61.
RADCON THREW TOM MUELLERa going-away party at Bar Fiume on May 24—just two days after the Red Brigades released Mario Sossi.
“You picked some week to get out of here,” I said to Tom when Paul and I greeted him.
“Ending on a high note,” Tom said with a laugh.
Paul asked what I wanted to drink, and when I told him I’d take a gin and tonic, he disappeared into the crowd to fetch it.
“You getting excited for New London?” I asked Tom. He had been selected for Submarine Officer Advanced Course, the same assignment that Paul wanted next.
“Yeah, I’m worried I’ve forgotten how to study. But I guess it’s like riding a bike, right?”
“Sure.”
He took a sip of his beer. “Honestly,” he said, “I’m so excited to be in the same time zone as Shari, let alone the same house, I haven’t thought much about anything else.” Tom’s wife, I’d learned, was a pediatrician, and he’d come to Italy on a one-year unaccompanied tour so that she could keep working.
“That’s sweet,” I said, then remembered his car. “What’d you wind up doing with the Fiat?”
“Oh, I sold it to Hollingsworth. That kid who works the gate.”
“He didn’t care about the key?”
“He’s nineteen. He’s just glad to have a set of wheels.”
Paul returned with my drink, and I listened to the two men talk about some steam turbine that either was or wasn’t imbalanced. After a minute or two, I allowed a few of the wives to lure me away.
With the exception of Laura, I didn’t know many of these women. Most of them were married to enlisted guys who worked in RADCON, Nuclear Planning, or Nuclear Repair, and while I’d met a few at CAWSmeetings, the reality was that most enlisted wives viewed the Community of American Women in Sardinia as an Officers’ Wives Club, no matter how fervently Mary Lou argued otherwise.
In general, I found that the enlisted wives were more fun, which explains why, at a quarter to nine, I was already three drinks in and following Marty Ricard’s wife out to the sidewalk for a smoke. Her name was Colleen, and like me, she’d never been out of the country before. “Do you ever miss McDonald’s?” she asked, then launched into a story about a guy in Planning and Estimating who had to fly home on emergency leave when his father died. On his way to the airport after the funeral, he’d stopped at McDonald’s and bought a Big Mac for his wife. “He packed that thing in a cooler and carried it from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to La Maddalena, Italy. If that’s not the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard, I don’t know what is.”
“I wouldn’t have touched that burger with a ten-foot pole,” I said firmly.
“Really?”
“It had to have been in that cooler for two full days.”
“Well, she ate it,” Colleen said. “And she said it was the best thing she ever put in her mouth.”
This made us giggle uncontrollably, and it was as I was catching my breath that I noticed Teo sitting at an outdoor table with a few friends. “Hey,” I said as I took a few trepidatious steps in his direction. “I know you.”
He gave me a big smile, then stood to greet me with a kiss on each cheek. He smelled like tobacco and red wine, and for a second, I lost my balance. “Whoa,” he said as he took my elbow to steady me.
“I’ve got it,” I said, gesturing at the cigarette and my empty glass. “Just too many things in my hands.”
“Eileen, right?”
I nodded, then introduced Colleen. “Teo, Colleen. Colleen, Teo.”
“Nice to meet you,” she said.
“This is funny,” I said to him, “but I realized I take Italian lessons with your aunt.”
“No,” he said disbelievingly.
I nodded. “I saw a picture of you in her living room, and we put it together.”
He laughed. “It’s a small island.”
