The first time she saw Jack he was standing in front of the counter in the Hogan and Griffith office; tall and broad and black haired, with slanting eyes set in a wide face. He smiled at her uncertainly as she moved to the counter with one of the new-employee blanks and a pencil. Typewriters clacked behind her, a slide ratcheted.
He took the fatigue cap from his head and laid it on the counter. Dark hair curled at his neck above the top of the white sweatshirt he wore beneath an unbuttoned Navy dungaree jacket.
“Are you the new operator for Kearny?” she asked.
He nodded and leaned a hip against the counter. She poised her pencil over the blank form.
“Name?”
“Jack Ward.”
“John?”
“No, just Jack Ward. No middle name.”
She wrote it down. “Social Security number?”
He extracted a dog-eared blue-and-white card from his wallet and pushed it over in front of her. She copied the number, finished filling out the form and had him sign it. Then she gave him a yellow badge from the cardboard box under the counter. “Just out of the service?” she asked.
He nodded and grinned, straining his neck to watch his fingers pin the badge to his collar. “Yesterday,” he said.
“You’re in a hurry to get to work.”
“You bet I am.”
Gene laughed and said, “I’ll bet you’re broke. Big party last night?”
He shook his head. “I’ve fooled around too long. I sat on my tail on enough islands to get to thinking I ought to get busy.”
“Oh. Ambitious?”
“I guess,” he said; his eyes narrowed and he looked down at the counter. “Thirty came up and tapped me on the shoulder a while back. You know.” He put the Social Security card back in his wallet without looking up, and Gene saw he was embarrassed. The wallet had an aluminum oblong fastened to it, on which was printed, “Betio, 1943.”
Gene pointed to it. “Marines?”
“Seabees.”
“My father was in the Navy, too.”
He looked at her expressionlessly, replacing the wallet in his hip pocket. “He was a Chief,” Gene said. “He was killed in the Philippines in ’41,” and she immediately wondered why she had bothered to tell him that.
He only nodded. “Well, thanks,” he said. “I’ll see you again.” She watched him go, standing behind the counter and tapping her pencil on its top and feeling a little foolish. He paused outside the door, looked both ways, looked back briefly, and was gone. I’ll see you again, he had said, and somehow she knew he would. She discovered she was smiling after him. She liked to see them come back. It was late in 1945 and a great many of them were returning from the Pacific. Charley Long had been back six weeks now.
As she walked back to her desk she looked up at the clock on the wall above the door to Mr. Griffith’s office. It was almost twelve and Charley would be in soon, to take her out to lunch.
They ate in the streamlined diner around the corner. It was crowded and as they waited for seats Charley put his mouth close to her ear and asked her to marry him. She laughed and shook her head, frowning at him, but he asked her again when they sat down on the leather and chrome stools.
“Charley!” she whispered, laughing. “This is hardly the place.”
The counterman came with a plate of rolls and stood in front of them, wiping his hands on his apron, while Charley gave their orders. “You want coffee now, folks?”
“Yes,” Charley said. The sleeve of his chamois jacket brushed Gene’s arm as he replaced the menu, and he turned his long face toward her. “Why not?” he said.
“You don’t want everybody to hear.”
“Well, I have to keep working or you’ll never make up your mind. You keep forgetting to think it over.”
“I don’t forget,” Gene said. The counterman brought two mugs of coffee and Gene mixed sugar and cream into hers.
“Well, how about it?” Charley said.
“Don’t be so impatient.”
“Impatient! You’re supposed to’ve been thinking it over ever since I went in the Navy. Is that impatient?”
“It’s an important thing,” Gene said. “You have to be sure.”
“Yeah, but how long’s it going to take before you get sure?”
“You just have to be careful,” Gene said, and the counterman came back with the two platters. The hollow mounds of mashed potato were overflowing with dark gravy.
“You got to be careful, all right,” the counterman said. He was a balding youth with a red, shining face.
“Yeah, yeah,” Charley said. “Get us some catsup, will you?”
But she had always been careful and maybe that was why she was twenty-six and still unmarried. And maybe, too, it was because of her father. He was dead now, and she had not seen him since her graduation from high school; a small man in a black uniform, with a big head and a deeply lined, unhealthily white face. She had hated him. When he had had sea duty she did not see him often; whenever he came into San Diego she had dreaded it. He kissed her sloppily and smelled of liquor and he seemed always to be drunk. When he was especially drunk he would curse her mother and call her an old straw mattress. After he had gone away Gene would feel as though she had to take baths over and over again to get rid of him. She had hated him, and hating him she had pitied her mother, and pitying her mother she disliked her, and so she had always been lonely. Although she liked people and got along well enough with them, she had gone to movies by herself and read by herself and never minded it, and maybe because she had never minded being lonely she was twenty-six now, and unmarried.
She supposed she would marry Charley Long. She had known him almost from the time she had come to work for Hogan and Griffith, and he had proposed to her when he had gone away in the Navy as a Lieutenant j.g. There was no reason why she should not marry him. He was a good man, she liked him well enough, he had his own surveying company now, and there was nothing about him she did not approve of. She did not know why she kept putting off telling him she would marry him.