A Hero Comes Home

by Sandra Hill

  “Well, then, cowboy, it looks like we’re still on for a cinnamon rodeo.”

  Chapter 15

  The minds of men, no matter the age, run in one direction . . .

  Jake and Sally stood on the back porch just before noon the next morning, waiting for the kids to return. His father had called once the boat docked to alert them that they were headed home.

  Jake was feeling satisfied with himself in an admittedly macho way. What guy wouldn’t after the kind of weekend he’d enjoyed with his wife? Except for the nightmare, everything had been perfect.

  And Sally . . . He had only to look at the sex flush that covered her from face to chest to know that Mick Jagger song didn’t apply to either one of them. She wore a black tank top and white yoga pants, and he would bet she was flushed in some other places, too. If he had gotten his rocks off, his wife’s bells had been rung, a time or twenty. Which gave him even more immense satisfaction.

  Just then, with perfect synchronicity, the town bells began to ring twelve times, and his father’s truck pulled into the driveway.

  “Stop smirking,” Sally said, as if she could read his mind.

  He just winked at her—with his one eye, the other was covered with the eye patch today—and walked down the steps with the aid of the handrail.

  No sooner did the truck stop than the three gremlins and mangy dog hopped out and came rushing at him, almost knocking both him and Sally over.

  “Daddy, Daddy, we caught fifty fith.”

  “Even a baby shark.”

  “PopPop says there prob’ly are no more fish left in the ocean.”

  “I caught the most fish.”

  “But mine was the biggest.”

  “PopPop made us clean all the fish.”

  “I puked on thome of the guts.”

  “Old Mike said a bad word. Three times! Do you wanna know what it was?”

  “Kin we play video games for extra hours t’day ’cause we missed them for two days?”

  “Donky Kong firtht.”

  “No, Space Wars.”

  “I hafta pee.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Me, too.”

  They all ran into the house, pushing each other aside as they tried to go through the door together and Goofus ran off, presumably to his own backyard.

  Jake looked at his father, who was beginning to haul their gear out of the truck. He’d aged about twenty years this weekend, or maybe he just looked tired. Whoever said children were for the young knew what they were talking about, Jake decided. Kids were energy draining, to say the least.

  Jake put the gate down in back of the truck and hauled the cooler forward. It really was heavy with their catches. He peered inside and noted trout, bass, stripers, and blues, even a few crabs. “Wow! Who’s gonna eat all this stuff?”

  “Hell if I know! Give it to the neighbors if you don’t want it.”

  “Don’t be so grumpy, Joe,” Sally said, coming up to give his father a kiss on his whiskered cheek. “We’ll use them all, and we appreciate your taking the boys out for a trip they’ll remember all their lives.”

  Exactly what Jake would have said, if he’d thought before speaking. “Where’s Old Mike?”

  “We dropped him off at the house. Says he’s gonna take a nap for a week.”

  Jake suspected that his father would soon be doing the same. He reached out and shook his father’s hand, then pulled him into a hug. Against his ear, he whispered, “Thanks, Dad.”

  His father seemed to have trouble swallowing for a moment, then said, “Anytime, son.”

  They could already hear the sound of the video game blasting from the living room.

  “Turn that down!” Jake yelled.

  Immediately, the volume was lowered. The kids were probably worried that he would come in and turn it off. Not yet. But soon. By the looks of them, they could all use a shower and fresh clothes.

  After they unloaded the truck, including a mountain of smelly kids’ clothing that went directly to the laundry, Sally told his father, who was standing with them in the kitchen by now, “We have a lot of leftover food here that the neighbors and friends dropped off. Can we give you a care package to take home?” She opened the fridge to show him how the shelves were still overflowing.

  “Sure. A couple ham and roast beef sandwiches would be good, and I wouldn’t turn away some of that Norse potato salad of Vana’s.”

  The jaws of Jake and Sally both dropped.

  “What? Don’t knock it till you tried it. Those lutefisk taste just like anchovies. Yum.”

  “Yeah, and snake tastes just like chicken,” Jake scoffed.

  They gave him the whole bowl.

  Just before his father left, Jake said to him, “I know you’re tired and probably pushed to your limits of patience with the kids, but, well, was the trip successful? Was it all you wanted it to be?”

  His devious father looked at Sally, giving her a full body survey, then looked at him with equal attention. Then, he grinned. “Yep.”

  Is a half-baked idea better than no idea? . . .

  They decided to go to the Rock Around the Clock Diner for dinner that evening, at Sally’s suggestion. She and Jake were tired of the leftovers, and Sally didn’t feel like cooking, especially since she intended to go into the bakery this evening to prep tomorrow’s breads and rolls. Plus, it was a treat for the kids, who loved the Elvis atmosphere, though they didn’t have a clue who “the King” was, except for that hound dog song, which they thought was hilarious.

  It wasn’t until six p.m. that they were able to leave the house. It took that long to get the boys showered and changed, they were so wound up from their trip.

  Just before they left, while Jake was on the phone with someone, maybe Major Durand, the three of them cornered her out on the back porch. “We have an idea,” Matt said, and the other two yahoos nodded in agreement.

  They were up to something, she could tell.

  Matt, their spokesman, said, “We want to enter the Lolly talent contest, with you.”

  She frowned. “Doing what?”

  “Singing.”

  “What?” Unless something had changed dramatically in the past few days, none of them could carry a tune in a bucket, as the old saying went.

  “We want to surprise Dad,” Matt elaborated.

  “What do singing and a surprise for your father have in common?”

  “Well, the Lolly celebration is supposed to be about lots of stuff. Treasures and patriotism and heroes and hometown talent,” Matt told her, like a little old man who’d rehearsed his spiel. “We think it would be cool if we sang that song about eagle wings and heroes, just to show Dad that we’re glad he came home.”

  It took Sally a moment to decipher what they meant. Oh, my God! They meant that old Bette Midler song about a woman asking a guy if he knew he was her hero, that he was the wind beneath her wings. And the boys wanted to surprise their father with that song! Oh, my God! Jake would die of embarrassment, or from emotion overload. He objected to the yellow ribbons still exhibited around town. She could only imagine his reaction to being serenaded by his family.

  “Um, can we think about this before we decide for sure?”

  The boys weren’t too happy about her lack of enthusiasm.

  “Maybe we could even ask Uncle Kevin if he would play the guitar with us?” Mark suggested.

  Oh, no, no, no! Talk about awkward! “If we decide to do this, and I’m not saying we are, I don’t think asking Kevin to join us would be a good idea. It should be a family thing.”

  “We been practicin’,” Luke told her.

  “You have, sweetie? When?”

  “Out on the boat,” Mark said.

  Sally narrowed her eyes with suspicion. “Does PopPop know about this idea?”

  “Yep,” all three answered.

  Sally was going to have a thing or two to say to Joe about encouraging his grandkids with this notion. It would serve him right if they decided to go ahead wit
h the wacky idea, and forced him to join them on stage.

  “We got the idea when that song came on the oldies station on the boat radio,” Matt explained.

  “At first, PopPop said we were scarin’ the fish away with our caterwaulin’,” Mark noted.

  “But then he and Old Mike thaid we were really good,” Luke interjected. “Wanna hear?”

  “Not right now,” she said quickly. “Remember, it’s supposed to be a surprise.”

  The three of them pretended to zip their lips as Jake came out, looked at all four of them, who’d gone suddenly silent, and asked, “What’s up?”

  “Nothing,” they all said, including Sally.

  As they walked to the truck, Sally noticed how cute they all looked in almost identical khaki cargo shorts and black T-shirts, father and sons. It had been an unintentional matchy-matchy action, and not worth changing when they realized what they’d done. Jake, who was wearing the eye patch this evening, rather than dark sunglasses, and smelling enticingly like cinnamon, looped an arm over Sally’s shoulder.

  The boys were already in the back seat arguing and squealing over who should sit where and an occasional “Mom, he’s touching me” yelled out. The whole time, they kept darting glances at their father, then at her, and whispering. Secret agents, they would never be.

  Jake squeezed her shoulder. “Are you guys ganging up on me?”

  “You have no idea,” Sally said.

  And the (red) tide turneth . . .

  Jake had been in Clyde Jones’s rock ’n’ roll–themed diner many times growing up in Bell Cove, but not of course in recent years. Clyde’s niece, Delilah, Sally’s friend, had done a great job restoring the place to its former glory.

  In fact, the boys insisted that he take a picture with his cell phone of them posing in front of the twenty-foot neon Elvis out front, which hadn’t been there in the old days, but was a great addition. Two of them had crawled halfway up Elvis’s leg. Matt was stretched on tiptoes, pretending to be patting the King’s butt. And Sally was as bad as the kids, hugging Elvis’s boot. She looked like a kid today, too, with her hair all spiked up, wearing a pink-and-white halter dress that barely covered her thighs, which was amazing considering how un-kid-like she’d been all weekend, especially with her interpretation of cinnamon sex. Whoa!

  Just as he was about to round up his rowdy bunch, he heard the loud screeching noise of car brakes being pushed to the metal. Glancing sharply to the right, his Special Forces training on high alert for danger, about to leap into action, he saw a bunch of teenagers in a beat-up convertible, laughing their asses off as they barely missed the curb on the street out front. Without a care for any damage they might have done, the idiot driver did a quick self-correction and zoomed off. He’d either been talking or texting or whatever teens did today to distract them from driving with alertness. There could have been kids near that curb.

  He sounded like an old fogey thinking that way, but he realized that the knee-jerk, sharp swivel of his head to the right had been due to his concern for his family. What did I think would happen? That a vehicle would jump the curb and come barreling over the parking lot, taking down my wife, three kids, and a twenty-foot Elvis? Hey, stranger things have happened. Good thing I didn’t have a weapon with me. I might have shot up a terrorist teenager.

  But here was an even stranger thing. When his head had wrenched to the right, so had his eyeballs. Both of them. It felt like something had pulled in the socket. And it hurt now. Not painfully. Just an odd ache. This had never happened before. He needed to examine the situation in front of a mirror once he got home. He’d probably popped a blood vessel, or something.

  In any case, time to get this show on the road. “Let’s go, kiddos. If we don’t hurry, they’ll be sold out of grilled peanut butter and banana sandwiches.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “I want bacon on mine.”

  “Well, I’m not eatin’ fried pickles. Yuck!”

  “Pickles give you farts. Binky said so.”

  “I’m gonna eat five banana puddings with whipped cream, and I don’t care if I barf, either.”

  “I like that Elvis song about Hawaii. That’s where they do the hula dance.”

  “Kin we get a hula hoop?”

  “Wonder if Maggie will be here?” Matt asked, his face going suddenly red as he noticed his father watching him.

  “Who’s Maggie?” Jake asked Sally.

  “Maggie, short for Magdalene, is Delilah’s daughter.”

  “Magdalene and Delilah, huh? Biblical names. She’s as bad as us with Matthew, Mark, and Luke.”

  “And there’s the grandmother, too, named Salome. Wait till you get a look at her. Oh, my! No, I won’t tell you what I mean. I can’t wait to see your reaction. Let’s just say if you think Vana Gustafson is hot, wait till you meet the Glam Gram. That’s what they call her.” She rolled her eyes. “And as for Maggie, she’s only five, Luke’s age, but all girly girl. All the boys love her.”

  Still laughing and talking over each other and elbowing each other, the boys would have rushed up the steps and into the diner, screeching like hyenas, if he hadn’t grabbed the hands of two of them and Sally corralled the other. They were laughing as they walked inside.

  Right away, they were greeted by a blonde bombshell. That was the only way to describe the tall woman with big bed-mussed blonde hair and a hot-cha-cha figure encased in tight white jeans, a red tank top, and an apron. Yes, Jake had developed a thing about aprons.

  “Sally! You came! At last!” The woman hugged Sally, gave each of the boys a kiss on top of their heads, then turned to him. “And you must be Jake.” She gave him a hug, too.

  “Jake, this is my friend, Delilah Good. As you can guess, Lilah, this is my husband, Jacob.”

  “You can call me Jake,” he said quickly. Sally was the only one he wanted calling him Jacob.

  “Welcome, welcome,” she said to them all.

  “Hey, the place looks great. Just like it did in the old days, but better,” he said. And it did. Everything was shiny new, including the mini jukeboxes set on the wall of each booth, where you could hear the low strains of Elvis songs playing whenever the diners had put in their quarters. At the back end of the diner, on a far wall, he saw evidence of Sally’s parents and their set-designing skills having been there. There was a mural depicting a collage of Elvis images against the backdrop of Graceland.

  “Thanks. You grew up in Bell Cove. Did you know my uncle?”

  “Yeah, a little. My mom and dad knew him better. But this was a teenage hangout for a while. Old Clyde was a good guy.”

  “You can take that booth there at the end. Merrill is out back, checking inventory for me. I’ll bring him here to meet you, Jake. We’ve heard so much about you.”

  Jake looked at Sally, wondering what she’d told everyone.

  She just shrugged. “I might have mentioned that you’re an ass on occasion.” Then she grinned. “Or that you have a great ass.”

  He grinned back at her and said, “Likewise.”

  Once they were seated, Jake noticed a little girl wearing a red dress with a black belt and a mop of blonde curls. She was talking to a waitress over near the counter. “I assume that’s Kindergarten Barbie,” Jake said.

  “Da-ad!” Matt protested, his face red with embarrassment as he pivoted to make sure no one overheard him.

  “Hey, boys, I could give you some tips on how to draw in the chicks. First off, no picking your nose. For some odd reason, girls consider that uncool.”

  Now it was all three boys who said, “Da-ad!”

  “Stop teasing them,” Sally said, fighting a smile.

  They ate and listened to “Hound Dog” three times on their personal jukebox. He and Sally listened to the boys chatter about every little thing that had happened on the weekend with PopPop, including a few things that might discomfort the old fellows.

  It wasn’t until they got up from their booth and Jake was placing a tip on the table th
at Delilah was able to bring her husband out to meet Jake. She apologized for the delay, explaining that the sudden influx of customers was due to a van load of bird-watchers from Virginia coming in, unannounced. Not that the diner took reservations. The Outer Banks was noted for its nature preserves, and because of both its marsh and beach environments, there were presumably more than four hundred species of birds flying or nesting about. Jake knew because many of his school trips involved birding. It was something all Outer Banks kids knew about, his boys included.

  “Jake, this is my husband, Merrill Good. Merrill, honey, this is Sally’s husband, Jake Dawson, that we’ve heard so much about.”

  Good’s handshake was firm and he looked him straight in the eye as he said, “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I understand we have a lot in common.”

  Jake assumed that he meant the military.

  Sally and Delilah stepped aside and were talking softly about something involving Lollypalooza weekend. The boys subtly moved over crablike to where Maggie was now sitting on one of the counter stools helping the waitress fill ketchup squirt bottles. Well, subtle as a clump of three clumsy boys could be.

  “Have you decided whether you’ll stay in the military or stay here in Bell Cove?”

  No beating around the bush with this guy!

  “Nope. Not a clue.”

  “You’re welcome to join my salvaging crew, and we’re about to start another venture into the mountains, looking for precious gems. We can always use a guy with a military background.”

  “Are you shitting me? I don’t have the physical capability or the coordination to do anything like that.” And, frankly, Jake was offended that he would bring it up.

  “Bullshit!” Good said amiably. “You and I both know that men can overcome any kind of obstacles if they really want to. I know a guy who lost both legs, and he runs a fleet of trucks.”