For Love and Country

by Candace Waters

  “Are you trying to say you’re not strange?” Lottie managed to shoot back.

  Luke’s blue eyes crinkled as he smiled. “Nope,” he said.

  The two of them had crossed onto the sand, which slid through Lottie’s pumps as they padded down the beach. She pulled them off and let her toes sink into the sand.

  “I didn’t get the chance to talk with you,” Luke said. “Before I made you head of the shop.”

  “I noticed that,” Lottie said, frustration stirring in her heart. Was this all just about work, after all? A flood of embarrassment coursed through her.

  “You think you can handle it?” Luke asked.

  “My commanding officer does,” Lottie said, keeping her eyes fixed ahead. “Or he wouldn’t have made me second-in-command.”

  Luke tilted his head as the waves crashed beside them. It hadn’t taken them long to reach the cove where she’d found Luke that other evening.

  “You mind getting your feet wet?” Luke asked.

  In answer, Lottie darted ahead of him, across the wet sand at the foot of the rock outcropping that hid the cove from the rest of the beach.

  “Hey,” Luke said when he’d followed her into the curve of the cove. “I’ve got something for you.”

  Lottie turned, curious.

  In his hand, he held a thick metal ring.

  “It’s the O-ring,” he told her. “From that first engine you worked on. I want you to have it, for luck.”

  Lottie held her hand out, palm up. The gesture felt vulnerable, almost childlike. She couldn’t believe that he’d kept it all this time.

  Luke placed the O-ring in her hand. She had expected it to be cool, like the metal in the shop. But it was warm from the heat of his hand.

  Surprised, she looked up at him.

  He was staring at her again with that same searching look he’d given her when they’d met at the cove before by accident, scanning her face, but in a way that made it seem like he was looking for something deeper, something hidden far within.

  But this time, he began to lean toward her, his eyes still locked with hers, his face moving closer and closer to her lips.

  Lottie stood there transfixed, her own heart racing. She wanted so desperately to lean toward him, to feel his arms wrap around her in an embrace.

  But just before he reached her, Lottie stepped away.

  “It’s against policy,” she said softly, looking down. She hadn’t realized until this moment just how much she wanted this. How much she wanted him. A floodgate gave way to her pent-up emotions, and they tried to carry her with them. It took everything inside her to keep the distance between them.

  “When this is all over,” she said, looking back up with a small smile, “you come back and collect that kiss.”

  She could see from the way Luke held himself that something was drawing him to her just as powerfully as she felt drawn to him. But just like her, he didn’t allow himself to close the distance. She could see from his face that he knew she was right. “Lottie,” he said, in a way that took her breath away. “It’s my last night.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Lottie said firmly.

  The way Luke looked at her then almost tore her heart in two. He looked so pained, so fragile, that she hardly recognized him. “You haven’t seen what I’ve seen.”

  Lottie’s hands had wanted to reach out for Luke, and her lips had wanted to kiss him. Now her heart tugged toward him, like an anchor to a moving ship. This was the closest he’d ever gotten to talking with her—really talking with her—about the things she knew he still wrestled with in his dreams.

  “Maybe I haven’t,” she said. “But I don’t believe the things you’ve seen are the only things you’ll ever see.”

  He sighed and turned to walk closer to the water. As he passed, his arm grazed hers and an electric jolt shot through her.

  “You’re going to be a great leader,” he said, looking out into the black abyss.

  Suddenly, the faces of the men back in the shop flashed in her mind and a wave of mortification coursed through her.

  “Is this why you promoted me?” she asked, almost in a whisper. She still felt unsteady on her feet from the power of feeling him so close to her. But the thoughts and questions that had begun to crowd her mind made it easier for her to resist him. “Because you have feelings for me?”

  But when he turned around, his expression was insulted, almost pained. In an instant, her words had broken whatever spell he had seemed to be under.

  “Palmer,” he said, suddenly in the familiar tone she knew as “Captain Woodward.” “What kind of CO do you think I am?”

  “I guess I don’t know,” Lottie said, her voice rising.

  “Then what kind of a man do you think I am?” Luke asked. “You really think I’d play with our pilots’ lives by promoting someone who wasn’t ready?”

  Lottie looked deep into his eyes, searching for answers. But the longer she looked, the more she realized there was a lot she didn’t know about Luke. And, she was finding out tonight, there was a lot she’d thought she’d known that wasn’t right.

  “It’s just—” Lottie said, her voice softer. “I never thought you…”

  Luke squinted. “Well, Palmer,” he said. “There was a reason for that. I guess you thought I was pretty hard on you. Right?”

  Lottie nodded, a bit of fire flashing in her eyes at the memory of all the times he’d corrected or dogged or outright ignored her.

  “Well,” Luke said, “first off, I wasn’t about to let my best new recruit get lazy or overconfident. Or let her get away without learning anything she might need to know. You can’t tell me you haven’t learned anything while you’ve been working with me.”

  Lottie nodded. It was true. She’d learned more in her months working with Luke than she had perhaps ever in her life.

  “But there was something else,” Luke said.

  “What?” Lottie asked.

  “I didn’t want to cause any trouble for you. If the men got any hint I thought you were anything but a new recruit, it would have been over for you.”

  Lottie thought back to the comments she’d heard the men making about her promotion. Luke was right. They’d jumped to those conclusions even when neither of them had given them any reason to.

  “Well, then, let’s not give them a reason,” she said. The words came slowly as she worked this through in her mind. Nothing, no one, was more important to her than this mission. If Luke truly thought she was qualified, then she was going to do this the right way. Without a moment to lose her nerve, Lottie straightened and cleared the lump forming in her throat.

  “Godspeed, Captain,” she said quickly as she turned and briskly walked back up the beach so he wouldn’t see the tears streaming down her face.

  Twenty-One

  THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER HAD been anchored in the harbor for so long, and was so incredibly large, that it had become a piece of the landscape in Lottie’s mind. As long as she had been there in Hawaii, the big ship had been a feature of the bay. And when it began to move at last, it felt to her, standing on shore among so many of the other WAVES and sailors who had come out to see them off, like a piece of the island or an outcropping in the bay had just broken loose and begun to float out to sea, against all the laws of time and space and physics.

  Part of her felt pride in the moment. Almost half the birds on board had passed through their shop. And even from this distance, she could see that they were spaced a little tighter than on some of the other carrier decks she’d seen—a testament to the fact that their shop had managed to churn out those twenty extra planes.

  But the pride took a distant second to the deep ache that had taken over her heart when the carrier first began to move.

  “It’s like watching a mountain head out to sea,” Maggie said beside her.

  Lottie nodded silently. She hadn’t expected to be able to tell which man was which when the carrier moved out. She’d seen it from shore a million times, and she
knew that the deck was so far away that in general the forms of the sailors who milled around on it were as indistinguishable as ants.

  But in the crush of women who had come to watch the carrier ship out, she and Maggie had wound up next to someone who had an old, Navy-issue captain’s lookout glass, a short brass telescope that looked like it had been kicking around since several wars before this one.

  “They put us girls in charge of all the ancient stuff in the storage warehouse,” the woman told anyone who would listen. “So when I saw this, I thought, I know where I can use that!”

  Lottie wasn’t one of the women who was constantly jockeying to take a look through the glass, but it eventually got handed to her.

  When she looked through it, the figures on the deck of the ship suddenly sprang toward her. Instantly, she could make out the makes of the planes on deck, and see the individual uniforms of the men and what they were doing: testing that the planes were safely fastened to the deck; leaning over the railing to get a last look at shore; running down the bridge, probably with an order from the admiral who was standing high above, his white uniform blazing in the early morning Hawaii sun.

  “See anything, princess?” Maggie asked.

  And then, clear as day, there was Luke. He was already hard at work, with the side of one of the birds open to expose the engine within. And of course, a machinist’s mate whom he’d already corralled into service, running here and there on his orders.

  As she watched, the carrier’s horn blasted a friendly toot, in farewell to the harbor that had been its home for these last few weeks.

  Luke looked up and back at shore. And through the glass, Lottie had the unmistakable sense that, even over all that distance, their eyes had met.

  “Hey,” Maggie said, watching her expression closely. “You all right?”

  Shaken, Lottie nodded, then handed the glass back to the woman who had given it to her, wishing that she’d just passed it on rather than taking the turn to look through it herself. It did no good to dwell on things she couldn’t change.

  But Lottie still couldn’t erase the image from her mind.

  The men on the deck, which was receding instant by instant as the carrier moved out of the bay, had shrunk to specks because of their true distance from shore.

  But however Lottie tried, she couldn’t forget which one specific speck he was. And as it grew smaller and smaller, as the carrier crossed out of the bay and headed out to sea, her heart constricted so tightly that she didn’t know what to do.

  Everything in her told her that she should do anything in her power to stop what was happening.

  But at the same time, she felt paralyzed by the absolute knowledge that there was nothing she, or anyone else, could do to stop the carrier from moving out—and the war itself from churning on.

  When the carrier began to look like a child’s toy, dwarfed by the sheer size of the ocean and the endlessly distant horizon beyond, Lottie turned away from the view of the water. She felt like something that had been holding her up had just fallen away.

  Maggie, who was still at her side, looked at her closely. “All right, princess,” she said. “Back to work.”

  At this, a thought that had been wiped from Lottie’s mind by the spectacle and excitement of the departing carrier suddenly straightened her back.

  She didn’t have the luxury of crawling into a hole to rest this ache away, no matter how much she might have felt like it.

  The shop would be open this morning, just like always. And she was the one who had to take charge of it.

  “See you,” Lottie said.

  “See you,” Maggie said, her gaze still questioning.

  Squaring her shoulders, Lottie started off toward the repair bay without another backward glance at the sea.

  When she arrived, Cunningham was the only man in the hangar.

  “You didn’t go down to the harbor?” Lottie asked.

  Cunningham shook his head. “I’ve seen it before,” he said in a tone that let Lottie know that he was worn down by the harsh rhythms of war. Lottie suspected he’d seen a fair number of men leave on those ships and never return. “Why don’t you give out the assignments today, Palmer?”

  “Aye aye, sir,” she replied.

  Lottie took in a deep breath and walked over to the station where Luke used to stand, ready to command the men. It felt strange to take his place. And even stranger that he wasn’t there to see her do it. The ache she felt at missing him in this space, where he was always nearby, was almost overwhelming.

  She steadied herself by looking down at the muster list.

  Lottie hadn’t exactly made friends with any of the men in the shop.

  But over time, she felt she had fallen into a steady pattern of respectful partnership with some of the men she’d worked with. Men whom she could trust to have her back, or at least take her orders, now that she was in charge of the shop.

  Not one of those men was on the list.

  But there, near the bottom, was Pickman’s name, the last one she would have chosen for herself if she’d had any choice in the matter at all.

  She looked around the hangar. Even though they’d just sent the whole ship out, loaded with planes, there was already more work to do. Two planes had come in overnight.

  And on the other list Luke had shown her, of planes slated for repair but still in transit to the base, she could see almost a dozen more, beside the list of ten men they still had on staff.

  It might not have been a heavy load if the shop were full of mechanics. But with the skeleton crew she had to work with now, they’d have to continue working at a good clip to get these planes back into shape and back into action.

  The war didn’t stop, it seemed, for anyone.

  She looked up at the sound of footsteps. Several of the mechanics had wandered in at the same time: Jameson, whom she knew to be quiet and responsible; Harris, who was a loudmouth but was their resident welding wizard; Johnson, whom she’d never worked with before. And Pickman.

  They looked around the hangar much like she had, with a mixture of wistfulness and surprise. All of them had probably just come down from the bay. They seemed to feel the same way she had: listless and a bit restless.

  Then they looked at her.

  Lottie had felt the weight of responsibility as she got up that morning and as she walked down alone to the hangar.

  But until all those eyes turned to her, she hadn’t realized how important this moment was. If she didn’t take command now, and quickly, she might never be able to earn the men’s respect again.

  The thought of failure was sickening. Her biggest fear was having to come into the shop, day after day, with a group of mechanics whom she couldn’t command. But the idea of Luke’s coming back to his shop and finding it in disarray was worst of all.

  And there was only one solution to that. She needed to make it clear that she deserved her position of authority. And she needed to do it now.

  As she glanced over the faces of the men, her gaze slid more quickly past Pickman. She didn’t like the fact that he was there, she realized, so she was trying to pretend he wasn’t.

  But when she realized that, she looked back and locked eyes with him.

  “Pickman,” she said.

  “Yeah?” Pickman replied.

  Lottie considered demanding he come back with a more respectful reply, but all she could think of at the moment was what Luke might have said: “That’s ‘aye aye, sir’ to you, recruit.” And she didn’t want to give the men a chance to laugh if she demanded they call her sir—or ma’am.

  Instead, she narrowed her eyes, lifted her chin, and pointed at the first busted plane that had come into the shop the afternoon before, a seaplane with the name Mary Alice emblazoned on the side.

  “The Mary Alice,” she said. “Report says it’s not drawing fuel, but it was sluggish in flight before that. I want a full workup of the basic systems to see if it’s something more than just the fuel line. By lunch.” />
  This was a big ask. It would take some doing. It showed she knew what needed to be done and that she expected things to keep happening in the shop as fast as they always had.

  But Pickman was a complainer. And he could change the tenor of the whole morning by pushing back.

  She and Pickman watched each other.

  Then Pickman shrugged.

  “You got it,” he said, and headed for the seaplane.

  Jameson raised his hand for permission to talk.

  “Jameson,” Lottie said, hiding a smile.

  “I got experience with those seaplanes,” Jameson said. “Captain Woodward had me rebuild two of them, when I first got here.”

  Lottie gave a curt nod, and he trailed after Pickman.

  Then Lottie looked back down at her list, a feeling of relief washing over her as she decided how to allocate the remaining men for the day.

  Maybe, she thought, this would work out after all.

  Twenty-Two

  LOTTIE SIGHED AS SHE pushed through the crowd that was milling about outside the mess hall in the Hawaii twilight.

  She was exhausted after her first day in the shop, and all she wanted to do was go back to the barracks and drift off into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  But the base was crawling with newcomers. Since they’d deployed so many troops, the Navy had sent in replenishments, getting ready to ship out themselves on later carriers.

  A big group had arrived today, Lottie had heard, from training bases all over the continental United States. And it seemed like every single one of them was now standing between her and her bed.

  As she wove through the crowd, she let her mind wander to her bed back at home: covered with down pillows and duvets, all wrapped in cotton so fine it might as well have been silk. The flowers on her bedside table, always fresh no matter the season. And the ever-shifting moods of the tree beyond her window. What she wouldn’t have given for just an hour of sleep in that bed. Or just one more glimpse out that window.

  In her shapeless jumpsuit and bandana, Lottie felt pleasantly invisible.

  She would have never been able to slip through a crowd like this unnoticed before the war, she thought wryly. People were always saying it was amazing what the war could do to change you. And in this little way, at least, it was true for her.