there before Nana moved here,” Olivia said. “Grandpa Fred owned service stations.”
“Started working in a station right after the war,” Alice said, as if this were a good memory. “Worked up to owning four.”
“And you lost your grandmother’s tablecloth in the fire?” Wanda asked.
“I did…. I had wanted it for Karen. I made her things, of course…. But I didn’t have…not this pattern.”
“Is it the same one?” Tracy asked. “As the one you had?”
“I found an old book. Little antique shop in town. Last year in a pile. Maybe not exactly the same, but very close.”
“Nana’s making it for me,” Olivia said. “I told her I might not get married, but I want it anyway.”
Tracy laughed and ruffled Olivia’s hair. “Anyone would want it. It’s gorgeous. It’s an heirloom. You have to promise you won’t spill spaghetti sauce on it.”
Olivia giggled.
“How much more do you need to do?” Tracy asked.
Alice spread her hands about two feet apart. “A month. Maybe more.”
“Nana works on it all the time,” Olivia said. “When she watches television, when she listens to the radio, when I’m doing homework.”
“It’s a pineapple,” Alice said. “A sign of welcome. And I welcome all of you.”
Tracy was touched, and more so when Alice brought out an old-fashioned sponge cake covered with whipped cream and strawberries. Tracy bent to whisper in Janya’s ear, “You’re safe with that unless you don’t eat eggs.”
“I will eat them tonight, thank you.”
“We’ll catch on soon enough,” Tracy promised.
They took their dessert plates back into the living room, and Alice carefully brought in a tray with a silver coffee service and set it on the table. She filled delicate china cups, and even Olivia got one, with the addition of lots of milk.
Everyone complimented the hostess and dug into their dessert. When the room grew quiet, Tracy cleared her throat.
“Remember our conversation on Sunday night? Our guess that Herb and Clyde were the same man?”
She got a varied assortment of responses, but everyone remembered.
“Well, this week I discovered I could go online to see if a man named Herbert Lowe Krause was buried in a military cemetery.”
Wanda looked up. “And?”
“I drew a blank.”
“Oh…” Janya sounded disappointed.
“But I remembered what Alice said, about families wanting their sons nearby, in places they could visit. So I called all the cemeteries in Montgomery I could find numbers for and asked for help. I had a call on my voice mail when I got home this afternoon. One Herbert Lowe Krause, with the same birth date as our Herb, is buried at the Greenwood Cemetery. He died in Sicily in 1943, and his body was returned after the war at the request of his family.”
“Well, that clinches it. Clyde was in Sicily, too,” Wanda said. “It was right there on his discharge papers.”
“So we were right. And more important, now we can be positive the Herb we knew was living under an alias, and his real name was Clyde Franklin.”
Janya considered this out loud. “Then, for some reason, Clyde wanted to disappear. He needed a new name, and new identification. So he thought back to the war, and he took Herb’s name.”
Wanda held up her hand. “Okay, this is important. We have to decide something right this minute. Are we going to call this man Clyde? Or do we go on calling him Herb? I vote for Herb, because the real Herb’s not alive to care one way or the other, and Herb’s the name we knew our neighbor by.”
“I vote for calling him Herb, too, just like we always did,” Tracy said. “We know everything we need to about the real one now. That Herb’s just a name our Herb appropriated.”
“Stole, more like it,” Wanda said. “A chicken’s still a chicken, even when it’s plucked. And now, not to try to outdo you or anything, but as a matter of fact, I found out some things on my own. I figure while Kenny’s still hanging around, I should use him. He ought to be good for something.”
“Honestly, do you talk about the man that way when you’re with him?” Tracy asked.
“Talk?” Wanda laughed. “Did you talk to your ex before you divorced him?”
“CJ was way too busy with attorneys. The last real conversation we had was the day he told me life as I knew it had ended. After that, I almost never saw him alone again.”
“And when you did, you were too furious to talk to him,” Wanda guessed. “Am I right?”
Tracy wasn’t sure what to call