CHAPTER 16

Days slipped by. One, then two. Another one and another one. Alice-Ann lived each day —each moment of the day —as she thought expected of her. The dutiful daughter, heading off to work, Monday through Friday, putting in the hours. Her paycheck would go mostly to Papa, to help with the farm, which continued to struggle in spite of government help.

“I reckon we’re all in a mess,” Papa said one night over a cold supper.

Nelson, who looked plumb worn-out and weary —both from work and from a new baby keeping him up all hours —nodded. Beside him, Irene nestled their son in her arms, cooing to him in the way of mothers. “We’ll get through it, Pops. When the war is over, the country and the tide will turn. You’ll see.”

Aunt Bess pushed her chair from the table, rose, and retrieved a plate of sliced tomatoes she’d forgotten on the countertop. “Let’s just pray to the good Lord that we don’t have another depression like the last one. Don’t think we could handle another one.”

Depression.

If Alice-Ann had time, she might consider her own sadness. But work —at the bank, at the unyielding farm —never gave her a moment to rest, much less to think for too long. Only at night did she allow herself the privilege of weeping. After she’d bathed, gone into her room, and closed the door. After she’d read one of Mack’s old letters (sometimes two), never touching the ones near the top of the stack. The ones where he talked about what would be his last mission.

Reading the letters kept him alive and coming home. To his parents. To Bynum. To her. She imagined him entering the house. Reaching for the baby who bore his name. Holding him as he’d one day hold one of their own.

And then kissing her.

The kiss she’d hoped —believed —would only be his. She always and only had wanted her first and last kiss to belong to Mack. The first, the last, the only.

On the weekdays, after work, she walked to the five-and-dime to read to Carlton. Though it seemed, with each passing day, they spent more time talking —him about losing Betty Jo and her about losing Mack —than delving into the words of Carroll and Wilder and, most recently, Travers.

Some days, she read to him from the Savannah Morning News. On Thursday afternoon, she regaled him with articles and letters to the editor from the Bynum Telegraph, their local paper, which turned a blind eye to world events, focusing more on who had dinner with whom after church on Sunday, who had visitors from out of town, and recent births and nuptial announcements. And of course, what was going on in the schoolhouse.

On the first Saturday morning in June, the third Saturday since hearing of Mack’s death, she worked alongside Aunt Bess in the gardens and on the back porch, where they washed a load of linens and hung them out on the line. After a simple lunch of tomato and cucumber sandwiches —her favorite when slathered in mayonnaise —she took a hurried bath, then dressed for town. Lately, she’d forgone the matinee with Maeve and Ernie to spend time as her papa’s new heroine, reading to a man who grew somewhat stronger with each passing day, his vision clearer.

Alice-Ann got off the bus in town, but instead of going to the Hillises’ apartment straight off, she walked beneath the storefront awnings to MacKay’s Pharmacy. The door, held open to allow the air to circulate, had been draped in black.

Alice-Ann’s breath caught in her throat and she paused a moment before going inside.

Janie Wren, a young woman who’d graduated with Alice-Ann but whom she’d never been particularly close to, stood behind the front counter, flipping the pages of a glossy magazine she’d no doubt snagged from the nearby rotating wire stand. She looked up, blew a bubble of gum as she did, then popped it with her tongue. Her hand flew over her mouth, apologetically. “Hi there, Alice-Ann,” she said, smiling around her fingertips.

Alice-Ann gripped her purse with both hands. Janie had always been a pretty girl, but since high school she’d grown more so. Mature and almost sultry. Her hair, silky smooth and perfectly coiffed, a peaches-and-cream complexion, and her intense green eyes made her Hollywood-star perfect, which only made Alice-Ann more uncomfortable in her own skin. “Hey, Janie,” she managed.

Her old classmate straightened, squared her shoulders, then spit her gum into a tissue she retrieved out of a box on the counter. “How’ve you been? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you. You’ve been good?”

“Things are . . . things are okay.”

“I heard about Nelson and Irene having a boy. I think that’s just keen of them to name the baby after Mack.”

Alice-Ann forced a smile and stepped closer to the counter. “He —ah —he cries a lot.”

“Don’t they all,” Janie said with a laugh. “When my sister Patricia had her daughter —never have I ever heard such a pair of lungs on something so tiny.” She flipped the magazine closed, then leaned over and returned it to the rack.

Alice-Ann now stood close enough to catch the scent of Janie’s perfume, light and flowery. A thought washed over her, that if Mack had stayed, or even returned, if he’d gone to work for his father as Mr. MacKay had always wanted, he’d be here, day in and day out, with Janie.

The thought left her nearly nauseous and most definitely envious.

Why couldn’t she have been blessed with looks like Janie’s? Like Maeve’s and Claudette’s and Irene’s? All of them so naturally —

She stopped as reality struck her. Janie, as lovely as she’d always been, now wore light touches of makeup. She looked to the back of the store, past the lotions and potions, the shampoos and cosmetics, to the pharmacy.

“Mr. MacKay is in the back, if you’ve got a pharmaceutical need.”

Pharmaceutical . . . Even her words sounded all grown-up.

“Um . . . no.”

She’d only come in to offer condolences to the family, something she should have done before now but had been unable to rouse herself to do. She’d hoped to step in, say her piece, and then cross the street to the five-and-dime. To the Hillises’ apartment and to Carlton’s room. On Saturdays, they read the newspaper and from the Bible. It should have all been simple enough. But then . . . “I —I only wanted to —” She breathed in Janie’s scent again. “Janie, what is that perfume you’re wearing?”

Janie’s green eyes dazzled. “Isn’t it something?” She came around the counter in a flurry. “Follow me, Alice-Ann. It’s body lotion, actually. And quite reasonably priced.” Janie walked Alice-Ann down an aisle between the lotions and cosmetics. “Look at this,” she said, pointing to an ad featuring actress Elyse Knox for Jergens.

“‘Object Romance,’” Alice-Ann read, then chuckled. “‘. . . say Elyse Knox’s Hands.’”

“Smell,” Janie said, opening a half-filled square-shaped bottle displayed on the shelf.

Alice-Ann leaned her nose closer to the open bottle. “Mmm . . .”

“Here. Try it.” She squeezed a dollop into Alice-Ann’s cupped hand. “This bottle is what we call a ‘tester.’” She leaned closer. “Trust me. I test it several times a day.”

Alice-Ann rubbed the silky lotion into her hands, then up and down her arms. The scent of it caught the stirring breeze from the ceiling fan overhead and tickled her nostrils. “It’s lovely.”

“And see this?” Janie nodded at the advertisement, then peered over her shoulder to the back, where Mr. MacKay, one arm wrapped in a black band, busied himself behind the high-rise pharmacy counter. “See how they have her with a pilot in the ad?”

Alice-Ann studied the ad, then nodded.

“You know, she’s getting married to Tom Harmon, the football player and war hero?”

Alice-Ann shook her head. She’d hardly had free time to devour magazines as Janie apparently had. “No, I —Tom who?”

“Harmon. He’s a pilot, you see?” Janie had lowered her voice and she looked over her shoulder again. “He’s in the United States Army Air Corps —”

“Like Mack,” Alice-Ann sighed.

“Yes. But listen to this. Last spring —a year ago —he crashed his plane in South America.”

“South America?”

“In the jungle. I read an article that said after he ordered his men to bail out, he parachuted fifteen hundred feet from his plane.” Her perfectly arched and penciled brows shot up. “He landed in a tree.”

“Alive, obviously . . .” Unlike Mack, at the bottom of an ocean.

“The sole survivor. None of his men made it. Not a single one.”

Like Mack. “That’s . . . awful, Janie.”

“He worked his way through the jungle for days, Alice-Ann. Days.”

Alice-Ann reached for the bottle of lotion, thinking to buy two —one for herself and one for Irene. Since the baby’s birth, she’d been nicer. More tolerable.

Janie’s hand touched hers. “Wait.” For the third time, she looked toward the back. Alice-Ann glanced up. Mr. MacKay watched them briefly, then went back to work. “Six months later, after all that, he got shot down again in China, but he was rescued by some anti-Japanese group —I don’t know what they’re called.” She tossed her head as though it didn’t matter for her purpose in telling the story.

Alice-Ann grabbed the two bottles as pressure filled her chest; then she grabbed a third. Where in the world was Janie headed with this story? “So that’s why there’s a pilot in the ad?”

Janie grabbed Alice-Ann by the short sleeve of her dress and all but dragged her to the front. “No,” she said, still keeping her voice low. “I mean, yes, but that’s not the point.” She sighed. “Don’t you see? If Tom Harmon could survive all that, then maybe Mack survived too.” Her green eyes sparkled in the afternoon sunlight that spilled through the large storefront windows. “And wouldn’t that be wonderful if he did?”

“I —” Her mind whirled and her ears rang. Had Janie been in love with Mack? All this time? Was she still? Had she expressed those feelings to him? Had he done the same? “Did you —? How well did you —?” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the question.

“Know Mack?”

“Yes.” Had she spoken the answer or only imagined it?

Janie took the bottles of lotion from Alice-Ann’s grip, then stepped back behind the counter and set them down with a gentle thud as she shook her head. “Not as well as I wanted to,” she admitted. Brazenly, in Alice-Ann’s point of view. She pushed the keys on the cash register. “But I’ve been writing to him. I have so dreamed and . . .” She leaned over the counter to whisper the rest of the sentence. “Why do you think I took the job here?” Janie looked past Alice-Ann’s shoulder. “The MacKays have come to mean an awful lot to me.”

“I . . . see.”

“Alice-Ann, I’m not giving up. If some football player from Michigan can survive the war, then so can our Mack. He may not have gotten his picture on the cover of Life magazine like ‘Old 98,’ but he is a survivor. Anyone who knows him knows that.” Janie looked back at the register. “That’ll be seventy-three cents.”

Carlton tilted his chin and wiggled his nose. “What’s that smell?”

Alice-Ann brought her forearm to her nose, her hands wrapped around two sweating glasses of cola. “Body lotion. I —went over to the drugstore and . . .”

Carlton eased his legs to the floor.

“Carlton,” she exclaimed, crossing over to the bedside table, where she placed the glasses of Coke. “Look at you.”

He grinned. “I can’t walk. I can’t even stand, really, but how’s this for progress?” He reached for her hand and she willingly gave it, then sat in the chair angled toward his knees. “And you’re wearing something light on the top and . . . plaid? On the bottom.”

Alice-Ann crossed her legs and squeezed his hand. “Pedal pushers. They’re kind of a new thing. Comfortable in this heat, I can tell you.” She squeezed again, then released and brought her hands together in her lap. “I’m so thrilled, Carlton, that you are healing so well.”

He nodded. “Me too. I’m ready to get out of this room.”

“What does Doc Evans say about that?”

Carlton pressed his fists into the foam mattress and pushed, bringing his shoulders up around his ears. “He’s bringing some kind of contraption on Monday that’s supposed to help strengthen my legs. Help me to walk again.”

“That’s —wonderful.”

He sniffed again. “And you really do smell good.”

She giggled. “Jergens lotion. I got it over at —at the drugstore.” She took a breath. “Elyse Knox advertises for it.”

“The woman marrying Tom Harmon?”

“How do you know that?” she asked, grateful he’d not inquired further about her going to the MacKays’ place of business.

“It’s Tom Harmon, Alice-Ann.”

She shook her head and leaned back in the chair. “Until today I’d never heard his name.”

Carlton laughed easily. “You’re such a girl.” He squinted toward her lap. “Even in . . . what did you call them?”

“Pedal pushers.”

“Girls in pants.” He shook his head. “My, how the war has changed the world.”

“I’ve worn bib overalls my whole life and you know it.”

He leaned forward. Slowly. “In a pea patch.” He chuckled. “I don’t believe I ever saw you in them uptown.”

“Aunt Bess would tan my bib-overalled hide.”

Carlton laughed hard, then winced. Alice-Ann stood, put her arms on his shoulders, and pressed. “Sit back; sit back.”

He eased himself into the nearly flat pillows at the bed’s headboard, which she pulled out and fluffed, then replaced. “Here you go.”

“Sorry,” he said.

“No. Don’t apologize, Carlton. For pity’s sake . . .”

After a few deep breaths, his body relaxed. “Okay. Okay.” He looked up at her. “Did you bring the newspaper up?”

She’d snagged it from Mr. Hillis downstairs but had left it in the kitchen. “I did. Hold on and I’ll go get it.”

Alice-Ann dashed into the kitchen, then returned with the slightly askew Savannah Morning News. She sat, unfolded the paper, and snapped it as she’d seen her father and brother do time and again. “Now then,” she said. “What would you like to hear first? World news or local?”

“Give me two to choose from off the front page.”

She dropped one corner of the paper to peer at him. A smile crossed her lips without her willing it. He looked so boyish and yet so grown-up, all at once. “All right.” She returned her attention to the paper. “‘Allies Smash Rome Defenses.’” She dropped the corner of the paper again. “That’s one.”

“And two?”

“‘US Urged to Join French Talks.’”

“Hmmm . . .” He paused. “What are you looking at now?”

“How did you —? Never mind.” She frowned. “I’m looking at an ad for natural gas and our need to conserve it at home so it can be used for warplanes.”

“Got to.”

“We’ve conserved everything else. We girls are even cutting our skirts shorter to save on material.”

He grinned. “I can live with that.”

Alice-Ann shook her head in amusement. “Carlton . . . pick an article and hush.”

He pretended to straighten up. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll take the first one and then the second one.”

She popped the paper back into place. “All right,” she said, then took a deep breath and prepared her voice to sound as though it came straight from the radio. From Washington or some other faraway place she’d probably never visit. “Here’s the first news article for June 3, 1944. . . .”