The Older Woman

He must, he finally decided, because he’d made the considerable effort it took to get himself to the church, just so he could watch her get married to another man. He must, because he’d made a point of not saying or doing anything stupid the whole time he was there. He must, because the bottom line here was that he really did want her to be happy. And wasn’t that a hell of a note? He’d seen Rita through thick and thin—mostly thin. If anybody deserved a little sunshine on her back door, it was Rita. Even he realized that.

He smiled slightly to himself.

Rita, Rita, he thought, shaking his head. There is nobody like you, girl.

He had at least managed to give her a chaste goodbye-and-good-luck kiss—albeit under the watchful eye of his superior officer and, as it happened, her new husband. Lieutenant McGraw was one more lucky bastard. He’d survived a Black Hawk helicopter crash and he’d gotten the girl, while he, Calvin “Bugs” Doyle, the only other survivor of the same crash, remained, simply and always, said girl’s “friend.”

He took a quiet breath.

Get yourself together here, Doyle.

He had always known the rules of engagement. There was absolutely no reason for him to feel so down about this thing. He understood the situation. Rita had never for one minute led him on. She had always been straight with him, even when she’d been so abandoned and penniless she’d had to move in with him for a while. She had lived with him—on her terms—and she had been grateful for his help. But she didn’t love him, not like that, not the way he had wanted.

Just friends.

No. Best friends. He knew everything there was to know about Rita Warren. Everything. The good and the bad, and it hadn’t mattered to him. Unfortunately, what he knew hadn’t mattered to her, either. It was the lieutenant’s knowing she’d worried about.

But it had turned out all right for her, and he supposed, when everything was said and done, being a friend was better than nothing.

He closed his eyes and tried not to think about how beautiful Rita had looked today. He didn’t want to think about the honeymoon, either. He was so tired, and his legs were beginning to hurt. If he didn’t get up and walk around soon, he’d regret it. He had mistakenly believed that finally getting both of the leg casts off would make the pain situation better. Wrong. No casts just meant that the muscles in his legs had to work harder. Which meant more pain.

The wind shifted, and the rain beat against the windows.

“Happy is the bride the sun shines on.”

The truth was this bride had been happy without the sun—without much of anything, if you got right down to it. The groom’s parents hadn’t exactly given their blessing, and Rita didn’t get much in the way of a family send-off—unless you counted her little girl, Olivia. Olivia had a ball getting all dressed up and blowing kisses and scattering rose petals. Except for Olivia, Rita didn’t have any relatives she or anybody else would want to claim. The closest thing to a bona fide well-wisher she had was good old “Bugs” Doyle—and he could have gone either way. Even so, he had still dragged himself to the wedding.

Just for her.

A sudden sharp pain made him jerk his legs to try to get away from it. The cane he needed for walking slid off the nearby straight chair and clattered to the floor. He swore under his breath, but he made no effort to get it. He stared out the window again, breathing deeply they way he’d been taught, trying to fight down the intense burning ache before it got the best of him.

But the pain wasn’t going away. He had to get up and shuffle around, and he had to do it now. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to him that the way to make the hurting less was to do everything he could to make it hurt more, but that seemed to be the way of things. He was walking again—and what were the odds of that, given the degree of his injuries and the ups and downs of his prolonged recovery? He was a work in progress, all right. His only comfort was the fact that Lieutenant McGraw had made it all the way back—pain or no pain. And so would “Bugs” Doyle.

He couldn’t see the cane, much less reach it. He was too tall to be comfortable in a chair low enough to pick up anything he dropped on the floor, anyway. He was going to have to get up—and then get down. And then get back up again. Deep knee bends on legs that had already had one hell of a workout today. If he was lucky, he might finish with this little project by sundown.

It was going to be struggle enough just to push himself out of the chair, but he wasn’t even tempted by the option of yelling for his landlady. The word can’t had been weeded out of his vocabulary years ago in basic training. He had no doubt that little old Mrs. Bee would come help him out here—if he asked—except she probably wasn’t any better at deep knee bends than he was.

Nice old lady, Mrs. Bee. Kate Meehan, one of the nurses at the hospital had arranged for him to move into an upstairs apartment in Mrs. Bee’s house after the doctors finally promoted him to an outpatient. He had no place else he wanted to go. He’d given up the trailer he had shared briefly with Rita, even before he and the lieutenant had ridden the Black Hawk into the ground, and he just wasn’t up to living with a bunch of other soldiers who would feel sorry for him whether they said so or not. He knew the army would keep him on if he wanted, make room for him somewhere—if he could come back far enough. But he didn’t want an audience of his peers on hand for the trip, and he figured somehow Meehan knew that.

The apartment was fairly close to the post hospital, and it was cheap enough for an enlisted man to afford. Meehan had warned him up front that Mrs. Bee’s house was smoke and alcohol free, and that he would absolutely have to promise he’d “behave,” if he wanted her to vouch for him.

Like he could do anything else. His days of dancing naked with a rose in his teeth were pretty much behind him. His hands were more or less working again and didn’t look too bad, but he couldn’t half get around. Regardless of what his old drill sergeant always said, it wasn’t entirely true that where there was a will there was a way. Actually, he would have liked to have raised a little hell, even before the incentive of Rita’s wedding, but the best he could do for recreation these days was to eat, sleep and, with a great deal of effort, strum a little guitar.

Behave? No problem. Too easy.

So now he had a combination living room, dining room, kitchenette and one bedroom on the back side of the second floor of Mrs. Bee’s big Victorian house. No cigarettes. No whiskey. No wild women. Oh, and it would be really good if he didn’t swear.

So far, he and Mrs. Bee were getting along. She didn’t seem to mind his so-called music, and he didn’t cuss where she could hear him. Of course, he was pretty far away from her part of the house, and her hearing wasn’t what it used to be.

He had his own backstairs entrance, but he was welcome to use the front door if he wanted. He’d once made the mistake of coming in the front way when Mrs. Bee and the church ladies were meeting. Talk about getting pounced on. He’d never been so clucked over in his life. One minute he was minding his own business, struggling purposefully toward the stairs, and the next minute he was sitting in the parlor with his feet up, having chocolate cake, salty peanuts, bread-and-butter pickles and some kind of cherry-cola-and-pineapple-juice punch with the “girls.” It was kind of a hoot, really. He even remembered to say “please” and “thank you” and make Mrs. Bee proud. Nice old ladies—except for the one who thought anybody in the military was trash and didn’t do much to hide it when Mrs. Bee was out of the room. Man, could they bake, though, even the snooty one.

But, no matter which way he came or went, he still had to drag himself up and down all kind of steps every day—the prospect of which had made his various surgeons positively beam with approval. Just what the doctors ordered, every one of them. He was okay with the on-going challenge of getting in and out of Mrs. Bee’s house, and he was okay with the self-imposed “behaving.” He had to be if he was ever going to make it back to where he was before the Black Hawk went down.

But first, he had to pick up the damned cane.

He managed to make it to his feet on the first try.

“Not bad,” he said aloud—if he focused on the end result and not the process.

And now that he was more or less vertical, he could see into the backyard of the house next door— Meehan’s house. Sometimes he could see her, too, mostly when she left for work in the mornings. Sometimes she had breakfast outside on the patio—here lately with some guy Doyle assumed was a new boyfriend, a “suit,” who would arrive with a little white bag of bagels and coffee, chat her up for a little while, make her laugh, then go.

Sometimes, on her days off, Meehan fiddled around out there with plants and hanging baskets and clay pots. She apparently liked growing things—there were flowers all over the place. And wind chimes. The woman liked her wind chimes. He could hear them at night if he cut off the air conditioner and left the windows open.

Occasionally Meehan just sat on a lounge chair by herself and read. She definitely had nice legs, nice enough that it was no hardship for him to pay attention to her comings and goings. She always waved if she happened to see him in the window, but she didn’t bother him. As far as he knew, she’d never checked up on him or anything like that. Apparently, his word that he’d wouldn’t upset old Mrs. Bee had been good enough for her, and he appreciated that.

He hadn’t seen her much the past few days, though. It kind of surprised him that she hadn’t come to Rita’s wedding. He knew she’d been invited, and he knew she liked Rita and Lieutenant McGraw both. In fact, Meehan was one of the few people who had openly approved of the big Warren-McGraw romance—besides him. And he did ultimately approve, regardless of the current ache in his gut. He was nothing if not a realist.

A woman either loves you or she doesn’t. Period.

Doyle shifted his weight and kept watching out the window, mostly because Meehan and the boyfriend had just come out of the house. She was standing in the gravel driveway with her arms folded. She was standing—and the guy was pacing. And talking. Every now and then he gestured with both hands—a “What do you want from me?” kind of thing.

Apparently nothing, Doyle decided, because it didn’t look as if Meehan answered him. She wasn’t even looking at him. She just stood there with the rain beating down on her.

The boyfriend was talking again, waving his hands around a little too much, Doyle thought.

Threatening?

No. Not threatening. Or if he was, he wasn’t making much of an impression. Meehan didn’t seem to be intimidated by him. Still, this was not the Meehan he knew. He’d been a patient on her ward for months. She had a mouth on her. She was tough—tough enough to hand it out and then some if the situation called for it. And it sure looked to him as if this one required at least some kind of comeback on her part.

The boyfriend said something else, then turned and walked to his car.

Meehan stared after him, but she didn’t try to stop him. He slammed the car door and drove away, accelerating too much for the weather conditions in the process and slinging mud and gravel all the way to the street.

Meehan stood for a moment after he’d gone. Doyle thought she was about to go into the house, but she didn’t. Rain or no rain, she abruptly sat down on a nearby stone bench.

Was she crying?

Nah, she wasn’t crying.

Well, hell, maybe she was…

Doyle abruptly pushed himself away from the window. Either way, it was all over now. The boyfriend had gone his merry way, and Meehan’s current emotional state was none of his business. He had enough troubles of his own.

He held on to the furniture to maneuver to where he could get the cane. It hadn’t entirely hit the floor after all. It had caught in the chair rung, and he managed to retrieve it without too much difficulty.

He stood leaning on the cane, out of breath but more than a little pleased that the retrieval hadn’t turned into some kind of major production. He suddenly remembered the drama in the backyard next door and lurched over to the window again. Meehan was exactly where he’d left her.

“Damn, Meehan,” he said. “How long are you going to sit there like that?”