by Mary McNear
“Yeah, I can believe it,” Will said, reaching out to tuck a stray strand of Daisy’s strawberry-blond hair behind one of her ears. “Because if you were like me this summer, Daisy, you’ve been a little distracted.”
It was the next day, right after closing time at Pearl’s, and they were sitting in one of the back booths talking. Or at least Daisy was talking. Will, who had come here to tell her something, something important, was finding it easier to listen than to talk.
“You’re right. I have been a little distracted this summer. I can’t imagine why,” Daisy said, leaning over and kissing him on the lips. Will smiled at her, relieved that in the week since her surgery, she’d started to look like herself again. Still pale, yes, but a soft, creamy pale, not the worrying grayish pale of her hospital stay.
“You know, Daisy,” he said now, running a finger down her cheek. “I didn’t just come here to flirt with you. I came here because there’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“Will, you look so serious,” she said, frowning slightly.
“Well, this is serious,” Will said, his mouth suddenly dry. He didn’t know what he was more nervous about, her reaction to what he was going to say or his reaction to her reaction to what he was going to say. Until this morning, it had all felt somehow unreal. Watching her face now, though, as the first shadow of anxiety flitted across it, it suddenly felt very real.
“What is it, Will?”
“I, I don’t know how to start,” he said, fiddling with the Coke Daisy had just brought him.
“Start at the beginning,” she said, her jaw tightening. And Will realized his nervousness was contagious. He sighed. This wasn’t going to get any easier for either of them. He needed to get it over with. Now. He took a deep breath.
“Okay, I’ll start at the beginning. And actually, Daisy, it was the beginning. For us, anyway. It was the morning after our first date, our first real date, the one at your apartment, and I’d driven up to Duluth to pick up a car part. While I was there, I . . . I walked by this army recruiting office. I swear to God, I’ve walked by that place a hundred times, and I’ve never even thought about going in there before. But that morning, for some reason, I went inside. I have no idea why. But I started talking to the guy there, the recruiter. At that point, I wasn’t thinking about joining the army. I was just . . . just curious, I guess.”
He was watching Daisy for a reaction, but she didn’t have one. Yet. She just looked alert, tense.
He took a quick, nervous sip of his Coke and kept going. “So the guy there, the recruiter, talked to me about all the job opportunities the army has to offer and how I might qualify for some of them with my background in mechanics. He suggested I take the army physical and vocational test. And I thought, ‘What the hell,’ right? I mean, what did I have to lose, really? So I passed the physical test and I did really well on the vocational test. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve never done well on a test in my life. But the counselor at the processing center said, based on my score, I’d be good at aviation mechanics. The mechanics part didn’t surprise me, I guess. But the aviation part did. I mean, I’ve read a lot about airplanes, but I’ve never worked on one. It didn’t matter, though. The test measures your aptitude for something, not your knowledge of it. And he said the military would train me in aviation mechanics, and after my time was up, I could stay in the military or work in the private sector. I mean, it’s so cool,” he said, his enthusiasm breaking through his nervousness. “Here I’ve been working mostly on people’s old, broken-down trucks and cars, and I could be working, one day, on airplanes or helicopters that cost millions of dollars to build.”
Daisy didn’t look like she thought it was cool, though. She looked like he’d said something to her in another language, something she was trying to translate into English for herself. “Are you saying, Will,” she said, finally. “Are you saying that you . . .”
“That I enlisted? Yes.” He nodded, looking into her eyes, her blue, blue eyes, and willing her, somehow, to be okay with all of this. “That’s exactly what I’m saying, Daisy.”
“Why . . . why would you do that?” she asked, and there was something about her expression that told him she still didn’t really believe him.
“Because it makes sense, Daisy. It makes a lot of sense. I know it may not seem like it now, but it does.”
When she didn’t say anything, Will tried again.
“Look, Daisy, I can’t just keep doing what I’m doing at the garage. I mean, I spend most of my time babysitting Jason. And I’m just barely eking out a living doing it. I did think about other ways to get ahead. I thought about going to college or vocational school. But you know college is out, Daisy. My grades were lousy. All that time I spent in the bleachers, smoking cigarettes, I guess.” He smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back at him. “And I looked at some of the programs at the vocational college in Ely, too, but most of them have a two-year waiting list, at least. And I don’t want to wait that long. I don’t want to wait any longer than I have to.”
“But when, when are you leaving?” she asked softly, and he saw that her complexion had gotten paler.
“Sooner . . . sooner than I thought,” he said. “Originally, I signed up for the Delayed Entry Program, and they told me I had several months before I needed to report. That’s why I didn’t tell you right away. I thought I had more time. But then, the day you had your operation, I got a letter saying that my ship date had been moved up, and that I had to report to the Minneapolis processing center and then fly to Fort Benning, Georgia, for basic training in ten days. So I’m going sooner than I thought I’d be going.” Will stopped talking. Something about the expression on Daisy’s face made him stop.
“Will, that means you have to be there in a few days,” she said.
“That’s right,” he said, nodding slowly. “I have to be in Minneapolis the day after tomorrow; I’ve already got my bus ticket.”
“The day after tomorrow?” she echoed, and the last of the color drained from her face.
“Daisy, I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t expect them to push up my ship date by almost six weeks.”
“But, still, you waited until now to tell me?” she asked, her voice quiet. Too quiet, he decided.
“Yes,” he said guiltily. “I waited until now. I know it was cowardly, and wrong, not to tell you sooner. But I knew as soon as I told you, it would hang over us. And you were so happy. And so was I. Then, we were going to Mr. Phipps’s cabin, and I didn’t want that to be about this, about us saying good-bye. I wanted it to be about us being together. I was going to tell you after we got back, but by the time I read the letter saying they’d moved up my ship date, you were in the hospital, and then, when you got out, it didn’t seem fair to spring it on you right away.”
“But now? Now it seems fair to spring it on me?” she asked, her voice almost a whisper.
“No, it doesn’t seem fair.”
Daisy looked away from him then, out the window of the coffee shop, and shook her head, slowly, and Will saw her eyes glaze over with tears. “So . . . so this is it?” she asked, looking back at him. “This is it, then, for the two of us?”
“What? No. God no, Daisy,” he said, reaching for her. She let him take her in his arms, but her body didn’t relax, didn’t yield against his. “Is that what you think? That I’m breaking up with you? Because I’m not. Look, basic training is nine weeks. After that, I have something called Advanced Individual Training. That’s where I learn my skill. But after six months, I’ll get two weeks off, and I can be with you again. I can be with you for every single second of that two weeks.”
“So we’re going to be apart for six months?” she asked, pulling away from him. Her voice was trembling, and when she blinked, a single tear slid down her cheek.
He nodded, and he felt it too, the awful realization that he’d have to go for that long without seeing her. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “It’s a long time. But we’ll write, and text, and tal
k, and do whatever we can do to stay in touch.”
“But what happens after the training?”
“After that, I’ll owe the army two years.”
“Do you know where you’ll be stationed?”
“No, I don’t, and I won’t have any control over that. But, Daisy, we can find a way to make this work. Other people do it. They do it all the time.”
But she only shook her head. “I don’t understand, Will,” she said, her voice breaking. “I know we never talked about what would happen after this summer. But I thought . . . I thought . . .”
“You thought I’d stay here, and keep working at the garage, and see you on the weekends? Come down to Minneapolis, or have you come up here?”
“Something like that,” she said, pulling a napkin out of the napkin dispenser on the table and wiping her eyes with it.
“But, Daisy, don’t you see the problem with that? Only one of our lives would be going forward. Mine would be standing still. Or worse, it’d be going backward.”
“Okay, but . . .” He saw her searching for another reason his plan wouldn’t work. She found one. “But, Will, you said once you hated high school because there were too many rules. The army is all rules.”
“I know that. But the reason I hated the rules in high school was because I didn’t know what they were for. In the army, I’ll know what they’re for and why I’m there, Daisy. I’ll know what I want.”
“What do you want, Will?”
“I want you.”
“You have me,” she said, with a sob.
“No, I mean, I want you . . .” He paused here, struggling with how to say this. He’d never said anything like this to her before. “I want you for the long run, Daisy. That’s why I have to have something to offer you, something more than I have now. Because I want you for good. I want you for the rest of my life.” He kissed her gently.
She blushed immediately, as he’d known she would, but he kept going. He was desperate to make her understand. “Daisy, do you know what I’ve been thinking about since we got back from that night at the cabin? I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to live with you. To fall asleep with you every night and wake up with you every morning. I never thought I’d want that with anyone. But I want that with you. I mean, do you remember, at the cabin, when we were getting ready to go and I told you I needed to go check on something?”
She nodded, a little uncertainly.
“I lied. I went down to the dock, and I looked out over the lake, and I looked back up at the cabin, and I thought, what if we had a place like that one day? A place that belonged to us? Only we wouldn’t have to lie then, or rearrange our schedules, or anything like that. It would be ours, and we’d live there together. That would be our life.”
“Will, we can have a life together now,” Daisy said, a little desperately. “Come back to Minneapolis with me, please. My roommates won’t mind. You can share my bedroom with me and when I start classes you can—”
“I can sit on the couch in your living room and wait for you to come back between classes so I can make love to you?”
“Well, yes,” Daisy said. “For starters, yes. That sounds like a good plan.”
Will couldn’t help but laugh. Because the truth was, right now, it did sound like a good plan, or at least the part about making love to Daisy did. But he realized then that he was getting sidetracked. They both were. If Daisy, for once in her life, was going to underthink this, then he was going to have to overthink it for her. Or maybe not overthink it. Maybe, instead, think about it just the right amount.
They sat in silence for a while then, Daisy crying quietly and Will trying to comfort her. Her blue eyes were red-rimmed, and her fair skin was blotchy and tearstained, but it struck him, nonetheless, that she’d never looked as beautiful as she did right now. And it left him feeling the same rush of emotions he’d felt at her hospital bedside that day, the day he’d told her he loved her.
“Look, I know this is a lot to take in,” he said, pulling her into his arms again. “And maybe, right now, it feels like a mistake to you. But you have to trust me here, okay? Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned this summer, Daisy, it’s that when it comes to you, I have to trust myself. I mean, that morning when I walked into the recruitment office, I already knew, somehow, how important you were going to be to me. And that afternoon, in high school, when I walked into the gym during one of your volleyball games, I—”
“Will, you didn’t even know I played volleyball in high school. You thought I was a cheerleader.”
“I knew you weren’t a cheerleader,” he said, kissing her wet cheeks. “And you know what? You would have made a lousy cheerleader, Daisy. And I mean that as a compliment.”
“But—”
“I’ll tell you all about it sometime,” he said, as he stopped kissing her cheeks and nuzzled her neck instead. “About all the volleyball games I watched. But right now, I just want to know that you’re okay.”
She took a deep, shaky breath and wiped another tear away with a crumpled napkin. “I think so, Will. It’s just . . . it’s a lot to take in.”
“Do you trust me, though, when I say we’re going to make this work?”
She nodded, but her brow was creased with worry. “But, Will, what if there’s another war? And you’re sent somewhere halfway around the world?”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he said. “I mean, I could be wrong, but I think it’s going to be a while before our country decides to fight in any more wars.”
She nodded, but she didn’t look especially reassured. So he pulled her back into his arms. “Six months will go faster than you think.”
But she pulled away from him then. “That’s another thing, Will,” she said worriedly. “I don’t know, honestly, if I can go for six months without . . . you know, us being together. I don’t even know if I can go for six minutes without it.”
Will laughed, but then he leaned down and kissed her. “That bad, huh?” he said, pleased, in a way, that she felt the same way he did.
She nodded seriously. “It’s bad. I thought I would think about it less after we went to Mr. Phipps’s cabin. But I’ve been thinking about it more. And it’s worse, Will. It’s so much worse.”
He smiled and kissed her again, a long, lingering kiss this time.
She pulled away, her breathing uneven. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“No,” he admitted. “But I can’t help it. You’re not the only one who spends all their time thinking about it, Daisy.”
“But what are we going to do about tomorrow night, Will? It’s going to be our last night for six months. We have to spend it together.” She hiccuped then and wiped at her eyes again.
He sighed. He’d thought about this, too. “I’d ask Bill Phipps if we could borrow his cabin again,” he said. “But he’s away on business now.”
“What about . . . what about your place?” she asked.
“No, I’m not taking you back there,” he said adamantly. “And I’m not taking you to a motel, either, even though, honestly, I’ve thought about it. But it would feel wrong somehow, sleazy. And you’re anything but sleazy.”
“Well, I may not be sleazy, but I am human, Will,” she said softly, resting her head on his shoulder.
“Look, we’ll figure something out, okay? But right now . . . I need to go. I’m sorry; I’ll come back as soon as I can. But I need to tell Jason about this, too.”
“Jason doesn’t know yet?”
Will shook his head. He was dreading telling Jason only a little less than he’d dreaded telling Daisy.
“Does anyone else know?” she asked, sniffling.
“Ray knows.”
“Ray?”
“Jason’s dad. I figured I owed it to him to give him time to hire another mechanic.”
“He won’t find anyone as good as you,” Daisy said loyally.
“He’s not even going to try. He’s selling the place and
making Jason get a real job,” he said, and he almost smiled then, because the thought of Jason actually having to work for a living was about the only thing he could find humor in right now.
“Okay, but don’t go yet,” Daisy said, holding on to him even tighter.
He kissed the top of her head. “I won’t.”
How’s she doing?” Caroline asked when Jack walked back into her kitchen later that afternoon.
“She’s stopped crying, I think,” Jack said, sitting down across from her at the kitchen table, where she was already on her third cup of coffee. He started to ask her then if it was always that hard, seeing Daisy cry. He’d seen her cry before, of course, when she was a very young child, and she’d bumped her knee or broken a toy. But this? This was different. This was worse. Something stopped him, though, from asking Caroline about it. Maybe it was the expression on her face. It was one of anxious regret.
“This is what I’ve been afraid of all summer,” she said, topping off her already full cup of coffee. “Daisy getting hurt.”
“Not hurt, exactly,” Jack qualified. “Daisy told me that they’re very much in love with each other. And that, army or no army, they want to stay together. They want to try to make this work, Caroline. Long term.”
“Well, that was the other thing I was afraid of,” Caroline said, but she smiled a little, and after a few moments of sitting in silence, she asked Jack, in a softer tone, “Did you . . . did you tell her about us, Jack?”
Jack shook his head. After spending the night at the cabin, Caroline had insisted that she get back home early, before Daisy got back from Jessica’s. She’d told Jack that she wanted Daisy to find out about them the right way.
“So she doesn’t know anything about our plans?” Caroline asked.
Jack shook his head again. He and Caroline had talked last night, in between lovemaking, and they’d decided that Jack would move back into the apartment, for now, but that after Daisy left for college later in the week, he would help Caroline pack up all her things and she would move out to his cabin, soon to be their cabin. The second, smaller bedroom there would be Daisy’s whenever she came home to Butternut. And Caroline would offer Frankie, who was already looking for another place to live, the apartment above Pearl’s. She was also going to offer him a partnership in the business, in exchange for his investment, and with the understanding, too, that if he was living upstairs, he’d be responsible for opening Pearl’s every morning. Caroline was thrilled with the possibility of being able to sleep in occasionally—“sleep in” here meaning sleeping until six thirty A.M.—and she was thrilled with the prospect of letting someone else shoulder some of the responsibility for the business with her. There was another thing she was excited about too. She and Jack had agreed, sometime around sunrise, that after the summer season ended, they were going to do something together they’d never done before: take a vacation. Caroline wanted to go to Bermuda, and Jack had to admit, he was almost as curious about the pink beaches there as she was.
