“Better make it four,” Dwight said.
C H A P T E R
3
Friday, 21 January
Even though they had gone to bed at ten-thirty, it had been a heavy week and Dwight felt as if he had barely closed his eyes when the alarm rang at four the next morning. He cut it off at the first sharp trill, but Deborah gave a drowsy groan as he pushed himself out from under the heavy covers. They both preferred a cold room for sleeping and the icy floor was a jolt to his bare feet. The bathroom was warm, though, and the hot shower left him feeling he could face a day that would probably include facing his ex-wife. He had told Deborah the night before that there was no need for her to get up, but when he came back into the bedroom to dress in a dark red wool shirt, black slacks, and a red-and-gray-striped tie, their bed was empty and the aroma of freshly brewed coffee drifted down the hall from the kitchen.
He was tying his shoelaces when she returned with a steaming mug. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know.” She used her own mug to cover another yawn. Standing there in an old blue sweatshirt with tangled hair tucked back behind her ears, she was sleepy-eyed and so utterly desirable that without the long drive in front of him, he would have pulled her back beneath the covers. Instead, he took the Thermos of coffee she had filled to help him through the drive, put on his black leather jacket, and promised to be back that night before Portland and Avery got home from their movie.
By the time Dwight reached Greensboro, there were patches of snow in the shady spots, and after he crossed the state line into Virginia, more of the landscape was blanketed with Wednesday night’s four-inch snowfall.
Plows and scrapers had left thick banks of snow alongside the highway, but the January sun shone brightly in a cold blue sky and the road itself was dry. Stifling a yawn, he turned the heater off so that the chill would help keep him alert.
When he tired of NPR’s bleak recital of world news, he fumbled through a handful of CDs Deborah had given him for Christmas. One three-disk set held more than seventy Johnny Cash songs, but he’d already listened to the whole set twice, so he popped an Alabama collection into the player instead. As the gentle harmonies of “Feels So Right” filled the truck, he found himself contrasting the two women he had married.
At thirteen, Deborah had been a headstrong kid, already full of the sass and vinegar she would possess as a woman, and the six years between them seemed so insur-mountable that he had joined the Army to avoid tempta- tion. Yet every time he came home on leave and hooked up with her brothers, there she was, more tempting than ever. He put in for special training and was reassigned to Germany, where he thought he was over his infatuation.
He told himself it had been a matter of forbidden fruit, an aberration; and when he met Jonna Shay, who was visiting an Army friend in Wiesbaden, he was taken in by her soft Southern voice, her beautiful face, and her slightly patrician air.
“But she didn’t fall into your bed right away, did she?”
his mother had said the one time he discussed it with her after the divorce. “And there you were, ripe for marriage.
Any reasonably compatible woman will do when a man’s ready.”
And yes, he’d been ready. And no, it wasn’t all bad. She had thought he could be molded into an officer and a gentleman, and he was willing to try. He took enough college equivalences to almost qualify for officer training, and with some strong recommendations from his commanding officers and a few bent rules, he made it into OCS through the back door. It was only later, when he was commissioned and his workload eased off a little, that he fully comprehended just how much Jonna felt she had lowered herself by marrying an enlisted man.
After her stint as Mrs. Sergeant Bryant, she was delighted to be Mrs. Lieutenant Bryant, to lunch regularly at the officers’ club, and to play bridge with the wives of majors and colonels. In the Army’s rigid caste system, enlisted and commissioned seldom socialize, but when she used that as an excuse not to hold a farewell cookout when the friend who had introduced them was being 2 transferred, he realized that she had quietly dropped every enlisted friend still assigned to the base.
Well before they were posted to the D.C. area, he knew the marriage was a mistake. A quick visit home for his mother’s birthday only confirmed the seriousness of that mistake. One glimpse of Deborah, newly admitted to the bar, lusty and vital and more desirable than ever, and he knew that what he had felt was not youthful infatuation, that he really did love her. Would love her forever. But she was involved with a state representative at the time and he was married, which meant that she was doubly off-limits. He had made his bed and he would keep sleeping there even though he found no joy in it. He spent long hours at his job with Army intelligence while Jonna kept a serene house and played bridge twice a week. There were no fights, no friction. From the outside, it looked like a good marriage.
Then the political climate changed. A couple of incidents grated on him so strongly that he abruptly resigned his commission and joined the D.C. police. Jonna was quietly furious. Not only did she lose her O Club privileges, she felt as if he had deliberately put her back on the enlisted side of the fence.
After that, they seemed to be simply going through the motions. It surprised the hell out of him when he learned that she had quit taking her birth control pills; but he was willing to try harder for the sake of the baby she had conceived.
With Cal’s birth, she quit pretending to like sex, and when she asked for a divorce, he did not fight it.
Nor did he try to stop her when she took Cal and moved back to the small town in western Virginia that had been named for her early nineteenth-century ancestor, even though the distance made it harder for him to see his son as often as he wanted. Shaysville, on the edge of the Great Smokies, was whitebread America—small enough that most of its middle-class citizens felt they knew everything worth knowing about one another, yet big enough to support a shopping center and a couple of furniture factories. Meth labs were gaining a toehold up in the hollows, but so far there were no gangs, and crime was pretty much limited to petty larceny and occasional drunken brawls.
