The Marine (Semper Fi; Marine)

by Cheryl Reavis

  “You like motorcycles?” Allison asked, simply to fill what could be an awkward moment.

  “Yeah,” he said, shifting the fretful baby to his other arm.

  “I bet you like Harleys.”

  “No. Indians. I . . . used to have a restored Indian Chief with a chummy seat, but I had to sell it.”

  “Chummy seat?”

  “So somebody could ride with you.”

  “Oh. Who did you sell it to?” she asked, and he gave her a look she couldn’t quite read. She supposed that the most logical thing would have been to ask why he’d sold it and not to whom, but she was more curious about the latter. If he’d done the restoration himself, it would matter to him who bought it.

  “A retired Marine sergeant,” he said. “He lives around here. He still lets me take it out on the road sometimes, but it’s harder now—with a baby,” he added, shifting his child again as she continued to fret. “She’s teething. She doesn’t like those teething ring things. She’d rather bite on the furniture. Or me.”

  “Have you tried a frozen washcloth?” Allison asked. “You just wet some clean ones and put them in a bag in the freezer and take one out when you need it. Babies like to bite on the cold cloth.”

  “You know a lot about teething babies, do you?”

  “I took a babysitting course at school.”

  “Good for you. So what do you want, Allison James? Does your mother know you’re here?” he suddenly added.

  “No.”

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve, you know that?”

  She gave a quiet sigh. “I guess,” she said, because he didn’t seem mad about it.

  He smiled suddenly. “She’s like that,” he said of his daughter. “Brave.” He smiled at the baby and the baby tried her best to return it—briefly—before she began to squirm and fret again.

  “Could I . . . hold her? I know how.”

  He hesitated. “She’s not happy right now.”

  “I don’t mind,” Allison said.

  “Okay, then. I need to heat up something for her to eat.” He handed over the baby, who stopped fretting long enough to inspect Allison’s face and hair and to try to poke a chubby, already juicy finger into the corner of Allison’s mouth.

  “What’s her name?” she asked, dodging the finger.

  “Spike,” he said, taking the lid off a jar of baby food and dumping the contents—something chunky—into a small bowl.

  Allison laughed. “No, really.”

  “Elizabeth.”

  “Hello, Elizabeth. Hello, Lizzie,” Allison said with just the right tone to inspire a smile.

  When she looked up, Joshua Caven was staring at her. “Why did you call her that?”

  “Lizzie? It’s short for ‘Elizabeth’ and she sort of looks like a Lizzie. It just . . . fits. I didn’t mean . . .”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said shortly. “So what did Grace tell you about me?”

  A car horn blared outside before she could answer.

  “That’s my sister. I have to go,” she said, dodging the baby’s inquisitive finger again.

  “What did she say, Allison?”

  Allison looked at him. She couldn’t see any alternative but to tell him the truth. She wanted to tell him the truth, but not to be mean, to keep him from that awful useless kind of hoping. She knew what useless hoping felt like. It had taken the hospital people a long time to tell her and her mother and Lisa for sure that the accident victim known as Trent James was dead.

  “Those papers must be wrong,” she said, dodging the question in spite of her convictions.

  “What did she say?” he asked again, his voice quiet now.

  “She said you weren’t her son,” Allison said in a rush.

  He gave a brief, odd smile that wasn’t a smile at all. “Well, she should know, right? Did she even look at the papers I left?”

  The car horn sounded again. And again.

  “I don’t know.” She handed him the baby. “‘Bye, Lizzie,” she whispered.

  “Hey,” Joshua said as she turned to go. He started to say something more, then didn’t.

  “What?” she asked, stopping halfway outside so Lisa would quit blowing the stupid car horn.

  “Grace—is she a good mother?” he asked.

  Allison hesitated, surprised by the question. “Yes,” she said. “She is.”

  Chapter Four

  GRACE LEFT THE house early Saturday morning—grocery shopping, she would have said if anyone had asked. The girls were still asleep, and she taped a note on the bathroom mirror, advising them that she’d gone to the store but leaving out the fact that she planned to get there by way of the fishing pier. She didn’t think they needed to know that she was making a side trip specifically to look for Joseph Kinlaw. She didn’t want to call the man on his cell phone. It was hard enough to keep him talking face to face. She didn’t want to give him the option of hanging up on her when she wanted—needed—to know what he knew before she met with Sergeant Caven again, assuming that the young Marine still wanted to meet with her. She hoped he’d figured out there was a serious glitch in his adoption paperwork.

  Except that life never worked like that. Wishes were never horses, and Grace needed to get this thing settled once and for all, for her daughters’ sakes.

  He looks too young to be a sergeant, she thought as she walked to the car.

  The morning was breezy and chilly, typical early spring on the coast. Traffic was light on the way to the beach, but there were still the expected number of hardy day-trippers setting up for a long day of surf and sun. It took her a while to find a legitimate place to park, and it was far enough away from the pier to give her time to change her mind if she’d been so inclined. Fortunately or unfortunately, her resolve held during the walk to where she hoped to corner Kinlaw. She fully expected to have to pen him up between her and the long drop to the ocean to get anything out of him.

  The wind was strong at pier level, and cold. Grace zipped up her jacket and kept going, making her way down the wooden planking around, and sometimes over, tackle boxes and a hodgepodge of coolers, from the expensive super deluxe kind to the one-price store Styrofoam variety. A few of the fishermen, and one fishing woman, spoke to her as she passed. She knew them all well enough to have stopped and chatted for a moment. She didn’t stop.

  She eventually saw Joseph Kinlaw near the end of the pier. She walked toward him, taking her time so that she could validate her initial impression of him. As fishermen went, he was clearly the kind who approached the process with intensity and purpose, paying little attention to the activity around him. He just . . . fished. As if it mattered.

  But, less than a yard away from him, she lost her nerve, stopped cold by sudden misgivings about coming here.

  “You going to fish or cut bait?” Kinlaw asked suddenly.

  “I am fishing,” the teenage boy standing next to him said. The kid looked more like a skateboarder than a fisherman—out of place and not particularly happy.

  “Not you. You,” he said, looking at Grace. “What can I do for you, Mrs. James?”

  She didn’t say anything, but he didn’t seem to notice. “This is Joe Benton,” he said of the boy. “Joe-B, he likes to be called. He goes to school with your daughters.”

  “Hi,” Grace said.

  For a moment, she thought the boy wasn’t going to participate in the pleasantries.

  “Yeah, hi,” he said, but not particularly to her. He glanced at her. “Are you Lisa James’s mother?”

  “Yes. And Allison’s.”

  “I don’t know Allison. I’ve got a couple of classes with Lisa. She’s a real—”

  “Watch it,” Kinlaw said under his breath, but Grace heard him in spite of the wind.

  “I hear
Lisa’s grounded,” the boy said, making Grace wonder how much he’d amended his original thought.

  “Who told you that?” she asked, looking at Kinlaw.

  “One of the Lisa clones,” he said.

  “If you hang around a little while, Mrs. James, you can talk to Josh,” Kinlaw said. “He usually comes out here Saturday mornings.”

  “No, I don’t—I—” Grace stopped and looked out toward the ocean. A diving pelican plummeted toward the water in search of a meal. “Actually, I’m here to see you. Just what is your interest in all this, Mr. Kinlaw?” she asked, looking back at him.

  “Call me Joseph,” he said. “My interest? It’s . . . what I do—when I’m not fishing.”

  “You mean meddle?” Grace suggested, making Joe-B have to choke off a laugh.

  “Oh, yeah,” the boy said. “He’s all about getting up in people’s business.”

  “Shut up,” Kinlaw said, but not unkindly. He handed the boy some money. “Go get yourself something to eat—bring me back a sausage biscuit and the change.”

  “What? You’re not worried I’ll run off with it?”

  “I don’t think that’s going to get you very far, and I’m not the one on probation. What have I got to worry about?”

  The boy didn’t say anything more. He stuck the money in his jacket pocket and left.

  “So, what exactly do you do?” Grace said. “When you’re not fishing?”

  He took his time about answering. Clearly, the bottom feeders were his priority at the moment.

  “I’m a . . . volunteer . . . go-to person,” he said eventually.

  “For what?”

  “Little bit of everything. Personal problems mostly.”

  “Like what?”

  “Usual military baggage—drinking, women, nightmares, debt, whatever. Some of these guys—and some of the women, too—they won’t go the direct route for help. I’m a . . . bridge. For the real help.”

  “So, do you like being a volunteer go-to person?”

  “Not much, no. It’s a lot of trouble and heartache. Your basic pain in the ass.”

  “Then why do it?”

  “Because I used to be where a lot of them are.”

  “In the military.”

  “That, too.”

  “They must trust you, I guess.”

  “Correct.”

  “You were a Marine?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “You’re . . . self-assured like a Marine. And not what I would call shy.”

  Surprisingly, he smiled. But the smile was brief, as if he didn’t want her to suspect that she might have actually located his sense of humor.

  “If you’re ready to talk to Sergeant Caven, I see him,” he said.

  “No, I—”

  “It’s going to be hard to get by him without him seeing you—unless you want to jump off the pier. Lock and load, Mrs. James. You can do it.”

  She looked down the pier. Joshua Caven was indeed walking in their direction. He had the baby in his arms. She was wearing a little pink “hoodie”—with the hood up against the wind—and she looked adorable, full of smiles and interested in everything. If he was surprised to suddenly see Grace there, it didn’t show. Or maybe it did. In any event, unsettled or not, he still managed to be decisive.

  “Ma’am,” he acknowledged once he was close enough, as he might to anyone he found standing with Kinlaw. “How’s the fishing, Sergeant?”

  “Not bad,” Kinlaw said. “I see she’s feeling better.”

  “Popped another tooth through. Life is good.”

  “Josh, do you think we could talk?” Grace asked suddenly, probably taking both men by surprise. But even she could see there was no point in putting this off. She was here now; so was Joshua Caven and the eight hundred pound gorilla that was his adoption mystery.

  “Sergeant Caven!” someone called from down the pier.

  Josh looked in that direction where a young man with a crutch hobbled painfully toward them. He made no attempt to try to shorten the injured man’s trip. He stood and waited, despite the fact that the man was obviously finding it difficult to manage a crutch and whatever was causing a pronounced limp. He had to rest from time to time, and when he was close enough—so that neither one of them would lose face, Grace supposed—Josh walked the last few steps to meet him.

  “How about taking the baby,” Kinlaw said to her. “So they can talk.”

  Grace frowned. “What?”

  “Go get the baby. That’s one of his guys. I think there’s some heavy stuff going on there. It would probably help if Josh didn’t have her right now. Her name is Elizabeth, by the way.”

  She hesitated, annoyed because he had essentially given her an order and he clearly assumed she was going to follow it. She wasn’t completely oblivious to the situation—not when both men were wearing Allison’s failed recital expression.

  “Damn it all,” she said under her breath as she walked to where the two men stood.

  “Could I hold her?” she asked Josh, making the request sound more as if it was something she wanted instead of something he might need.

  It was clear that he was surprised, but still, he held the baby out to her.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  She took the baby, and as she did, she could already see the change in him—the switch from young father to some entity she couldn’t identify.

  “Good job,” Kinlaw said when she walked back with Elizabeth in her arms.

  “Where’s her mother, Kinlaw?” she asked.

  “Not my question to answer, Mrs. James.”

  “Right. As a volunteer go-to person, you really suck, you know that?”

  She thought for a moment he was going to smile again.

  He nodded in Josh’s direction. “Josh Caven is a good Marine and his men know it. He’s responsible for them and they’re totally locked in to his judgment. It’s his job to keep them all alive and they believe he will. It’s a hard choice for him to make.”

  She didn’t quite understand about the “choice” aspect of his remarks or the dynamics of a military group, but she didn’t say anything. She turned her attention to the baby instead, trying to make her smile and succeeding without difficulty. She was a happy child and reminded her of both Allison and Lisa. Both of her girls had been ready with their smiles, even for strangers—all recent evidence to the contrary. There hadn’t been much smiling since the ill-fated bar excursion, and she still hadn’t decided if their mutual grounding was sufficient, considering their serious lapse in judgment.

  “Thank you,” she said abruptly.

  “For what?”

  “For meddling, actually. For telling me what my daughters were up to.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said, his mind clearly on his fishing.

  She looked down the pier again. Josh seemed to be listening more than talking, and whatever the one-sided conversation was about, it was intense. Sometimes the young man with the crutch stopped talking, as if he needed to collect himself, and when he did, Josh looked elsewhere, toward the beach or out over the ocean. She couldn’t help but wonder what was happening.

  She began to walk around the pier, shielding the baby from the wind and chatting to her about all the fascinating things around them—fishing poles, the ocean, the gulls, Kinlaw—naming things the way she used to for her daughters, regardless of the limitation in their ability to understand.

  “Oh, look,” she said to Elizabeth when they encountered an open cooler. “Fish! Gray trout. Wow.”

  “Ooooo,” Elizabeth said, and Grace laughed.

  “Ma’am,” Josh Caven said behind her. He immediately reached for the baby, who was as happy to see him as she’d been to see the almost reachable fish. But he wasn’
t quite the young father again, Grace thought. It was more that he had one foot firmly planted in both camps, and it was painful for him somehow.

  She expected him to walk away, but he didn’t. He stood there, waiting.

  “Kinlaw told me he was one of your guys,” she said after a moment.

  “Yeah.”

  “He looks so young.”

  “They’re all pretty much kids,” he said, and she had to work not to smile at the irony of his statement. He looked like a kid himself.

  “He was wounded?” she asked, looking toward the young man as he hobbled away.

  “Yeah. IED.”

  “He looked . . . upset.”

  “Yeah,” he said again. “He thinks he let me down.”

  “Did he?”

  “Hell, no,” he said. “Sorry. I’ve got to get a handle on that—the language. I don’t want her swearing like a Marine.”

  “No,” Grace agreed, smiling because Elizabeth suddenly smiled at them both—a wise, baby smile that suggested she just might understand what her father was talking about.

  “I . . . always felt more responsible for him,” he said, nodding towards the shore. “I guess because we’ve got the same birthday.”

  “When is that?” Grace asked mildly, still interacting with the baby.

  “You know when my goddamned birthday is!” he said sharply, causing Kinlaw and who knew how many others to look in their direction.

  “No,” Grace said quietly, looking him in the eye. “I don’t.”

  He didn’t say anything for a long time, long enough for the baby to suddenly lean forward and reach for Grace again. Grace took her. And waited.

  “I just—” he said, then looked out over the water. He abruptly sat down on the nearest bench, and Grace sat down beside him. The gulls soared overhead, riding the strong wind before they swooped on in search of food.