Promises to Keep - Ann Tatlock [69]
“It’s Frank all over again,” she kept saying as she walked aimlessly from room to room, ringing her hands. “It’s Frank all over again.”
Once, when she and I came face-to-face in the living room, she looked at me with a haunted look and said, “Wally’s father went to war, and he never came back. Did you know that, Roz? He never came back.”
“I know, Mom,” I said, giving in to the tears. “I’ve known that a long time now.”
And on it went, Mom wandering and muttering, the cops drinking coffee, the neighbors mingling over food and murmuring among themselves – until Grandpa called a doctor who showed up with his black bag of tricks, including a sedative in a syringe. Mom protested only briefly, then complied, and after the shot was given Tillie walked Mom upstairs and put her to bed.
Grandpa stayed for a time, but everyone else left, and soon the house was quiet.
I snuggled next to Grandpa on the couch, and he put his arm around me and kissed my forehead. “What’s going to happen to Wally?” I asked.
“I don’t know, sweetheart,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “But you can be sure he’s not the first young man who’s run off to war. They romanticize it, you see. They think it’ll make them heroes, but . . . well . . . once they get there, they begin to see what it’s all about.”
He seemed to want to say more but didn’t go on. “Were you ever in a war, Gramps?” I asked.
“Oh yes. I was in the Great War, over in Europe.”
“And you came back, didn’t you.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes, I did. All in one piece.”
“Then Wally will come back too.”
Grandpa lifted his chin and offered me a tiny smile. “Of course he will. But in the meantime, he doesn’t know how he’s broken your mother’s heart. We must be extra good to her, you and I, to help her get through this. Do you think you can do that, Roz?”
I nodded eagerly. I would be good to her, because I loved her and because I needed desperately to ease my guilt. I should have known Wally would leave; he had as good as told me more than once. If I had pieced together all the evidence – his favorite book, his talk of butchering the Vietcong, his talk of leaving, for crying out loud, that had seemed to me only so much foolish dreaming – but if I had pieced it all together I might have warned Mom, and she in turn might have somehow kept him from going.
But I hadn’t spoken up, and now it was too late. Wally was gone, and we didn’t know where he was or when he’d be coming back. Or whether he’d be coming back at all.
chapter
29
A light snow drifted down from a steel gray sky, slowly and wistfully, as though reluctant to fall from the clouds. I looked up as I walked and followed the journey of first one flake and then another, watched them travel as single airborne beauties, only to get lost amid the slush and dirty snow of the streets and sidewalks. I understood their unwillingness to drop to earth. Why would they want to leave the sky only to fall on the dismal streets of Mills River? I wasn’t all that keen on walking through these streets myself, except that I had somewhere important to go.
Daddy had left me another note, asking me to meet him at Hot Diggity Dog. I hadn’t seen him in more than three weeks; since then I’d had my tonsils out and Wally had run away from home. I didn’t want to tell him about Wally, but I figured he should know.
He was in the same booth as before, his mustache neatly trimmed but his hair a little longer. He smiled at me as I slid onto the bench across from him. Without a hello or any other greeting, he jumped right back into the conversation we’d been having weeks ago. “There, now see? I told you you’d be all right, didn’t I?”
I nodded, trying to return his smile.
“So how are you feeling? Can you eat?”
“Yeah, I’m better now. My throat stopped hurting a long time ago.”
I was hoping he