Purple Hearts(75)

Cassie laughed.

“To survive bullets, you know? And here I was, a little baby boy, crying about a bruise, and my dad was like the cowboys on TV, getting hit and not blinking an eye. Just going about his business. I wanted to be like that.”

“You are like that,” Cassie said, touching my leg lightly.

“Of course, it’s not the same,” I said. I didn’t feel invincible. Most of the time I felt like my skin was turned inside out. Today was one of the first days in a while when I didn’t mind that it was.

“Of course not,” she agreed, smiling. “It’s always different when your parents do it.”

“When my mom died, that’s what we did. We pretended we were invincible,” I said, and hesitated.

I had never talked about my mom with Cassie, but I wanted her to know. I wanted her to know everything. “We just went about our business. Didn’t mourn, didn’t talk about it, and it wasn’t really fair.”

“To you?”

“No, to her. Just letting her disappear like she wasn’t also the most important person in the world.”

“How old were you?”

“Five. It was ovarian cancer. I barely remember her. A lady at the church had to tell me how she died. When I asked my dad, he said something like, ‘Don’t worry about it. Let her be in peace.’?”

“Damn.” Cassie fiddled with the collar on my uniform, then looked at me. “What is it with you and your dad, anyway?”

I sighed. “It’s a long story. He did the best he could.”

“He’s doing,” she corrected. “Doing the best he can.”

“You’re right.” I regarded her, realizing that even though I’d known her for only a few months, even though our relationship had been predicated on a lie, she’d seen me at my worst and she was still here. “Thank you,” I said, quickly—it felt urgent, up here among all these stories, before we had to go back downstairs to the real world. “For everything, in the past few months.”

She smiled, calm, unafraid. “You’re welcome. You know, if you talked this much all the time, our lives might be a little easier. I might understand you a little better.”

“Ha. Don’t get used to it.”

“I’d like to,” she said, then stood, fast, embarrassed.

I busied myself putting things back into the trunk. We didn’t have long before I was discharged. I knew that and she knew that, but we’d been playing married all day and there was permanence in the air. Little comments, like when she was playing with JJ, Hailey had asked if there would be a little Cassie or Luke in the future.

The ease of her taking my hand before I saw my dad, the ease of kissing her on the cheek when I was proud of her, my funny, creative, fake wife.

I knew it was all an illusion, a life we’d dreamed up out of desperation, but in that moment it felt real.





Cassie


The day after the barbecue, a couple of hours before The Loyal’s last rehearsal before the show tomorrow night, I made my way to Toby’s. And I was on a mission.

So the thing about Luke, the thing about him kissing me on the cheek in a fairly regular, natural way, and my recent tolerance and even fondness for the nickname “honey,” and my saying I’d like to get used to you. So the thing about that was, I didn’t know. I was pretty sure these were surface-level gestures that had been made complicated only because I had seen him naked. Combine that with a cute dog and a cute baby running around his cute family, with the cute dad making cute burgers, and bam, you’ve got yourself Lifetime movie feelings.

Toby, as I’d decided today, was a real person with whom I had a real thing going on. I wasn’t saying Luke wasn’t real, but the circumstances through which I began to care for him were not. They were fabricated. Completely. So that detracts a certain legitimacy from said caring, does it not?

But that didn’t stop me from caring about Luke, and, in fact, I’ll be damned if it didn’t punch me right in the face with the fact that I was ready to care for someone. I was ready to share the space I’d built. And it should be with someone who wasn’t about to limp out of my life, leaving a trail of take-out boxes and dog hair and painkiller bottles.

And that someone was Toby. Toby with the Arkansas gap in his teeth, who was an encyclopedia of music and had nimble, rhythmic hands that had been backing me up for a year now.

When he opened his door, I pulled his face toward mine.

“Um, hey,” he said between kisses.

“I’m getting a divorce soon,” I told him. “You know that, right? Luke and I will be divorced when he gets discharged.”

“Yeah.”

“I also think . . .” The words caught. “I think you and I should give the living together thing a try.”

“Wait, Cassie, really?”

“Really.” The way his eyebrows drooped at the ends, eyes wide, that grateful smile. He was adorable. I took his shoulders. “I mean, it just makes sense, you know? We’ve known each other for so long.”

“And you don’t have to sign a lease or anything, you know,” he said.

He glanced at my hands, which were now unbuttoning his shirt. “Let’s not talk logistics right now.”