Laura Altom - Her Military Man

For the sake of her show—her sole means of financial support—she had to pull it together. Constance cleared her throat off air, then managed somehow to inquire in a blessedly detached voice, as if she hadn’t just joined Garret’s cat-and-mouse game, “Ever considered there may have been a reason behind Lucky’s actions? That maybe she’d actually been trying to help you?”

He laughed sharply. “By making out with another guy? Worse yet, my supposed best friend?”

“Yes, but did you look hard enough to see if the kiss was genuine—or maybe all for show?” Covering her face with her hands, Constance told herself to shut up. The man wasn’t Garret any more than her heart was on the verge of pounding straight up and out of her chest over the notion that maybe he was Garret, come home to haunt her. If he’d had any idea why she’d kissed Nathan that horrible night, maybe he wouldn’t now be so cruel. “Maybe the whole time, this Lucky person to whom you keep referring, was kissing that other guy, she was thinking about you. Wondering if—”

“Give me a break. See? This is what I’m talking about. This show is bogus. Entirely one-sided with the favor always going to the ladies. You’re always talking about how guys are basically snaggle-toothed brutes and women nothing but sweetness and light.”

“That’s not true. Just the other day we did a show on women who curse and how that affects the men who love them.”

He laughed again, filling her mind and heart and soul with a huskier, world-weary vision of her first love. No way. It couldn’t be him. No, no, no. “I’m gone. Peace out.”

“Well…” she eventually said after a four- or five-second dead air lag to regain her composure.

Seriously, the guy couldn’t have been Garret.

Last she’d heard through a friend of a friend, the Navy SEAL was rarely even in the country, let alone backwoods Oklahoma. He didn’t even come home for Christmas—instead always sending his mother a plane ticket to meet him somewhere exotic.

How did she know? Strictly beauty shop gossip. Well, except for that time she’d run into his cousin Hillary at the county fair. And then, Constance had only asked about him to be polite.

Yeah, right.

“Renee-Marie, do you have our next caller?”

“Miss Manners, my name’s Pat, and I just want to tell you how much I adore your program. You don’t pay that obviously ill-bred oaf the slightest bit of attention. Oh, and for the record, though I’m sixty-eight years young, and it’s been fifty years since my last breakup, I still believe kindness is a virtue—most especially with those we no longer want in our daily lives.”

And so the afternoon lagged on…

“Miss Manners, I’m Jim, and I gotta say I agree wholeheartedly with Military Man. All this manners stuff is hoity-toity horse crap. Oh, and just curious, how long were you two an item?”

“Miss Manners, I’m Vicki, and I agree with you in that manners are a beautiful, necessary part of life. That military man you used to date is obviously never going to land another girlfriend, much less a wife, if he persists in being such a barbarian.”

“Thanks to all my callers,” Constance finally said. “That wraps the show for today, so until tomorrow, I’m Miss Manners, wishing you mannerly days and deliciously refined nights.”

Sharply exhaling, Constance disconnected her mic.

“Great show!” Felix burst into the drab, brown-paneled broadcast booth with all the grace and forewarning of a Sooner State twister. “Wowza, where’d you find that guy? Wait—don’t answer. I don’t wanna know if you two never really dated and the whole thing was rigged. But whatever you do, keep him coming. The phone’s going nuts. All twenty of your faithful listeners must’ve called everyone they know to tell them about the show. We’ve had so many calls in the last five minutes, my cousin Wanda said the first time she tried getting through, there was actually a recording saying circuits are busy.”

“That’s all well and good,” Constance said, fishing under the brown laminate counter supporting her announcer turret and mic for her worn leather purse. “But I’m pretty sure I know this guy, and trust me, he’s rough around the edges. It’s best we never hear from him again.”

“Crap on a stick,” Felix said, “you’re going straightaway to sign the guy, right? Because with that much passion between you, the show’s a surefire hit.”

“But, Felix, I—”

He sobered. “Look, you know how I hate being the heavy, but remember that talk we had the other day?”

“A-about my ratings?” Her gaze plummeted to her scuffed brown boots.

“Yeah. How they’re the lowest in this station’s history—and that’s saying something, considering some of the junk we’ve had on the air.”

“But, Felix, I told you just as soon as folks realize how important caring about others’ feelings and incorporating manners into their everyday lives is, that—”

“Manners schmanners,” he said with a glint of his right gold canine. “All I care about are advertising dollars. Get this guy back on by the time I’m back from my trip, or your show’s in the can.”

Felix blustered off while Renee-Marie wandered in. They’d only been friends for a little under a year—the time Constance had been doing the show. Before that, Constance had worked more than a dozen small jobs that never seemed enough to pay the black hole of bills that came along with being a single mom.

She’d always dreamed of going to college, maybe earning a degree in history or literature to match her love of all things eighteenth and nineteenth century, back when everything seemed more…civilized. She’d fantasized about using that degree to work in a big city museum. Or the ultimate dream—penning a historic novel.

But then her and Garret’s relationship had moved to the next level, and suddenly being with him in every way a man and woman could—even though technically they’d still been teenagers—had meant more than future career aspirations. Her love for Garret had been like a living, breathing entity all its own. He’d made her feel cherished and safe and beautiful and interesting and above all, loved.

She’d have done anything for him—anything. Meaning, when she’d discovered she was pregnant a week before graduation, she’d loved him enough to let him go. To want him to follow his own dream of getting out of Mule Shoe, out from under his deceased father’s lengthy shadow.

“Felix doesn’t really mean it,” Renee-Marie said, wrapping Constance in a warm hug. “About firing you if you don’t track down that caller. You know how he is. Meaner than a crawdad with somebody dunking his tail in boilin’ butter. This’ll all blow over.”

Constance wished she could be so sure.

One thing was for certain, if the caller was Garret, he’d be easy enough to find. His mother lived only ten miles from Constance. All she’d need do was head that way, then politely inquire whether or not her son was in town.

On the one hand, if the caller was him, and if by some miracle Constance got him to agree to make a few guest appearances, then what? Yes, her much-needed job would be safe, but what about her most closely held secret?

“You going to be all right?” Renee-Marie asked.

“Maybe,” Constance said. Assuming Felix knocked off his foolish insistence on her old beau joining her show.

GARRET UNDERWOOD switched off the kitchen radio, wincing when the sudden movement stung deep within his bum left leg. Two months earlier, he’d busted it jumping from a helicopter onto a ship’s deck in choppy seas. Diagnosis? Comminuted fracture of his proximal femur. Docs fixed him with a steel rod, meaning no cast but plenty of pain. Recovery time? A good three or more months, which—taking into account time already served—left a minimum of three weeks to go.

He was now up to his neck in physical therapy. Plenty of weight-bearing exercises that left him aching, but if that’s what it took to get back on the job, so be it. His doc had yet to make a final decision as to whether or not he’d even still be fit to return to duty. He said he was waiting to see final X-rays to give his ultimate okay. Garret didn’t need pictures to tell him he’d be fine. He had to be. For if he no longer had his work, where did that leave him?

Lord knew he couldn’t spend the next fifty or so years stuck back in Mule Shoe.

He looked up to see his mother smiling. She calmly asked, “Mind telling me what that was all about?”

“What?”

She’d passed the morning in her garden, picking the first of that season’s green beans, zucchinis, cukes and tomatoes. She’d started her crop early in her greenhouse, placing her well ahead of everyone else’s garden game. At sixty, wearing jeans and a Rolling Stones T-shirt, Audrey Underwood looked a damn sight younger than he felt.

Tapping the portable radio she’d unhooked from the waistband of her jeans, she said, “I heard the whole thing. You do know Miss Manners is her, don’t you? Your Constance? The station has a billboard of her out by the cattle auction.”

“Yeah,” Garret said, trying not to glare, but not quite succeeding. “I know it’s her.” How many other people in the county had heard him make a complete jackass of himself? “But even if you did hear me, what makes you think I was talking about her?”

“Oh,” she said, setting her basket loaded with greens on the white tile counter beside the sink. The homey sight of her bountiful harvest completed the already disgustingly pleasant space. Yellow-flowered wallpaper set the tone for white cabinets and a worn brick floor. The flood of sunshine streaming through every paned window on the south wall didn’t do much for his mood, either. Where was a stinkin’ cloud when a guy needed one? “Maybe I don’t believe you’re over her because even after all this time, you still won’t say her name.”

Laughing, shaking his head while wobbling to his feet, he said, “Give me one good reason I should? That girl’s a snake.”

“That girl’s a woman now.”

He snorted. “A woman who ran off and married my best friend, then had his kid.”

“They’re divorced. Have been for quite some time.”

“And I’d care why?” he asked from in front of the picture window overlooking blue sky and rolling green pasture where a half dozen Herefords stood chewing their cud. Twenty or so stubby oaks dotted the landscape that otherwise consisted of nothing much but alfalfa and ragweed reaching as far as the overgrown fencerow serving as the boundary between his mom’s property and the Griggs’s. Though his dad had been gone for nearly twelve years, Garret remembered like it was yesterday when the two of them used to walk that fence, checking for breaks, mostly just swapping guy stories.

Though his dad, Ben, had been an attorney by trade and only a part-time farmer, he’d loved the land. He’d made sure that financially, Garret’s mother could live in the rambling two-story white Victorian plopped on the edge of five hundred acres of pasture and forest for as long as she liked or was able.

“Honey,” she said, stepping up behind him, resting her hand on his shoulder. “Let it go. Let her go.”

“What makes you think I haven’t?”

She shot him The Look. The one he’d always hated, because no matter how many missions he’d fought, or how many hellholes he’d barely made it out of, it was a look that instantly reduced him to a scraped-knee kid all of about eight. “How do pork chops sound for dinner? Mashed potatoes. Maybe sugar peas and a peach cobbler with plenty of ice cream?”