The Marine (Semper Fi; Marine)

by Cheryl Reavis

  “You see?” Lisa said. “I told you this whole thing was crazy! You are such a cement brain.”

  “Am not.”

  “If Mom ever finds out about this—”

  “You’ll be in deep you-know-what.”

  “Me! This wasn’t my idea! You blackmailed me!”

  “You went off and left me at a bar!”

  “I told you not to get out! All I did was go turn around.”

  “And you took your own sweet time about doing it, too.”

  “I came back, didn’t I? Flash! You are so—I don’t even know.”

  “I saw his truck!”

  “Only it wasn’t his truck, was it? You are totally the Queen of Stupid Thinking.”

  “It might not be his, but it was the one he was driving when he came to the beach house.”

  “Well, one thing’s for sure. I’m not taking you to look for him anymore. I don’t care what you threaten to tell Mom.”

  “It wasn’t a threat, Lisa. And I’ll let you know when I want to go looking again.”

  GRACE WAS SWEEPING dead leaves off the front porch when her daughters returned from their trip to the strip malls. She gave a quiet sigh at the synchronized slamming of both car doors when they got out and the “mad sibling stomp” from the driveway to the front of the house. Clearly, they were squabbling again, and she did not want to get drawn into yet another of their dramas.

  “Find what you were looking for?” she asked mildly as they came up the front steps.

  The answers came as simultaneously as the slamming car doors had.

  Yes.

  And, no.

  Grace went back to sweeping as they pushed and shoved each other to get inside. It was precisely the point where she should have intervened, but she was tired of being a referee. She was tired of everything, so tired that she consciously chose to let this latest altercation slide in the faint hope that it wouldn’t escalate. She didn’t want to hear the excuses and the recriminations, and most of all, she didn’t want to carry around anymore guilt. She had quite enough as it was. Apparently, it was in her genetic makeup to feel responsible for everything, even for the people who wandered into her life—like the young man who had thought she was his mother. Intellectually, she knew that he would eventually sort it all out without her help, but he and his baby girl had been on her mind all day. She couldn’t help but worry about baby girls, even when they eventually matured into exasperating teenagers.

  “Mom,” Allison said, stepping out on the porch again.

  “Allison!” Lisa yelled from inside the house.

  A vehicle turned into the drive, and Grace looked in that direction. It was a truck—a faded blue one.

  “Oh, no,” Allison said behind her and fled into the house.

  “Allison, what—” Grace said, but the driver of the truck was already getting out. Grace stood there with her broom, waiting as he came up the walk, not knowing whether or not to be relieved that he wasn’t the young man.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” the man said. “My name is Joseph Kinlaw.” He took out his wallet and showed her his driver’s license.

  Grace looked at it, but she had already recognized him. He was one of the fishermen she’d often seen on the pier. And she’d seen him in the passenger seat of the faded blue truck just before the young man who thought he was her son had made his visit.

  There was a commotion at the window behind her. She looked around in time to see Allison yank Lisa out of sight.

  “Your daughters are worried about me being here,” the man—Kinlaw—said.

  “Why?” she asked pointedly.

  He ignored the question. “You do realize you’re not addressing the problem.”

  “What problem?”

  “Josh Caven. I’m going to make this short and sweet. Your girls have been out looking for him, and I don’t think you know about that. You need to settle whatever it is between you and Sergeant Caven ASAP, and they need to be in the loop when you do it—before somebody gets hurt. Have a nice night.”

  With that, he turned around and headed back down the walk.

  “Wait a minute! I don’t even know you—you can’t just—”

  “I’ve said what I came to say. I’m done here.”

  “Well, where were they?”

  “They were in a place they had no business being—where they probably wouldn’t have been if you’d taken the time to be upfront with them.”

  “There is nothing to be . . . upfront about!”

  She needed to defend herself against his blatant misconception, but she realized suddenly that in this regard, he was probably right. It was no surprise that Allison would have been brimming with unanswered questions. Lisa, on the other hand, would have happily banished the whole incident from her mind—except that she hadn’t, for some reason. She’d apparently joined forces with her sister to go on some kind of quest to find their possible stepbrother—or so this man obviously believed.

  She switched directions.

  “How do you know they were looking for . . . Sergeant Caven?”

  “Your daughter asked me if I knew him.”

  “Oh. Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he—who is he?”

  For a moment he seemed surprised by the question.

  “He’s a Marine out of Lejeune.”

  “Do you know why he—?”

  “Look,” he interrupted. “He’s the one you need to talk to, not me. And the sooner, the better. He can answer all your questions. Here,” he said, coming back up the walk, reaching into his shirt pocket for a small notebook and a pencil. “He doesn’t have a phone. This is his address for the time being if you want to talk to him in person. If you don’t, this is my cell number. I’ll give him your message. I suggest you use it.”

  He handed her the sheet of paper he’d written on, glancing past her to where a blatant struggle for the best place to peep out the window continued.

  “They’re not used to reaping the whirlwind, are they?” he said.

  He didn’t wait for her to answer. She stood there, incredulous that this man would actually come to her house to complain about her daughters. She knew he hadn’t intended that remark as a compliment to her mothering skills.

  Only he hadn’t really complained about them. His criticism had been aimed at her, and his allusion to the Biblical “sow the wind, reap the whirlwind” made it clear he thought she was the kind of parent who was certain her children could do no wrong, and as a result, they never suffered any consequences for their bad behavior. She watched him back out of the driveway, still annoyed by his nerve and at the same time, unwillingly grateful for it. She needed to know what her children were up to, and clearly, her enlightenment depended entirely on the impertinence of strangers.

  She turned and looked toward the window again. Both girls scattered as she walked to the front door and opened it.

  “Hold it!” she said just as they reached the top of the stairs. “Get back down here.”

  They came down, but their tumbrel faces were very much in evidence. She waited until they stood in front of her, but she didn’t say anything, mostly because she was so furious, she didn’t know where to start. She continued not to say anything until they began to fidget.

  “Mom, I didn’t do any . . .”

  Grace quelled Lisa’s opening rebuttal with a look.

  “Mom—Mom,” Allison said. “Mom—”

  “What!”

  “I know we shouldn’t have stopped at that bar—”

  “You were at a bar?”

  “Well—well—just on the outside,” Allison blundered on, clearly panicked that Joseph Kinlaw hadn’t been as forthcoming as she’d feared and spinning her unwitting revelation for all it
was worth. “And it was just me, see. Lisa, she wouldn’t—she didn’t—well, not really—”

  “You drove your sister to a bar,” Grace said, turning to her other child, surprised by how calm her voice sounded.

  “Not . . . exactly,” Lisa said.

  Grace was in no mood for semantics. “Not really? Not exactly? And neither one of you saw any danger in telling a complete stranger where you lived?”

  “We didn’t tell him, Mom,” Allison said. “I think he just followed us.”

  “Ah. Well, then. Not your fault, right? What is wrong with the two of you? You know better than to do something like this! Have you completely lost your good judgment?”

  Lisa sighed instead of answering, and Allison looked at the floor. Clearly, Kinlaw had been right. Innocent of unwed motherhood though Grace may be, she had still needed to discuss Sergeant Caven’s sudden appearance at the beach house with these two. It was simple, really. Even after all her assurances, her children hadn’t believed her. She had been an idiot to think Allison, especially, would just let the matter drop.

  “Are we . . . grounded?” Allison asked tentatively.

  “You know what?” Grace said, rubbing the painful spot in the middle of her forehead. “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

  “You don’t?” Allison said and got a good elbowing from her sister for it.

  “No. I have some things to think about.”

  “You mean Joshua Caven.”

  “Allison, I’m going to say this one more time. Sergeant Caven is not, I repeat, not my son. He’s not your brother. He’s not anything. You are not to go looking for him again, understand?”

  “He’s a sergeant?”

  “Yes.

  “What kind?”

  “Marine—no more questions.”

  “But we still need to know why he would think—”

  Lisa poked her with her elbow again.

  “Mom, I’m supposed to go to Julia Rose’s house at seven,” Lisa said.

  Grace didn’t say anything, deliberately letting the silence lengthen.

  “I can’t go, can I?” Lisa decided, giving Allison a hard look.

  “Nope.”

  “Well, what am I going to tell her?”

  “Tell her you lied to your mother. Now go do your homework. Both of you. If you don’t have any, I’ll find something else for you to do.”

  Grace waited until they were upstairs and in their respective rooms, which, luckily for them, didn’t entail any door slamming. She stood for a moment, then sat down on the bottom step to stare at the piece of paper with the address and phone number Kinlaw had given her. She was going to have to talk to somebody about this, and, unfortunately, it was going to have to be Joshua Caven.

  Except that she didn’t want to.

  She made a small sound of dismay. “A bar,” she said out loud. She hated to think what kind of place it had been if Kinlaw had been concerned enough to come to her house. Surely it hadn’t been one of those off-limits beer joints that were too rough even for the military.

  All she knew for certain was that she wasn’t ready to encounter Joshua Caven again. She suspected that he had even more worries than she did, and it was hard enough dealing with her own.

  “WE’RE TAKING THE long way home from school tomorrow,” Allison whispered in the dark.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Lisa said, apparently deciding not to pretend she was already asleep or to waste time telling Allison to get out of her room.

  “It means you won’t be hanging out with your faux friends after school. You’ll be at your chauffeuring job.”

  “Allison, what is wrong with you! You heard what Mom said. We can’t go looking for him anymore!”

  “I’m not looking. I know where he is. I saw the piece of paper that guy gave Mom when I went downstairs—she left it on the kitchen table. It had Josh Caven’s name on it and his address.”

  “I don’t care. I’m not doing it.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  Because Mom said we couldn’t.”

  “Yeah, right. Mom said you couldn’t go to the kind of party Julia Rose’s cousin is throwing, too.”

  “What party?”

  “You know what party. The one at that big house on the beach where those movie people used to live. The party that won’t have any chaperones. The party you and Julia Rose and Ana Camilla and the rest of the Mellow Shallow are going to pretend is one of your BFF sleepovers. That party.”

  Allison couldn’t see Lisa’s face in the dark, but she could sense the wheels turning in her sister’s head. For once, Lisa had nothing to say. She and her friends were so good at treating everybody else as if they were invisible, they forgot sometimes that the unseen and uncool actually had working eyes and ears.

  “How very ‘ton,’” Allison said, more to herself than to Lisa.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Maybe you ought to sleep on it—you know, so you can consider your options. ‘Night, ‘night, sister,” Allison said sweetly. She gave Lisa a little wave she probably couldn’t see, then looked both ways before she stepped out into the hall and made her way past her hopefully sleeping mother’s door to her own room.

  Lisa was in “no comment” mode when she came downstairs the next morning, and Allison didn’t try to talk to her. Lisa knew what she had to do, and she knew the consequences. All Allison had to do was wait.

  Their paths crossed briefly at the end of Allison’s lunch period.

  “You had better be at the car waiting, and I mean it,” Lisa whispered to her in passing. “We’ll be cutting it close enough as it is.”

  Allison smiled. “Whatever,” she said, aiming for the kind of bored indifference typical of Lisa’s crowd. But she knew better than to push her luck. Knowing about the secret party was her trump card and she wasn’t the only invisible underclassman with big ears. Any one of the underage invitees could get busted at any time, and the big event would be cancelled. Of course, she still had a considerable amount of her birthday and Christmas money left, but out and out bribery seemed worse than blackmail somehow.

  After the last bell, she all but ran to get to the car ahead of Lisa, and she had just enough time to catch her breath and look nonchalant before her sister arrived. It wouldn’t do for Lisa to know she’d been intimidated by the “be there or else” ultimatum.

  Allison told her the address as they left the school parking lot, but other than that, the trip to the mobile home park where Joshua Caven was supposed to live was made in total silence—a helpful thing, because Allison still didn’t know what she wanted to say once she got there. She kept changing her mind—believing her mother and then, with all the associated guilt, not believing her. It was all so confusing. She had no choice but to go to the source of the problem.

  The mobile home park wasn’t nearly as big as she had expected—just a few older trailers and no trees. She saw two people outside when they drove down the bumpy lane in search of the lot number—a man with biker tattoos painting a small white table and a woman sitting in an aluminum folding chair and reading a paperback while a number of children dumped sand in a green, turtle-shaped sandbox. Allison waved to them all as she and Lisa rode past.

  “There it is,” Allison said when she saw the stick-on numbers on a trailer two spaces down.

  Lisa parked in silence.

  “You’ve got fifteen minutes. That’s all. I’ll leave your butt here in a heartbeat, and this time I won’t come back.”

  Allison chose not to argue. There was no time for that, not if they were going to get home before their mother realized they’d managed an unauthorized side trip.

  She took a deep breath and got out. Somebody’s dog barked, but she couldn’t see it. She kept going, despite her bare ankles.
If the dog came tearing out at her, she’d just have to make a run for it. The question was, in which direction.

  She walked purposefully to the prefabricated cement trailer steps, looked around carefully, then climbed up to knock on the door. It must be the right place, she thought as she waited. She could hear a baby crying inside—and a male voice singing.

  Hank Williams, she thought suddenly. Her Grandfather James used to sing that same song when he was still alive—just to tease her grandmother when he thought it was time for dinner to be on the table. Allison stood there, missing them both suddenly and trying to remember what the song was called.

  Hey, Good Lookin’, she decided with a smile just as the door opened.

  Her smile faded at the sight of Joshua Caven up close. He looked terrible—as if he hadn’t slept in a long time—and the baby he held in his arms still cried.

  “My name is Allison James,” she said in a rush before she lost her nerve and before he decided she was selling something he didn’t want and slammed the door. “And I . . .”

  “James,” he said. “Grace James’s kid?”

  “Yes.”

  They stared at each other.

  “You come to have a look at me or what?” he asked finally.

  “I . . . don’t know.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, then unlatched the screen door. “Well, you better come in while you’re trying to figure it out.”

  Allison hesitated.

  “I’m not going to hurt you. Leave the door open so whoever’s in the car can see where you are,” he said.

  She believed him. She looked over her shoulder toward the car once before she stepped inside. The sun was shining on the windshield. She could just make out Lisa’s silhouette.

  “Leave the door open,” he said again, and she complied, relieved that Lisa could keep tabs on her—if she wasn’t buffing her nails or something.

  She looked around the trailer. It was very neat in spite of the baby equipment here and there—a windup swing, a playpen, a red plastic bucket full of toys. She could see a framed photograph of a young woman—a pretty young woman with long blond hair—sitting on the cigarette-burned coffee table in front of the couch. He picked it up and placed it face down on a stack of motorcycle magazines.