I received a letter from Joe the Monday after I returned from Wedding Tree.
Lucille had placed it on my bed, where she regularly put my mail, and I found it after work. I stared at it for a while, thinking it must be some kind of a joke. It was too soon for me to have gotten a letter from anywhere out of state, much less from the Pacific.
“What are you waiting for? Open it,” Marge insisted.
My hand shook a little as I pried up the flap, thinking,His lips touched this to seal it. “Dear Addie, I read in a big, masculine scrawl. “Just wanted you to know I take my correspondence promises seriously. Love, Joe.”
“What an odd thing to write!” Marge said, peering over my shoulder.
“He means he’s written to my father,” I said. I turned it over and saw the base’s postmark. He’d mailed the letter before he left.
“You think? Oh, that’s so exciting!” Marge’s smile faded into a pout. “But that means you’ll be engaged before me!”
As far as I was concerned, I was engaged already—but no one, Marge included, considered it official. The next day, I had another note.Dear Addie, To make sure you don’t forget about me, I left some letters with Carl and asked him to mail one a day to you. Hopefully this will tide you over until you start getting my letters from overseas. Love, Joe.
After that, I raced home every day at noon to see if the mail had come. Thanks to the efficiency of the U.S. Postal Service, some days there were no letters; other days there were two. They were all just a line. “Your kiss haunts my lips.” “You are my everything.” “Your face is like a flower—bright and open and beautiful.”
Oh, be still, my heart! I slept with the letters under my pillow, as if they somehow kept him close to me.
I waited for my parents to mention a letter from Joe. Given the way they’d reacted to my news about him when I’d last gone home, I figured it was best to let the letter arrive and let them broach the topic with me. My mother’s letters were full of news about Charlie, telling me how well he was doing, how he was gaining weight, how his color was better. I heard all about how he was learning to walk with just a cane now instead of crutches, and how he was religiously doing the exercises the army hospital had prescribed.
Charlie wrote me, as well. Long, gushy letters, telling me how much he adored me, how he couldn’t wait for me to get the photography thing out of my system and come home, how he was workinghalf days at his father’s lumberyard. The store had fallen on lean times, but that was sure to end once the war was over. In every letter, he begged me to come home for at least a visit. I dutifully wrote him back, short letters about my job, how much I enjoyed it and how busy I was. We made plans to go to dinner together when he came to New Orleans in May to attend a lumberyard trade show.
After two weeks, Joe’s stash of pre-written letters ran out. I continued mailing letters to him, but I didn’t get a single letter in response.
And then I missed my period. At first I thought it was just late, but within a week, I started to feel sick. I stayed home from work because I threw up one morning, but later in the day, I was better. The next morning, I threw up again.
I opened the bathroom door to find Marge standing outside it in her robe, her face slathered in cold cream, her eyes round. “Oh my God. You’re pregnant!”
The word squeezed me in a vise of panic. “No. I can’t be.”
“You can’t?” Marge asked. “Or you can’t bear to think about it?”
“But—but we used rubbers!”
“They’re better than nothing, but they’re not foolproof,” Marge said.
I dropped my head and cried.
Marge insisted I see a doctor she knew.
I used an alias—Mrs. Patterson. After a humiliating exam, the doctor confirmed what I already, deep in my heart, knew. “Congratulations, Mrs. Patterson. You’re just a few weeks along, but you’re going to have a baby.”
“What are you going to do?” Marge asked when she came home from work and found me sobbing on the bed.
“I’ll write Joe,” I said. “He’ll know how to make it right.”
Although how, I didn’t know. I only knew that Joe was extraordinary, and he could accomplish extraordinary things. Maybe he could use his wiles and connections to get transferred back to New Orleans for another training mission so we could quickly marry.Maybe he’d arrange for me to sneak aboard a transport plane and fly to California so we could marry before he left. Maybe he’d wire me to take a train to the West Coast and he’d jury-rig a reason to fly back to a base there. I didn’t know how, but I was sure that Joe would come up with a way to solve this problem. Why, oh why had I refused to elope? In hindsight, I could see so clearly thatgettingmarried wasn’t nearly as important asbeingmarried.
Marge wanted me to see a special doctor she’d heard about, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I refused to consider anything but somehow marrying Joe. I continued to write him every day, and every day, I rushed home from work and checked the mail. Nothing—except more letters from Charlie. One of them said he was coming to New Orleans on the twenty-sixth on business and he wanted to take me to dinner.
I’d known I was pregnant for exactly two weeks when I rushed home to find Joe’s friend Carl in the parlor, his Army hat in hand, his expression grim. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. My heart pounded so hard I thought I would pass out. I knew something was wrong, and I knew it was bad.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I, uh, got some news about Joe.”
The breath left my lungs in a sudden whoosh, and I couldn’t draw another one for the life of me.
