American Empire: Blood and Iron - By Harry Turtledove Page 0,214

matters, anyhow. He asked me to marry him today.”

“Did he think about asking you to get an abortion instead?” Wounded, Nellie wanted to hit back any way she could.

Her daughter shook her head. “I ain’t in a family way, Ma. And I ought to know, too, I felt so lousy last week.” She laughed. “Turned out you were the one who ended up in a family way. I still think that’s the funniest thing in the whole wide world.”

If she’d had to find out for sure she wasn’t pregnant, she’d been doing things that left doubt in her mind. “At least I was married,” Nellie said.

“And I’m going to be,” Edna said. “Whether you like it or not, I’m going to be. I ain’t getting any younger, you know. I’m sick and tired of you watching me the way Teddy Roosevelt watched the damn Rebs.”

Edna wasn’t getting any younger, Nellie realized. She was closer to thirty than twenty, as Nellie was closer to fifty than forty. Even better than three years of marriage to Hal Jacobs hadn’t come close to making Nellie understand why a woman would marry for the sake of bedroom pleasures; for her, bedroom pleasures were at most rare accidents that brought as much embarrassment as release. But Edna wasn’t like that, however much Nellie wished her daughter were.

“Who is this fellow?” After Nellie asked the question, she realized it should have been the first one out of her mouth.

Her daughter seemed surprised she’d asked it at all. In less snippy tones than she’d been using, Edna answered, “His name is Grimes, Ma, Merle Grimes. He’s right my age, and he’s a clerk for the Reconstruction Authority.”

“If he’s right your age, how come he hasn’t got a wife already?” Nellie asked, wondering if in fact he had one Edna didn’t know about.

But Edna said, “He had one, but she died of the Spanish influenza a couple-three years ago. He showed me a snapshot once. I asked him to. She looked a little like me, I think, only her hair was darker.”

That took some of the wind out of Nellie’s sails. When she asked “What did you tell him about Lieutenant Kincaid?” she didn’t sound mean at all.

“I’ve told him I was engaged during the war, but my fiancé got killed,” Edna said. “I didn’t tell Merle he was a Reb, and I’ll thank you not to, neither.”

“All right,” Nellie said, and Edna looked surprised. Nellie guessed Merle Grimes would eventually find out, and there would be trouble on account of it. Too many people knew about the late Nicholas H. Kincaid for the secret to keep. His death at what would have been Edna’s wedding had even made the newspapers, though a clerk for the U.S. government wouldn’t have been in Washington then.

Bill Reach and me, we can keep a secret, Nellie thought. If anybody else knew… But no one else did, not Edna, not Hal, no one. No one ever would.

“He’s a nice man, Ma,” Edna said. “He’s a good man. You’ll like him when you meet him, swear to God you will.”

If he was such a nice man, if he was such a good man, what was he doing sticking it into Edna before he put a ring on her finger? Nellie started to ask that very question, but caught herself. For one thing, it would make Edna mad. For another, this Grimes had offered to put a ring on her finger. Nellie found a different question to ask: “How did you meet him?”

Edna giggled. “The first couple times were right here in the coffeehouse. I don’t reckon you’d recall him”—which was certainly true—“but he was here, all right. He doesn’t live too far away. We ran into each other at the greengrocer’s one time, and then again a week later. After that, one thing sort of led to another.”

I’ll bet it did, Nellie thought. But, regardless of whether she thought Edna was a fool, she couldn’t deny Edna was also a grown woman. “All right,” Nellie said again. “If he wants to marry you, if you want to marry him, the only thing I can say is, I hope you don’t end up sorry on account of it.”

“I don’t think we will, Ma,” Edna said. A few years before, she’d been unshakably certain she and Confederate Lieutenant Kincaid would live happily ever after. Maybe she really was growing up as well as grown—even if she did have more trouble keeping her legs together than