Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(58)

Rio smiles. “I wasn’t planning on it.”

“No, listen to me.” There is urgency in his tone. He insists she listen. He insists that what he knows she must know as well. “If they actually go through with this hare-brained notion and send you into the fighting, there will come a time when you’ll have a choice between staying in your trench and crawling out of it to save a buddy. Or maybe you’ll have had enough of getting shelled and decide you just have to run out there and shoot someone. That’s what I mean. When that moment comes, you stay down. You keep your head down. You hug the ground.”

She has the terrible feeling that his eyes might be filling with tears, but that’s impossible, surely. She looks away.

He is seeing something in memory, playing it over again. He winces, swallows hard, and takes another puff and then a drink.

“Don’t listen to your officers, listen to your noncoms. It’s the sergeants that keep their men alive, the good ones, anyway. You find a sergeant you trust and stick to him like glue. An officer will throw your life away for nothing, but a good sergeant . . .”

“Yes, sir,” she says, not even realizing that she’s fallen into the military style of address, nor that she is standing at something like parade rest that is not quite attention, but not the casual stance of a teenage girl talking with her father either.

“I’m your father. That’s your mother in there,” he says, his voice gone rough. “We’re your family. Whatever happens, we’re your family. Whatever happens, this is your place, this house, this town.”

He is seeing the Stamp Man too, she knows. And perhaps seeing much more.

“I know that, sir,” she says.

“You’ll need that.” He nods to himself. “You’ll need to know that. When you’re scared. Or hurt. No matter what: we are your family.”

Rio can’t answer. This is as open as her father has ever been with her, the first time he has ever addressed her as an adult. This is him baring his soul within the limits his notions of masculinity allow. A tear rolls down her cheek, but she can’t wipe at it without giving herself away.

“You’ll need that,” he says again, almost a whisper.

The doorbell rings at 0900 sharp.

“Strand!”

“It’s too early, isn’t it?” he asks.

He seems taller than she remembers, and his shoulders are definitely wider and stronger. But then, she supposes, she looks more muscular to him as well, and it makes her cringe a little.

“Not too early at all, Strand.”

“I figured you woke up at, what, 0700?”

“Nonsense. I woke up at 0600—I’m real army, not air corps,” she teases. “You know, in the real army we don’t even have butlers to bring us our coffee in bed every morning.”

“Oh, here we go,” he says, playing along. “Now I have to listen to this from you. It’s not true our butlers bring us coffee in bed. That is a dirty lie, a regular army falsehood. Our butlers lay the silver and the china out on a very nice table on the veranda, and then they bring us our coffee.”

“It’s awfully good to see you, Strand.”

“You look swell,” he says.

“So do you,” she says. It takes her a moment to register that this is something she would never have said before. It’s forward and blunt. She doesn’t exactly regret it, but she does make a mental note to think about it later. “Speaking of coffee, will you come in and have a cup?”

“Oh, I don’t want to use up your ration.”

“Nonsense, we always have coffee for men in uniform,” Rio’s father says, coming down the stairs. He sticks a hand out, and Strand shakes it. “Am I to take it that you are here to court my daughter, young man?”

He pitches the tone perfectly between deadly serious and downright dangerous, so Strand swallows hard and shoots a panicky look at Rio.

“Father is having fun with you, Strand. Come in, come in.”

“How’s air corps life?” Tam asks Strand.

“It’s fine, sir, aside from the matter of getting enough planes, which is FUBAR.”

Rio, who has heard that term and knows what it means, sees horror in Strand’s eyes and is torn between two wildly different emotions: fear of what may come next, and delighted amusement at the predicament Strand has just walked into.

Just let it go, Mother . . .

“What is FUBAR?” Millie asks.

Strand looks helplessly at Rio, who stares guiltily and paralyzed at her mother’s innocent expression. It’s her father who comes to the rescue.

“It stands for ‘Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition,’” he says, casting a wry look at Strand, who rediscovers his ability to breathe. “It’s a common soldier’s term.”

Yes, Rio thinks, though the F is usually taken to be a word that is a bit less appropriate for a mother’s ears.

“I’m off to the store; I’m already late,” Rio’s father says. “Oh, by the way, remind me that I need to clean my shotgun later. My twelve-gauge shotgun.” He softens this with a manly hand on Strand’s shoulder.

“Very funny, Father.”

There. He seems like my dad again.

They take their coffee in the kitchen, seated around the comfortable old table where Rio’s mother has laid out her dairy accounts and is industriously recording gallons of milk and dollars earned.