Wounded Heroes Boxed Set

by Judith Arnold

  "What happened to you?" she called through the closed door after a minute. "You weren’t this wet when you left."

  "I had a blow-out on Pond Road." He glanced around the small room, then lowered the lid on the toilet and sat. The aching in his legs began to wane, and he smiled at the thought of donning his jeans warm and fresh from the dryer. "Thanks," he said quietly.

  "What?"

  He envisioned her standing outside the door, perhaps leaning against the wall, her graceful arms folded across her chest and her hair cascading down her back. Despite his being partly undressed, he sensed nothing particularly erotic in his situation. It wasn’t just that a door separated him from her, but that her mood was so downright sensible, so calm and maternal. His doubts about whether to come here had been unnecessary. He and Bonnie could manage this.

  "I said, thank you," he repeated, aiming his voice at the door. "I’m finally beginning to thaw out."

  "What on earth possessed you to take Pond Road on a night like this?" she called to him.

  "I thought I could handle it."

  She clicked her tongue in disapproval, but he could hear the humor lacing her voice when she said, "You and Shane with your flat tires. It’s no wonder you two hit it off."

  "Where is Shane, anyway?" he asked.

  "Spending the night at his friend Matt’s house," Bonnie reported. "I was just fixing some dinner for myself. Why don’t you join me?"

  He closed his eyes and conjured a mental picture of her again, first as he imagined her standing outside the bathroom door and then as she’d looked when she’d helped him with the birch tree. He recalled the anxiety in her eyes when he’d arrived to salvage the tree, the sheer dread that had touched him deeply, even though he’d found it excessive. And then the joy that had brightened her face when he finally had the stakes in place and the tree propped. He’d thought then that the tree meant more to her than he did—and yet now she was taking care of him, drying his clothing and feeding him, rescuing him from the storm as he’d rescued her tree.

  The last time he’d eaten dinner with her, he had discovered how much he desired her—and afterwards, how committed she still was to her dead husband. Paul didn’t want to spend another evening feeling attracted to her and then listening to her run at the mouth about how amazing and incredible her one true love had been.

  But what were the alternatives? To say, "Thanks for the towels," and then head back out into the storm? To say, "You go ahead and eat" and sit by himself in the living room, where he could stare at all the photographs she kept on display of Mr. Wonderful and his fellow anti-war rebels? He was in no mood to deal with his truck’s flat tire, especially when the storm showed no signs of letting up.

  "Are you sure you don’t mind my staying?" he pressed her.

  "If I minded, I wouldn’t have asked. Maybe by the time we’re done eating the rain will have let up and you’ll be able to change your tire without drowning."

  He considered the invitation for a moment longer. It sounded relatively uncomplicated. "What are you serving?" he asked.

  She laughed, apparently interpreting his question as an acceptance. "I’m having what Shane would call a lady dinner—soup and salad. But I could fix you something a little heartier if you’d like."

  "Soup and salad sound great," he said.

  "Fine. I’ll turn up the heat under the pot and then go check your pants."

  He listened to her receding footsteps and then to the constant clatter of precipitation against the bathroom’s tiny window. Standing, he pulled back the curtain and peeked out at the rear yard. The sky was leaden and moonless, the rain unrelenting.

  Like the monsoons in ‘Nam, he thought, then shuddered and let the curtain drop back into place. The fabric featured a pattern of dark blue eight-pointed stars against a beige background. There was nothing frilly or feminine about the curtains—or about Bonnie’s house in general. Yet the atmosphere was warm and safe, a world away from the battering storms of Vietnam.

  He heard a light rap on the door, and then Bonnie’s voice: "Paul? Your jeans are dry."

  "Thanks." He reached around the door to take them, and quickly put them on. They were slightly stiff and toasty. As soon as he had his wallet, keys and change back in his pockets, he emerged from the bathroom.

  He found her standing at the stove in the kitchen, adjusting the heat under a pot of soup. "Help yourself to a beer if you’d like one," she suggested. "I’ve got some in the fridge."

  Bless her for offering. "Do you want me to get you one, too?" he asked as he opened the refrigerator door.

  She shook her head. "I can’t tolerate alcohol after a day at work," she explained, lifting the lid of the pot and releasing a cloud of aromatic steam into the air. She gave the soup a stir, then turned off the burner and pulled a couple of bowls from a cabinet shelf. "I’m usually so pooped, a few sips of beer would knock me out cold."

  "Is it really that hard teaching kids?" he asked.

  She served up two portions of chicken-and-vegetable soup, then brought plates and an assortment of salad dressings to the table. After filling a glass with water for herself, she took her seat at the kitchen table across from Paul. "It’s unbelievably tiring," she told him. "Especially at this time of year, when they’re suffering from spring fever and they can’t sit still or concentrate."

  "What grade do you teach?"

  "Fourth."

  "What made you decide to become a teacher?" Paul asked as he doused his salad with French dressing. "Were you one of those creepy little girls who always liked to play school?"

  She laughed at the image. "When I was a little girl I wanted to be the first woman on the Supreme Court. Thank goodness we didn’t have to wait that long for a woman to achieve the honor, but that was my goal: to be a lawyer and then a judge."

  A judge? He would never have figured Bonnie for that. But then, when he’d been a little boy he’d wanted to grow up to play center for the Boston Bruins. Children were entitled to dream big. "So, how do you get from Supreme Court Justice to fourth-grade schoolteacher?" he asked.

  She ate some salad and grinned. "When I grew up and started realizing what a mess the world was in, I decided that the best way to improve things was to get to the children while they were still young. If enough children were taught the value of peace over war, and of negotiation and compromise over ego and intransigence... If I could influence them to choose life over death and destruction, maybe when they grew up they’d be in a position to undo some of the damage our society has done and make the earth a better place. I’m sorry," she said, abruptly cutting herself off. "I didn’t mean to sound off like that."

  Paul understood that she was as eager as he was to avoid an argument tonight. Of course, he couldn’t really find much to dispute in what she’d said. What sane person didn’t think life was better than death? Her views seemed pretty naïve, but he wouldn’t point that out to her, not when she’d apologized for preaching at him.

  "This soup is delicious," he remarked, partly to let her know she was forgiven and partly because it was the truth. "Tell Shane to stop making fun of your cooking."

  "You tell him," she shot back, then chuckled. "Soup and spaghetti I can do. Anything more challenging than that, and I’m a disaster."

  Paul leaned back in his chair, sipping his beer and scrutinizing her. "I would have expected you to be a great cook. You seem like kind of an earth-mother type, with all that long hair and your being a teacher and all. I’d expect someone like you to bake bread and home-made cookies and put up your own preserves."

  She chuckled. "I always pictured myself as an earth-mother type, too," she confessed. "That is, once I got over my Supreme Court phase. I wanted to be the ultimate nurturer, in tune with the cosmos, living on a commune somewhere, cooking all sorts of wholesome feasts and raising a tribe of children. Unfortunately, nobody in their right mind would want to eat any feasts I prepared. And it doesn’t look as if I’ll be raising a tribe of children, either."

/>   Paul noticed the pensiveness creeping into her expression. For a moment, he found himself resenting her late husband not because of the guy’s politics but simply because with his death he’d destroyed Bonnie’s dream of having a large family. "Well," he pointed out logically, "if you’d had lots of children you probably wouldn’t have been able to become a teacher."

  "If I’d had lots of children of my own, I probably wouldn’t have felt such a strong urge to work with other people’s children," she countered with a smile. After a minute of thought, she brightened. "Not that I’m complaining. I’ve got Shane. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me."

  Paul digested the implication underlying her statement—that her marriage hadn’t been the best thing that ever happened to her—but didn’t comment on it. "It must have been tough raising Shane all by yourself," he said.

  "I didn’t do it all by myself," she admitted. "My parents live right outside Boston, in Newton. For the first year after Gary died, we moved in with them, and they took care of Shane while I earned my master’s degree in education. After he and I moved back to Cambridge, my folks still made themselves available whenever I needed help. They adore Shane."

  "I don’t blame them," said Paul.

  Bonnie smiled. "To tell the truth, Shane and I had a lot of practice at being on our own even before Gary died. For the first two years of my marriage, I used to travel with Gary wherever his work took him. But then Shane came along and money was tight—to say nothing of the hassles of traveling with an infant—so he and I would stay home while Gary went on lobbying trips and speaking tours. We missed Gary, of course—and it never occurred to us that one day he’d leave on a business trip and never come back. But we always had each other. And we still do."

  Paul observed her carefully. When she’d discussed her husband in the past, she had often become defensive or mawkish. Tonight, however, she seemed at peace with herself, able to talk about her loss without going to pieces. He was glad. He didn’t like seeing her cry; it made him feel guilty, even though he was never conscious of doing anything in particular to provoke her tears.

  Her soup bowl empty, she rose from her chair and peered out the window in the upper half of the back door. "It’s still pouring out," she announced, letting the curtain drop back into place. "Can I interest you in some coffee?"

  "Sure." He was in no hurry to get home—especially when getting home entailed changing a tire in a downpour. "I’m sorry if I’ve disrupted your evening," he added, aware of how much of her time he’d already taken.

  "You haven’t disrupted anything," she assured him, gathering the dishes from the table and carrying them to the sink. "And I’m sorry I’ve gone on and on about myself. I must have bored you."

  "Not at all," he insisted, helping her to clear the table. He found a dish towel and stood next to her. The last time he’d eaten at her house he’d dried the dishes, too. It had been the ideal task, allowing him to be near her, to admire at close range her clean profile and her tall, slender body.

  He was exerting himself not to notice her beauty now, not to focus on the smooth line of her throat, the tempting softness of her lips and the subtle womanly fragrance she exuded. As if she could read his mind, she buried her hands in the sudsy dishwater and said, "I’m also sorry about what happened the other day." She kept her gaze riveted to the bowl she was washing. "I just..." She scrubbed an invisible spot on the bowl with her thumb. "I think we’re better off just being friends."

  "Friends? Are you sure we aren’t enemies?" He sent her a quick smile so she wouldn’t take the question too seriously.

  She handed him the bowl and pulled a salad plate from the suds. "Let’s not talk about the memorial," she said.

  "Okay." He dried the bowl and set it on the counter. He wouldn’t push her on that subject; he was her guest, and basic courtesy demanded that he respect the limits she set. But his curiosity got the better of him. "Just tell me one thing—are you fighting the memorial for yourself or for your husband?"

  She shot him a flinty look. "You might say I’m fighting for Claire Collins," she said.

  "Claire?" The police chief’s wife? What did she have to do with it?

  "I’d rather see the town spend money on books for the elementary school library instead of on the memorial," Bonnie explained. "But really, Paul—" she offered him a hesitant smile "—I don’t think we should talk about it right now. If we do, we’ll wind up arguing."

  "You said you wanted us to be friends," he countered, refusing to back down. "Friends don’t shy away from disagreements—although, frankly, I’m not sure we’re really in disagreement. I have no objection to Claire Collins ordering more books for the school library. I just don’t see what that has to do with the memorial."

  "It’s a matter of dollars and cents," Bonnie explained, doing a respectable job of keeping her temper in check. "The town has enough money to spend on a memorial—which means it has enough money to increase the library budget, if it chose to. It doesn’t choose to, though. It wants to allocate all the money to a memorial and none to new books."

  Paul mulled over her charge as he wiped a handful of silverware with the towel. Her complaint seemed reasonable, but he couldn’t shake the suspicion that more than merely the library budget lay behind her resistance. "Suppose the town had enough money for both," he said. "Suppose they could afford to double the library budget and also build a memorial. You’d still object to it, wouldn’t you."

  She yanked the sink stopper up and let the dishwater drain out. Then she turned to him. "Yes," she conceded. "I would. Not because of Gary but because of me and what I believe in. He didn’t do my thinking for me. I hated the war long before I met him."

  Paul wasn’t sure what answer he’d expected or hoped for. What Bonnie said pleased him, though. It had the strength and conviction he had recognized in her from the start, the independence and certainty. He could accept the chance that his relationship with her would never develop beyond friendship a lot more easily than he could accept the idea of her being her late husband’s puppet.

  He gave her a tentative smile. "I’ve been rude," he apologized, "talking about this after you asked me not to. If I were you, I’d kick me out into the rain."

  She stared at him for a second longer, then broke into a grin. "That would be an act of war," she joked, taking the dish towel from him and hanging it over a drawer knob to dry.

  "Well, you ought to do something to me," he said as she filled two mugs with coffee. "Why don’t you raise some subject I don’t want to talk about?"

  She glanced at him over her shoulder, then set down the coffee pot and turned to hand him a mug of coffee. "Are you divorced?"

  The question threw him for a loop—not because his divorce was a particularly painful subject but because he was completely unprepared for Bonnie to question him about it. He took a long sip of coffee to buy himself time to recover, then lowered the mug and nodded. "Why do you ask?"

  "Well...I was just wondering why you aren’t married."

  He chuckled. "I find myself wondering the same thing about you. Although I suppose we’re coming from two different places. I’m not still carrying a torch for my ex."

  Bonnie opened her mouth to protest his assertion, then pursed her lips. Evidently she was aware that he’d meant his comment not as an insult but simply as an acknowledgement of her deep feelings for husband.

  "So, why haven’t you remarried?" she asked once they’d both resumed their seats at the table.

  From anyone else he’d resent the question. From another pretty single woman he would assume he was being stalked, and from other people—his parents, for instance—he’d assume he was being reproached. But he honestly didn’t mind Bonnie asking him. They seemed to be handling the sticky subjects well, and he was willing to keep at it, to see how far they could go. "I guess I haven’t found the right woman," he answered.

  "How could you possibly find anyone?" Bonnie challenged him, her pointed words softened by her s
mile. "You hardly ever date."

  He considered questioning her on her source regarding that information, then decided not to. That Bonnie had taken enough interest in him to investigate his social life was flattering. "The last time I asked a woman out," he returned, mirroring her smile, "I practically got slapped in the face."

  "I would never slap you, Paul," Bonnie swore. "I don’t believe in violence, remember?"

  He laughed.

  She joined his laughter for a second, then grew serious. "I’m not the only single woman in town," she persevered. "I’m sure you could find someone better suited to you, if you tried."

  "I’m not trying that hard," he allowed, then drank some coffee. Talking to her this way, intimately but without pressure, without worrying about the impression he was making, was as pleasant as kissing her. Even more pleasant, he thought, because he understood that no matter what he said, she wouldn’t push him away.

  "It’s difficult dating in a place like Northford," he explained, running his finger thoughtfully over the rounded handle of his mug. "You haven’t lived here that long—and I guess you’re not really into dating, so maybe you wouldn’t be aware of the problems. But in a small town, it’s not just that there isn’t a huge variety of available women to choose from, but everybody knows everybody’s business. I never told you I was divorced, but you knew I was. I don’t think I ever told anyone in Northford I was divorced, but everyone knows. If I dated a local woman and then we broke up, chances are I’d alienate half the town. People would drive over to the nursery just to give me grief about it—or else people would want to know whether we’d slept together or whatever. It’s all so public."

  "I’m glad you’ve warned me," Bonnie said with a laugh. "Now I definitely won’t go out with you."

  Paul laughed too. "I date women in other towns," he said. "It’s a lot less tricky."

  "But you aren’t trying that hard," she reminded him.

  He shrugged. "I didn’t make a very good husband my first time around," he admitted.