Long Way Home(20)

I still remember the night Pop and I stood talking about it in his garage, and he looked up at me from behind the engine he was repairing and said, “You don’t belong in that great big city, Peggy Ann. Especially during a war, with thousands of soldiers running around. You’re too naive. You’ve never even been away from home overnight.”

It was true. There had been no giggling pajama parties with friends, no trips to summer camp, no weeklong visits with doting grandparents. To be honest, I had been a little nervous about leaving home all alone for the first time, so I tore up the application to nursing school and took the job across the river as a Rosie the Riveter, instead. It was at the IBM plant that the exciting world of friendship opened up to me, like the friendships Jimmy had described with his pals during basic training. I was surprised and pleased when the other girls wanted to befriend me. When one of them said, “Golly, you’re pretty,” I actually looked over my shoulder to see who she was talking to. As we ate our lunches together, worked side by side all day, and shared our aches and pains on the bus rides home after a long day, I was included as part of the group for the first time in my life. The work was boring and monotonous and exhausting, but I looked forward to going each day just to see my friends. They even invited me to go to dances with them on the weekends, but I was too shy.

The two years I worked there had flown by—and then the war ended. I was overjoyed, of course. But oh, how I missed my friends! We all promised to stay in touch and vowed to never forget each other. But all the other girls had boyfriends or husbands who were returning home from the war, and I didn’t. I had my job at the veterinary clinic, which I loved and had missed. And I had Pop to take care of. Donna lived with us by then, but she didn’t know how to cook or how to make sure Pop wasn’t drinking too much or how to pay his bills and order auto parts for him the way I did.

As I remembered how lonely I’d been those first weeks after my job ended, I wondered if part of Jimmy’s depression stemmed from missing his friends and from the loss of a shared mission. If I ever saw Joe Fiore again, I would ask if any of Jimmy’s closest friends, like Mitch O’Hara and Frank Cishek, had been killed. Jimmy might have suffered unbearable grief, not to mention guilt as a medic, if he’d been unable to save the buddies he’d lived with and served alongside for so long.

I closed my notebook and put the letters back into the shoebox for the day. The temperature was probably close to ninety degrees, much too hot to sit in a closed-up bedroom. I walked back across the street to Pop’s office, which wasn’t much cooler, and switched on the little desk fan, quickly grabbing all the loose papers as they began to flutter all over the desktop. I had just gotten everything anchored down when Pop came in. Donna was with him.

“Got a minute to talk?” he asked.

“Sure.”

They sank down on the daybed and I swiveled my wooden desk chair around to face them. Donna wore a determined expression, her shoulders squared and her chin raised as if she were about to enter a boxing ring. Pop looked as though he’d rather be any place else but here. They made me uneasy. Something was coming, but I couldn’t guess what. Donna nudged Pop as if prompting him to begin, and he gave a nervous cough. “Um . . . the Crow Bar is cutting Donna’s hours,” he said.

I waited, but when he didn’t continue, I said, “That’s surprising. With all the local GIs returning home and coming to the bar to play pool and drink with their friends, I would think business would be good. Joe Fiore said it was packed the night he went there with you.”

“Yeah, well . . .” Pop coughed again.

“They want a younger barmaid,” Donna blurted out in her cigarette-raspy voice. “After all the years I worked at that dump, you’d think they’d show a little more gratitude instead of insulting me! I told them I quit!” She was spitting mad and her eyes were watery.

“I’m so sorry,” I told her. And I meant it. “That was cruel of them.” Donna was on the wrong side of forty years old, and her years of heavy smoking and hard drinking had taken their toll. I could see how her orange-red dyed hair, low-cut blouses, and sagging bosom would no longer be attractive to a younger generation of bar patrons.

“Good riddance to that firetrap,” she spat.

Pop cleared his throat and wiped his palms on his coveralls. “I . . . um . . . that is, Donna and me wondered if . . . well . . . if you could show her how to do the books for me. She wants to take over.”

The air suddenly felt very close. “You want my job?” I asked.

Donna nodded. She didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed to face me. “Don’t you think it’s time you moved on?” she asked. “Instead of hanging around here and mooning over that poor, godforsaken boy from across the street? He didn’t want you before the war and he ain’t in any shape to want you now. You’re a smart girl. You gotta see that.”

I couldn’t reply. I had seen wounded animals in the clinic lash out at anyone who came close, so I sort of understood Donna’s reaction. But I still was left speechless. Pop reached across the narrow space and rested his hand on my knee as if trying to soften the blow. “You don’t really want to hang around here forever, do you, Peggy Ann? Stuck in this one-horse town all your life? You could do anything.”

My heart began to race. “Are you going to kick me out of my home, too?”