished. “Thank you,” one says, a little louder than the others, and she catches thoughtful eyes. His voice, even in two words, sounds familiar.
It’s nice enough outside that she hopes no one will miss her quite yet, standing with the toe of her boot in the sun, and then the rest of her. She watches the crew mechanics out on the hardstands — talk about needing coffee, they can’t be sleeping more than four or five hours a night — watches the breeze gently pull at the grass. Not that she sleeps too much more herself. She wonders what it would be like to work on a B-17.
She watches the clouds move across the china-blue sky. In late June, it’ll be light out for a long while still. The aviation engineers are building more huts by a long line of trees. She thinks of home, and summer, and long days on Revere Beach. The crowds, the smell of suntan oil and popcorn. A few others across the way are wandering out into the sun, a bicycle or two on the far edge of the field.
Mollie can tell that her cheeks are getting pink – maybe she’s been out here longer than she realizes.
As if in response, a voice comes from behind her. “Beautiful day!”
“Oh,” she says, only a little surprised. “It is.” The pilot who’d thanked her. He’s got his jacket off, draped over his arm. “It really is.”
“I’m sorry if I startled you there.”
She knows her sun-pink cheeks would argue the alternative, but she tries anyway. “You didn’t.” Say, she wants to say. Where’re you from? You sound like half the boys I went to school with.
He’s squinting into the sky, his own cheeks red with the kiss of altitude. Hypothermia, more like. She can’t imagine coming down from such a height, such cold. “Name’s Charles,” he says, extending his hand after a belated second, like he’d just remembered. “Charles Cruikshank.” She shakes it, feels the warmth of his palm.
“You’re a captain?” She thinks he is. She’s almost certain he’s not a major.
He blinks, like he’s forgotten again. “Yes, ma’am.”
She can’t help but smile, his curls gone every which way. “Oh, please don’t call me ma’am.” I’m not Aunt Rose, or Aunt Sylvia. But I’m in the Army, maybe I should get used to it.
He smiles, really, this time, like he’s starting to land. “What should I call you?”
She folds her arms across her chest, straightens her shoulders. “Corporal Jacobs will do.” The look in his eyes melts when she laughs softly. “Mollie.”
“Corporal Mollie Jacobs.”
“Yes. Captain Cruikshank.”
“Do I hear a familiar accent, or is that just the altitude talking?”
“I was just thinking of summers on Revere Beach, if that gives you any clue.”
His entire face is fondness. “I knew I wasn’t dreaming.” She laughs. He stands there, remembering, points with a finger. “The ice cream shop across from the boardwalk.” The whole place was spilling over with people, places to get roasted peanuts and Cokes and ice cream. But she remembers, she thinks, the whir of the clunky old fan and the smell of sugar.
“What’s your flavor?”
He considers, serious as anything. “Strawberry?”
“Coffee marshmallow.” Before she’d tried to stop eyeing the tubs of ice cream, tried to steer herself towards a glass of buttermilk after ordering Max his scoop of chocolate chip.
“Everett Senior High School, Class of 1935.”
Maybe they’d gone to different schools, certainly moved in different circles. She knows that. But it’s a relief she didn’t know she needed, to meet someone who’d felt the same sun. Her smile pokes wider across her face. “Pleased to meet you. Again.” She sticks out her hand, and he returns it.
