“Of course I remember,” she let slip from her lips. The old woman lying in her nursing home bed tried to figure what yesterday was, what nearly 100 years ago was.
“I was too righteous.”
“Who was, Miss Delahanty?” the aide about to change her asked.
“A rose, no, no something wild, something from the field. It was white, not blue.”
“Can you roll a little bit on your left, Miss D.?”
And Dorothy Rose Delahanty shifted against the pain of cancer and age.
“There you go, that’s better. All done.”
The aide pulled the curtain a bit, and Dorothy’s half-room fell silent, silent as the sealed windows she could see out as she lay there, quiet as the lightest needle waiting to be brought forward into the grooves of a Benny Goodman phonograph record that starts again and again in her thoughts.
“Moonlight Serenade.”
Outside, children ran. They tagged and looked back to see. Dorothy watched. And soon she drifted deeper into her pillow, her thin grey arms long past holding her up.
“Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy!” her mother shouted up the stairs. Dorothy was nearly on her toes excited as she looked left and right at herself in her bedroom mirror. She pursed her lips puckered and leaned back. Bob was back, his Marine Corps. floppy hat in hand. He stood waiting downstairs in the foyer. This was it, training was over, his orders said: “Pacific Theater,” It was up to the Marines to take back the islands.
Outside the window, a girl tagged a boy. The boy looked down at her and didn’t move.
Dorothy waited at the top of the stairs and then measured each step slowly descending, revealing herself to this man, and in turn, he to her, his shiny shoes, pressed pants, this man in a green uniform came to life one step at a time, until she could see his young face.
“Bob,” she said and smoothed her dress. Bob looked at Dorothy and flushed, avoiding the suspicion of Dorothy’s Mother.
Dorothy saw inward at the bits and pieces that came into her at all hours of this waiting life, pieces she tried to put together, some good: a steady job in an office, some friends… some bad: the slap across her face by her mother, the unsureness, her parent’s fights.
Dorothy, turned her head to the ceiling and whispered, “I wish.”
“You know I’m leaving in two days,” Bob said, once they had driven to a corner of the church park where they played as children, a beautiful park outside of town. They had known each other since the first days of school.
“Do you like my dress?”
Bob smiled at her. Dorothy looked at Bob. They sat there quietly, windows down letting the warm breeze mix. They remembered the times they played there. And then Dorothy asked,
“Do you remember that girl, Kitty?”
“Sort of,” Bob said as if trying to recall.
“When we were kids, she married us right over there.”
“I kinda remember that.”
Dorothey pointed to the corner of the park surrounded and secluded.
Bob looked and then looked away, brushed off something from the single stripe on his sleeve.
“Remember when Kitty called all the kids, and pulled us two together and little Ellen Borston handed me some flowers and then Kitty started, ‘Dearly beloved’ and all that stuff and then I gave you those flowers?”
“You did?” Bob laughed.
“Then Kitty pushed you into me and said, “kiss the bride.”
Bob looked at Dorothy.
“She held our heads until we kissed.”
“They say we take the train all the way to California and then a liberty ship to somewhere in the Pacific,” said Bob.
“Did you like it?” Dorothy turned more to face Bob.
“The kiss? We were kids, I guess I did.”
“And the other times?”
Very much,” Bob smiled.
“I wrote to you,” Dorothy said now looking out the window. “Did you get my letters?”
“Yeah, thanks that helped me. Some guys didn’t get any.”
“I got your letter, one letter. I sent you seven.”
“They kept us hoppin’ every second, Dorothy. Nonstop. Sorry. I meant to write more.”
There was silence in the front seat of Bob’s car. Bob was an average boy, a good kid. He joined up because so many did. He leaned and slipped his hand on top of Dorothy’s. Dorothy didn’t move. Bob thought about the other times before, like after a dance or on her front porch. Not kisses of committal, but there was something.
“How many did Kitty get?”
Bob blinked. “What?”
“You know, she works down at the drug store, and she was telling a few girls at the counter about this young Marine she was writing to. I was sitting right there.”
Bob tightened more.
“Said she got six letters from him. Kitty says he’s an OK guy. You know that Marine, Bob?”
Bob moved his hand up on Dorothy’s arm.
“Said she was writin’ to him. Do you who she was talking about, Bob?”
“Look, Dorothy, she asked if she could write to me and I said ‘sure, why not.’”
“How many times?”
“How many times what?” Bob shifted.
“Did she write to you?”
“A couple, a few times, I guess. Nothin’ but news about town, stuff she heard at the counter.”
She doesn’t mean anything to me Dorothy. I’m here with you and glad I am, and…
“Show me her letters.”
Dorothy eased her arm away from his hand and rested it on the back of the seat between them. “A little too old for you ain’t she?”
“Come on Dorothy, look, I’m shipping out in two days, It’s nothing, she’s nothing to me, just an old friend, our old friend. ”
“Not my friend.”
“I want you to write to me, Dorothy, not anyone else.”
“Write to you?”
“Yeah, write to me. You’ll see. Maybe, the way I figure it, when I get back…”
“I’m waiting for you to pull out a ring or something. At least you didn’t do that.”
“Come on.” Bob said softly. Silence filled space between them. “I want you to write to me, so it’s you and me.”
Dorothy looked out the window.
“So what do you want to do?” Bob asked.
“I want you to start the car.”
The pieces shifted in the murk and overgrown vines of time. Dorothy played this “what if” for a thousand years, a million moments. What if, what if. He was a decent guy, I could have…. Now frail, out of her time, she closed her eyes and saw it all again.
Bob came home after no more than five months overseas. His parents got that letter they hand deliver, the one that sent Bob’s mother to the kitchen floor. At the church service, the Father spoke of Seargent Robert Tilling, how he served, earned a medal for extreme bravery, saved the lives of several wounded men in his platoon, held off a charge single handedly….Dorothy cried. She scanned all the heads in the church, rows and rows. No Kitty.
Dorothy never wrote to Bob.
Dorothy lay there in her closing days, travelling the “what if” road that takes her back to her only wedding, a small kiss, in a small park.
It was his only wedding, too.
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