The Daddy Salute

“A fall?”

“This could be better than I’d hoped,” Jack said, amazement in his eyes. “This could work into love, Gunnery Sergeant. You may have finally met your match.”

Love?

“I think marriage has warped what was left of your mind, Jack. I hardly know this woman…” Then, to make his point, he admitted the most humiliating fact of all. “She won’t even go out with me.”

“This just gets better and better,” Jack chortled.

“Thanks for your support,” Brian snapped and jumped to his feet. His uniform boots beat a heavy tattoo against the linoleum floor as he paced back and forth. Then he stopped in front of Jack’s desk, shoved his hands into his pockets and said, “I’m not in love, and I sure as hell don’t plan to be.”

“None of us do,” Jack pointed out.

“Yeah? Well, some of us,” Brian told him, slapping himself on the chest, “have a little more self-control than others.”

“Oh, yeah. I can see that.”

Brian scowled at him. “Is there a reason why we have to share an office?”

“Probably.”

“It’s not good enough, whatever it is.”

“Hell, Brian,” Jack said on another suspiciously evil laugh, “you’ll live through this. We all do.”

“Quit lumping me in with you and your kind.”

“My kind?”

“You know, married marines. Formerly happy men, now dragging wife and family from base to base…packing dishes and furniture and worrying about schools and doctors and God knows what else.”

Jack shifted uneasily in his chair and deliberately looked away from the picture of Donna and their daughter, Angela, that had a prominent spot on his desk. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure I do,” Brian snapped. “Heck, there’s some kind of marriage epidemic sweeping the base. More marines have been picked off here lately than at Iwo Jima!”

Jack stood up slowly, planted both hands on his desk and leaned in. “I wasn’t ‘picked off,’ Brian.”

“Sure you were…hell, Donna’s a sharpshooter! You never even saw it coming.” He lifted one hand to stop Jack from interrupting. “I like Donna, and Angela’s the prettiest baby I ever saw, but, man…you were taken out by a sniper and didn’t even know it until after the vows were read.”

“Back off, Brian.”

“No, you back off.” Nose to nose now, the two men squared off. “You’re not sucking me down into the hole you jumped into. I like my life,” Brian went on, his voice getting louder with every word. “I like packing a duffel and taking off. I like being deployed all over the world. I like living in furnished apartments. I like answering to no one but me.”

When Brian finished, he took a deep breath and listened to the sudden silence in the small room. Jack’s features were stiff, but after a few seconds ticked away, he seemed to relax a bit. Finally he spoke up. “Who’re you trying to convince here? Me? Or you?”

“I don’t need convincing,” Brian muttered, turning for his desk and the pile of weapons reports that awaited him. “I just needed reminding. So thanks.”

“Anytime, gunny,” Jack muttered, sitting down and getting back to work. “Anytime at all.”

Case closed, Brian thought and felt sanity pour back into his soul. No more moaning around like some lovesick kid. He was a marine, for pity’s sake. In charge of enough weapons to start World War III. And damn it, it was time he started acting like it again.

He had more names and numbers in his address book than any man he’d ever known. He’d just call a few and get back into the game. He must have been nuts spending the past four weeks daydreaming about a woman who couldn’t see him for dust.

Kathy Tate wasn’t interested. So what? There were plenty of other women in this city. Mind racing, resolutions forming and solidifying in his brain, he snatched at the phone on his desk when it rang and answered impatiently, “Gunnery Sergeant Haley.”

The voice on the other end of the line started talking. With every word spoken, Brian’s newly reinforced world started shaking. He couldn’t seem to draw air into his straining lungs. His thoughts spun, and his stomach lurched. The familiar sights and sounds around him seemed to evaporate, and all he could hear was the stranger on the phone shattering what was left of his once-so-comfortable life.

Three

“She’s getting married again.” She cringed inwardly as she said those words aloud.

“Who?” Tina Baker asked.

Kathy shot a long look at her friend, swallowed down the embarrassment choking her and said, “Three guesses.”

Tina wiped oatmeal off her infant son’s cheeks and frowned thoughtfully. A moment later comprehension dawned on her features. “Your mom?”

Sitting back in her chair, Kathy turned her coffee cup between her hands and glanced at her friend. “Yep. The queen of matrimonial nightmares is at it again.”

“Wow.” Tina handed the baby a teething ring to slam against the tray of the high chair, then sat down opposite Kathy. “So this will make husband number five? Or six?”

She made it sound like such a reasonable question. Thank heaven for Tina. Friends since high school, they’d always kept in touch. And no matter how humiliating Kathy found her mother’s behavior, Tina had never made a big deal out of it.

Moving to Bayside two years ago was the best thing Kathy had ever done. At least she had one stable person in her life. Tina was madly in love with her husband and constantly trying to convince Kathy that marriage was a good thing.

But Kathy had made up her mind years ago. With her mother, Spring, as a shining example of how not to live your life, Kathy had decided to stay single. Better to live alone than to go from one broken marriage to another.

Not that that had ever bothered her mother.

Oh, boy. Wasn’t the rule of families that children were supposed to embarrass parents? No doubt, across the country, middle-aged parents were going about their perfectly normal, rut-filled lives, lamenting their offspring’s loony life-styles. But not in the Tate family. No sirree.

Nope. Here in never-never land, Kathy was the adult, and her mother was the forty-eight-year-old teenager. Not that she didn’t love her mom, but honestly, was it too much to hope for that Spring Hastings-Watts-Tate-Grimaldi-Grimaldi-Hennesey-Butler-soon-to-be would grow up? That she would settle down into the kind of everyday, ordinary mom Kathy had always wanted?

A voice inside whispered, Yes. She’s never going to change, so just learn how to deal with it.

“Kathy?” Tina spoke up, and Kathy shook her head to clear it.

After taking a quick gulp of coffee, she answered, “Technically, this is marriage number six. But Mom says five. Because she married number three twice, she only counts him as one husband.”

Tina smiled, noticed Kathy’s disgusted expression and said, “I’m sorry, hon. I know it’s not funny, but you’ve got to admit, your mom is really something.”

“Oh, she’s something, all right.” Kathy shook her head and stood up.

“I swear, her life is like a soap opera.”

“Well, I wish she’d hire some new writers.”

No matter how kind or understanding Tina was, she’d never really be able to know what it was like growing up with a mother like Spring. Kathy had had to learn early on that she was the responsible one in the household. She’d grown up fast in order to make up for her mom’s not growing up at all.