Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(21)

Her mother is at her machine again and looks up, her face like a jittering filmstrip shifting rapidly from one emotion to the next, before settling on a resigned sadness, seeing the morning’s events in her daughter’s eyes. This is life: choices, mostly between bad and worse.

Frangie’s false and overbright grin fades to one of wry acceptance.

“When?” Dorothy Marr asks.

“Tomorrow,” Frangie says.

“Then I best get your wash done.”





7

RIO RICHLIN—GEDWELL FALLS, CALIFORNIA, USA

Am I really doing this?

Rio and Jenou beg a ride from Toby Perkins, who has the use of his father’s 1936 Chevy pickup truck and can drive them the thirty-seven miles down to Petaluma, a larger town, almost a small city. Toby has been sweet on Jenou since they were both in third grade, a fact that Jenou has exploited ruthlessly over the years, never giving Toby so much as a dance but asking him for a favor whenever she needs one.

The three of them drive squeezed in together in the truck, Rio in the center beside Toby, much to Toby’s regret. She angles her legs away from the gear shift, and Toby is painfully careful to avoid making contact as he moves through the gears.

“You girls sure you want to—” Toby begins.

“Why, Toby? Do you think we can’t hack it?” Jenou asks in a dangerously sugary voice.

“No, I never said that,” Toby retreats quickly. “Just ain’t right is all.”

Rio feels a little sorry for Toby, but mostly she is occupied with a case of nerves. Her stomach is in knots. Her mouth is as dry as the hills around them, and she would have traded her most prized possession—an autographed photo of Van Johnson—for a glass of lemonade.

“What if they don’t believe I’m eighteen?” Rio asks, not for the first time.

“No one’s going to run off and tell your mother. Goodness, Rio, you do worry. Anyway, you look eighteen, don’t you?” Jenou appraises her with mocking eyes. “Well, except for . . . But don’t worry, you’ll come into your bosoms eventually.”

Toby swallows his tongue, and Rio blushes red.

“Very funny, Jen,” Rio mutters, and elbows her friend.

“Toby here thinks we’re just weak little girls,” Jenou says.

“Despite your impressive bosoms?” Rio’s still annoyed at Jenou, but teasing Toby is too much fun for her not to get in on it.

“Rio’s strong, Toby. She can crack a walnut with her fingers,” Jenou says. “Did you know that? I’ve seen her do it. She’s a dangerous young woman.”

Rio smiles. “No walnut is safe from me. Just let some Jap or Nazi come at me with a walnut. You’ll see.”

They’ve both dressed for the occasion, Jenou in a white flannel skirt and tight-fitting, blue-striped blouse, and matching high heels; Rio, significantly less fashionable, in a plaid skirt and too-large white blouse handed down from her sister, and flats. Both wear their hair up, wanting to acknowledge the importance of the occasion and to look older and more sophisticated.

As Rio climbs from the truck she spots a familiar face: Strand is among those standing in line.

Rio notices Jenou smirking at her. “What?” she demands irritably.

“He’s pretty tall. You’d have to stretch all the way up on your tiptoes to kiss him.”

“Who said anything about any of that?” She feels a blush prickle her neck. Jenou is being particularly irritating.

“Oh, nothing. Nothing but the way you touch your hair and blush and lick your lips,” Jenou says. “Little things like that.”

Rio has not told Jenou about her date with Strand, or the terrible fire afterward, mostly because Jenou was out of town on an overnight visit to her aunt in the city, and also because Rio has yet to come to grips with either part of it, the date or the fire.

Two images are married in her mind now: Strand’s handsome face lit by the movie projector’s flickering beam and the Stamp Man. And both are colored somehow by the memory of her father’s grim expression following that single gunshot.

What a terrible life the Stamp Man’s sister must have had during the interminable twenty-three years she spent caring for her brother.

Rio imagines caring for Rachel, similarly hurt. Or Strand, if she were his wife. She would stand by him, of course, any wife would or at least should. But what complete abnegation would be required, a total abandonment of any life other than as a nurse to a ruined man.

Only at the furthest reaches of her imagination does the thought come that if she is really doing this, if she is really enlisting in the army, the shattered, dependent patient in need of constant care might be Rio herself. But immediately behind that chilling thought comes a reassuring sense that no, of course not, that would never happen. Not to her.

But Strand?

There is no avoiding Strand. Now Rio and Jenou straighten their clothing, lock arms, and advance on the induction center. Rio feels her face burning, a pink so obvious that Strand can hardly help but misinterpret things. Or perhaps not so much misinterpret as see feelings she doesn’t want him seeing.

Yet.

“Hi, Jenou,” Strand says. Then, his voice subtly lower, says, “Hi, Rio. Come to see me off?”

“Us?” Rio feels suddenly guilty. She’s involving Strand in a deception, after all. “We’re just . . .”