Of course now she was looking at him as if he were one of those serial killers she often wrote about. But, “Thanks?” she said again as she reached in her handbag, pulled out a file folder, and opened it.
“I printed several copies of those photos,” she continued, briskly getting down to business, “of Fiona.Andof Dingo and Daryl Middleton—I figured they might’ve been high school students in the not-too-distant past. This way we can leave the photos behind—not just flash them on our phones. If we’re lucky, Mrs. Sullivan will show them around in the teachers’ lounge.”
That got him focused—fast. “Wow, that’s good thinking, thanks,” he said.
“I’m not sure you’re going to want me with you in the school office, though,” Shayla said. “I think I’ll just lurk in the hall.”
“What?” Pete said, alarmed as he passed the In-N-Out Burger. “Why? No! Please, I need you in there with me. I need your brilliant writer’s brain to come up with all the questions that I know I’ll miss.”
Now the smile she gave him was full power and beautiful. “Okay, but how about if you go in first. That way you get to wow Mrs. S with—” she made a circular motion in his direction “—that magic, without me there to confuse the issue.”
“Thismagic?” he repeated with a laugh, although in truth, he relaxed a little. This was more like it. She was not immune.
Still, she gave him her now-familiar chiding look. “Lieutenant. The Navy definitely designed these uniforms for a very obvious reason.”
“Yeah, to keep us from being too hot.” As he approached the turnoff to the high school parking lot, he heard the words he’d said and winced.
Shayla was laughing again, her pretty eyes dancing. “Well, that’s a giant fail on the part of the Navy if the goal of these uniforms is tokeepsailors frombeing too hot.”
“Yeah, that came out wrong. I meant, to keep us fromgettingtoo hot. In the, you know, heat from the summer sun…? On the deck of a ship, in the middle of the ocean…? Not a lot of shade when you’re crossing the equator.”
“That must be amazing,” she said, doing that soft-eyed thing that he loved. “To look around and not see land in any direction…”
“Yeah, it’s amazing for about an hour,” he said as he waited for a break in the traffic to make his turn. “But when you’re out there, away from home for six months, it gets way less amazing, really fast.”
“But isn’t it kind of common, for a sailor, to beout there,on a ship, for months at a time?” she asked. “You could’ve joined the Army.”
“Nah, I wanted to be a SEAL,” he told her. “But that’s how they get you. You can’t be a SEAL until you’ve been in for a set amount of time, and you can’t be in the Navy for more than a nanosecond without going out on a WestPac—that’s six months in the Western Pacific. It’s not as bad as it sounds, because you almost always start from Hawaii, which has its perks. But you definitely don’t just join the Navy and show up at BUD/S—that’s what we call SEAL training. It stands for Basic Underwater Demolition slash SEAL.”
“And that’s where you work?” she asked. “As a teacher.”
“Instructor,” he said, as he pulled into an empty space right by the school’s front door. The lights were already on in the front office. “Yeah, that’s what I do.”
She nodded as she opened the door and picked up her handbag.
As they met on the sidewalk in front of his truck, she handed him the file with the photos and said, “I’ll linger in the lobby for just a few minutes, looking at the school art display.”
They went inside, and it smelled exactly the same as his old high school, a few miles down the coast.
“Don’t linger too long,” he said.
Maddie saw that Great-Aunt Hiroko was awake and already working in her garden as Dingo slowly drove past in the early-morning light.
“Is that her?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” Maddie said.
Dingo was amused. “How on earth can you tell?”
The old woman was wearing long sleeves, gloves, and a giant sun hat—and with her head down, her face was obscured. Still it was Hiroko, without a doubt.
“Japanese women—at least in my family—can be kinda insane about staying out of the sun,” Maddie told him as he used an empty driveway to turn around, so they could troll slowly back and see the yard from a different perspective. “It used to really piss off Lisa, back in Palm Springs, when someone new at the nursing home took my great-grandmother out into the garden without an umbrella, or even a hat. They’d be allDoesn’t the warm sun feel nice against your skin?and not understand why Gram’d get so upset.”
Gram didn’t remember much, but her insistence on staying in the shade had been one of the very last things to go—even long after she’d lost her ability to form words. Maddie still remembered the look on her mother’s face when they’d come to visit and found Gram sitting peacefully in the sun.
“She’s just an empty shell now,” Lisa had said at the time, but Gram’s shell lived on, while both her own daughter and now Lisa, her granddaughter, were dead and gone.
It was no fucking fair.
