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  Here’s to the ladies with whom I lunch and who know more about Colleton County than I do:

  Claudia O’Hale, Belle Allen, and Mary Nell Ferguson.

  Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

  — Exodus 20:12

  Let’s close our eyes and make our own paradise…

  — “Let’s Fall in Love”

  1943

  She first notices him because he always sits at a table off to the side of the USO club and he usually sits alone. For some reason, he reminds her of her father, the only person in Dobbs that she misses. Not her mother, not the friends she had gone to school with, and certainly not the boys who joined up as soon as they turned eighteen and who think she is counting the days till they return.

  KEEP UP THEIR MORALE! the posters urge; and to do her part, she writes weekly letters that give them news from home yet promise nothing, no matter what they might think. If they survive the war—and one has already died in the Battle of Corregidor—they will come back and become doctors, lawyers, or bankers like their fathers before them. They will be good men, pillars of the community, and they will live in big houses and buy their wives fur coats or take them to Europe every three or four years once things settle down over there, but she never plans to become one of those wives herself. Turn into her mother? Devote her life to maintaining a perfect home, to keeping up appearances?

  No—NO—NO!

  She drops out of Saint Mary’s after one semester. “It’s a debutante school!”

  “So?” says her mother. Ever since Sue and Zell were toddlers, Mrs. Stephenson has dreamed of seeing her daughters make their debut together and she will never forgive the Germans for a war that has cancelled all debutante balls for the duration.

  “You keep saying what you don’t want,” her bewildered father says. “What is it you do want, honey?”

  “I don’t know,” Sue cries. “I don’t know! I just want to live a real life,” which is the closest she can come to articulating this nameless yearning to be needed, to make a difference.

  “Do you want to teach?” he asks.

  In his world, teaching is the most popular choice for women who do not immediately marry. “What about music?”

  The organist at their church is a woman, a woman so pale and timid that he immediately searches for a more vigorous alternative and thinks of Margaret Mitchell, a distant cousin. “Or perhaps you could write?”

  She is honest enough to know she has no true artistic talents. No desire to pour out her soul on paper and no deep interest in classical music. After years of piano lessons, she mostly plays Cole Porter and Irving Berlin by ear, while that one lackluster semester at Saint Mary’s only confirms that she is bright but no intellectual.

  In eighth grade, a fiery and dramatic teacher reads them Wordsworth’s stirring call to action—“Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal.” That’s when a restlessness first takes root in her soul, a sense of time inexorably passing, a feeling that there is a life she is meant to lead, things she is meant to do, things that have nothing to do with the war, although it is the war that has let her mother be persuaded that they could contribute to the national cause. Mrs. Stephenson feels vaguely guilty that she has no sons to send to battle, which is why she finally allows Sue and Zell to go to Goldsboro in their stead.

  Sue has pushed Zell to come with her, but she has no illusions that her job here at the airfield is vital to winning the war. Clerk-typists are at the bottom of the paper-pushing totem pole, and there is an endless stream of paper that must be pushed. Anybody who knows the alphabet can file. What raises her up an extra pay grade is her typing speed and accuracy. In the department where she and Zell work, every document requires four carbon copies. Make an error on the top sheet and each has to be carefully corrected with two separate erasers while all nine sheets—one bond, four carbons, and four onionskins—are still in the machine so as not to lose the alignment. Most of the girls in the typing pool average two errors a page; she averages one error per three pages and her slender fingers hit the keys so squarely and with such force that the fourth copy is almost as legible as the first.

  The material itself is boring, though—reports and requisitions that are as dull as the deeds and depositions she types for her father in the summer when she fills in for vacationing clerks at his law firm.

  After three months in Goldsboro, she tells her sister, “Let’s go to Washington. That’s where all the fun is.”

  “Washington? Don’t be a goop, Sue. Mother barely agreed to Goldsboro and it’s only sixty miles from home. She’d never let us go three hundred miles away. Never in a million years.”

  “We don’t need her permission.”

  “Yes, we do,” Zell says logically. “I do anyhow.” Zell is bookish. She shares none of Sue’s troubling doubts and looks forward to becoming Mrs. Ashley Smith when Ash comes safely home. “Please stay here. I couldn’t stand it if you went and left me behind.”

  “Who’s leaving you behind?” asks Beulah Ogburn, who shares the top floor of the boarding house with her brother and the two Stephenson sisters.

  “Sue wants to go to Washington.”

  “What’s in Washington?”

  “Life!” says Sue. “Excitement! People! Bright lights!”

  “With blackouts?”

  Sue gives an impatient wave of her hand. “You know what I mean, Beulah. Don’t you ever get tired of J.C. bird-dogging us?”

  J.C. is their self-appointed chaperone and protector. A slight deafness has kept him out of the army, so he, too, works at the airbase. Night shift in the machine shop. He’d rather be farming, but he adores his sister and figures she’ll be ready to go home as soon as he’s saved enough money to buy a tractor.

  Next day Beulah brings them a flyer calling for volunteers at the USO club. “They need girls to entertain the boys who’ll soon be going overseas.”

  “Entertain how?” growls J.C.

  Beulah reads the flyer. “Serve them coffee and doughnuts. Dance with them. Or just talk to them.” Beulah is outgoing and gregarious and her feet were made for dancing.

  J.C. disapproves, of course, especially as it means they’ll be going out at night while he’s working. Sue laughs at him. “Zell will chaperone us, J.C. She’s practically an old married woman.”

  And indeed Zell would be quite happy to continue their quiet nights, reading a library book and writing long letters to Ash, but she’s a good sport and Sue can talk her into almost anything. “At least it isn’t Washington,” she writes Ash.

  They are popular additions to the club. Zell is a sympathetic ear for homesick young farm boys learning to fly, Sue augments the jukebox’s outdated selections on the piano, and Beulah can convince the most uncoordinated left-footer that he’s Fred Astaire. Like Sue, Beulah writes chatty letters to her brother’s best friend, a boy who plans to marry her as soon as the war is over. “Not going to happen,” says Beulah. “Footloose and fancy-free. That’s me!”

  (Except that she will go and fall head over heels in love with a boy from Nebraska who will be killed in action so that she winds up m
arrying J.C.’s best friend after all, but that’s in the unknowable future. Right now, it’s laughter and fizzy ginger ale and Friday night movies.)

  But Captain Walter Raynesford McIntyre, US Army Air Corps, has the same sad eyes as her father and she wonders if he is unhappily married, too.

  “He’s too old for you,” her sister Zell says the first time Sue meets him away from the USO club. “Besides, he’s probably married.”

  “He’s only thirty-four,” she says. “And he’s not married. I had someone take a look at his personnel file.”

  They go to a club at the edge of the airfield. He drinks bourbon on the rocks and she pours a little into her ginger ale. They talk about the war at first, then she tells him about Dobbs with its small-town social constrictions and suffocating standards. In return, he tells her about growing up in New Bern, down toward the coast. New Bern may be bigger, he says, but its people are just as narrow-minded and Raynesfords lead the pack, so he understands her frustration at not knowing what she wants from life.

  Unlike most adults, he does not suggest possibilities.

  “You’ll know when you see it,” he says. “I did.” There’s sadness in his voice and bitterness, too.

  He’s a flight instructor and she thinks he means that he wants to join the action, that he chafes at being kept stateside.

  When he lights her cigarette, she takes the lighter from his hand. It’s a brass Zippo with his initials engraved inside a frame composed of a vaguely familiar design.

  “Greek keys,” he says. “They’re supposed to symbolize the flow of life…or love.”

  “Did your girlfriend give it to you?”

  He slips the lighter into his pocket without answering. The sadness is back in his eyes and such a No Trespassing look on his face that she jumps to her feet as the jukebox plays a popular fox-trot. “Let’s dance!”

  She falls a little in love with him and he’s sensitive enough to realize it. Nevertheless, it’s two months before he tells her about Leslie’s suicide and the dreams the two of them had of making a life together. He continues to badger his superiors—“I’m not a penguin, for God’s sake. Let me fly!”—and orders finally come through. The night before he leaves for Europe, they drive out to the river to watch the moon rise. She drinks too much and starts crying because she’s sure he won’t come back.

  He swears that he will and gives her his lighter to hold for him until he does. “But if I don’t, promise me that you won’t be afraid to break the rules if they get in your way. We only get one life, Sue. Don’t waste it playing safe. Promise me that you’ll have the life Leslie and I didn’t get to have.”

  Her tears glisten in the moonlight and she holds the lighter between her two hands as if swearing on a Bible.

  “I promise,” she whispers.

  CHAPTER

  1

  Now there are diversities of gifts.

  — I Corinthians 12:4

  I almost forgot,” my brother Will said. It was only the first week of August, more than two weeks till my birthday, but he pulled a small, brightly wrapped box from his pocket. “Got another present for you.”

  “Aw, you didn’t need to do that,” I said. “The trellis was more than enough.”

  Will’s an auctioneer and does estate appraisals, too. Somewhere or other, in his ramblings around the state, he had found a beautiful wrought-iron trellis that someone had scrapped. All it needed was a good sandblasting to get rid of the rust and Dwight had gladly taken it to a body shop in Dobbs. He and Will said it was a birthday present for me and yes, I would enjoy its beauty once it was in place, but we both knew who was the more enthusiastic gardener. This trellis was seven feet tall with graceful leaves and bunches of iron grapes and once it was set in holes filled with concrete, it would support the scuppernong vine that Dwight had already begun to root from one over at the homeplace.

  When he’s not digging trees out of the woods or transplanting flowering bushes to turn what once was a tobacco field into our own Garden of Eden, Dwight is Sheriff Bo Poole’s second in command. I’m a district court judge and I should have been prepping for the heavy workweek coming up. Our benighted state assembly keeps slashing the court’s budget, so in addition to my usual workload, I’d been asked to take a day out of my rotation and hear a case down in New Bern next week. Since the trellis was ostensibly for me, though, it was only fair that I help set it in place. Besides, helping Dwight erect a trellis was a lot more fun than reading depositions. But first Will and I had to wait while Dwight and another brother ran down the farm’s posthole diggers. Seth thought Andrew might have been the last to use them when he expanded his dog run a few weeks ago.

  Our son Cal and his Bryant cousins never miss a chance to ride in the truck bed, so they’d gone along, too.

  We had wrestled the massive weight from the back of Will’s van and while we waited for the posthole diggers, I took the little package Will had handed me and tore off the paper. Inside was a flip-top Marlboro box and inside that was something small and hard, wrapped in white tissue paper that fell away as my fingers fumbled with it.

  A brass Zippo lighter.

  I stared at it in surprise and my eyes filled with involuntary tears.

  “Will?”

  He gave a self-conscious shrug and his own eyes seemed to glisten for a moment. “Adam and Zach never smoked. You quit almost before you started and I quit last year. I thought you might want to keep it.”

  I could almost see our mother’s strong slender fingers closed around it, cupping it in her hands to light a cigarette. She was never a chain-smoker—four or five a day was her limit, but I never saw her use a match. This lighter was always in her pocket, the brass smooth and golden. The engraved initials were almost worn off from the constant turning in her fingers whenever she was in deep thought. We should have hated it. After all, she died of lung cancer when I was eighteen. But it was so much a part of her that all the boys wanted it after her death. Not just her sons but her stepsons, too. Indeed Andrew was almost ready to fight the others until Seth stepped in and decreed that Will, as her oldest son, should be the one to have it.

  It might have amused me had I been around at the time, because I was the only one who knew whose initials—W.R.M.—were engraved on the case inside a frame of Greek keys. By then, though, I was in such deep denial, so angry at the world, at my whole family, and at Mother for dying that I eloped with a sweet-talking car jockey, a man I almost killed with a rusty butcher knife, and didn’t come home for a few years.

  The first time I saw the lighter in Will’s hands, I almost lost it, but for once I’d kept my mouth shut.

  Now I opened the lid and flicked the little wheel with my thumb. It sparked, but the wick didn’t catch fire.

  “Must be out of fluid,” Will said and reached to take it back. “Who was Leslie?”

  “Who?”

  He pulled the lighter apart to show three lines of engraving on the inner casing: 11/11/1934—Happy 25th. Below that was the name Leslie followed by four notes on a bar of music: C, G, E, A, a mixture of half notes and quarter notes.

  “I never saw this,” I said. “Mother told me that the man who gave it to her was a flight instructor at the airbase over in Goldsboro. I think the W stood for Walter, but I forget what the R was—a family name—Raynor, or something like that. His last name was McIntyre, though, and she called him Mac.”

  “Was he her boyfriend?”

  I shook my head. “She said she could have liked him, but he was carrying a torch for someone who committed suicide.”

  “This Leslie?”

  “Maybe. Mother never mentioned the woman’s name.”

  “It would go with that scrap of music.” Will hummed the notes and I recognized one of the old songs she used to play on the piano she had brought out to the farm with her when she and Daddy married. “Let’s Fall in Love.” When she was feeling sentimental or flirting with him or making up with him after one of their infrequent spats, this was the
song she always played. What he used to play, too. I suddenly realized that he hadn’t played it since she died. Not that I ever heard anyhow.

  I looked at the date again. “He would’ve been in his early thirties when Mother met him.”

  “So why’d he give her a lighter his girlfriend had given him?” asked Will.

  “I think she was supposed to hold it for him as a sort of guarantee that he’d come home safely from the war. Only he didn’t.”

  “So she did like him.”

  “Not the way you mean. But she did say he changed her life.”

  “How?”

  I shrugged. “It was one of those things she started to tell me, but then Aunt Zell or somebody came to sit with her for a while and we never got back to it.”

  There had been a terrible urgency about Mother’s last summer. She had been too busy living to keep a diary and it was as if she felt that her life would be completely lost if there was no one who knew her stories. So between bouts of nausea and diarrhea, she told those stories to me.

  Most of them anyhow.

  Only later did I realize how much she had left unsaid. On the other hand, I’d be lying if I said I remembered all the details and nuances of the things that she did tell me.

  “Would Daddy know?”

  “We could ask him, but…” I didn’t have to finish the sentence.

  Will nodded. “Yeah,” he said.

  Daddy’s never been one to talk about his feelings, but we know how deep the hurt goes. He’ll smile with the rest of us when we talk about her—the house parties that lasted for days, the way she could play any song she’d ever heard, the time she lured his best looper away from the barn with better wages than he’d been paying, the way she teased that she fell in love with his eight little boys before she fell in love with him. But we knew not to probe deeper than those lighthearted family legends and anecdotes. Mother probably would have told me about their courtship had I been mature enough to ask, but I was as self-centered as any teenager back then. More interested in whether to go to a ball game with the team captain or with the coach’s son.