She read through the first short chapter, pausing at the end to note some patients already asleep. Others regarded her with the inward contemplation of men in pain. She doubted half of them comprehended what she was reading, but she recognized their satisfied expressions, which mirrored those of her own little students when she read to them. Since the first chapter was so short, she read the second and then the third, with its stagecoach journey and camels. She looked around then; everyone slept.
“Perfect,” she whispered. She ruffled quickly through the book, reading some of the subtitles, which made her chuckle. As she did, a piece of yellow foolscap fell into her lap. She looked at it idly, then stared.
“My goodness, Joe,” she said softly. “What are you doing?”
Across the top, in his doctor’s handwriting, she could just make out “Suzie Randolph.” Her face grew hot and she put one hand to her cheek. Feeling like an eavesdropper into the most private part of a man, she looked at the page, which, to her relief, appeared to be nothing more than French sentences.
She looked closer in the dim light. It seemed that Joe had printed in English, and someone else had written in French. There appeared to be two different handwritings besides his, one firm and graceful, the other spidery and barely legible.
At the top, under “Suzie Randolph,” Joe had printed, “How do I say ‘I care for you’?”
“Je m’occupe de vous,” Susanna whispered, not even needing to read what the firm hand had written.
She looked down another line to see Joe’s printing. “More serious?” she read. It was followed by the spidery writing, “Je t’aime.”
Scarcely breathing now, she read, “How do I say, ‘Do you love me?’”
“You just ask me, Joe, and I’ll tell you,” she said softly.
“I’m not wasting my hard-learned French. Estce que tu m’aimes?”
Startled, she looked up, aware now that Joe was leaning over the chair. “Mais oui,” she said simply. “I do love you.”
His hand was on her shoulder now. She looked at his chapped fingers, probably washed over and over with carbolic as he’d treated the wounded men from the monumentally unsuccessful Powder River campaign.
“I have some salve for your hands,” she whispered.
“I can’t say that in French yet,” he whispered back, his lips close to her ear now, tickling it and causing the warmth in her chest to travel lower. “I did work on this next sentence, because it’s important. Fifi helped me, and Claudine, when she could. Mostly it made them giggle. So nice to see Claudine happy. Let me try …. Veux-tu m’épouser?”
“You have a terrible accent,” Susanna told him. “No wonder they giggled.”
“Well?” he asked, kneeling by her chair now. “After fourteen years of nothing, it took me about four months to go from ‘I worry about you,’ to ‘I care for you,’ to ‘I love you more seriously,’ and now this last question. I can’t imagine a less romantic setting, unless it might be the dead house out back, but that’s the question. What’s your answer? I’ll take it in any language.”
Susanna turned to look him in the eyes. He still wore that disgusting apron, and he had not shaved in at least three days. “How have I lived this long without you?” she murmured, both hands on his face as the book fell to the floor.
“You’re supposed to answer my question, not ask another one, knucklehead,” he said. He sounded like a man who already knew what her answer would be. He sounded like a husband. It occurred to her that all Joe knew how to be was a husband—a good one.
“It’s yes,” she said. “Soon, s’il vous plaît.”
Chapter Eighteen
Susanna didn’t care if all the patients were asleep as she kissed Joe Randolph. He smelled of exhaustion and carbolic and other nameless odors that she didn’t intend to question. She breathed deep, and found him entirely to her liking.
Her spectacles got in the way a little, until Joe unhooked them from around her ears and set them on the floor as they both continued a remedy for heart pain not commonly found in an army ward. His hand was warm on her neck. When their lips parted, he rested his head in her lap, and she understood how supremely tired he was: tired of this medical emergency, tired of living alone, tired of wanting and not having. She understood him precisely, because she felt the same way.