Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,17

knew, was wrong, and lying to your mother was the very worst kind. It violated the trust that family members are supposed to have for one another. But as far as I was concerned, my mother had already violated that trust when she held me back in the hallway so my father could beat Tim bloody. And anyway, what would she have answered if I’d said I was going to meet Tim that night? She would’ve said, “No, you’re not.” So lying to her now, I reasoned, wasn’t like lying at all; it was like integrity, a bold act taken for the sake of a higher good.

I don’t believe there could have been a more unromantic place in Zachary for our reunion than that patch of black tar behind the A&W. Framing us were the back wall of the drive-in, a Dumpster, a gravel service road, and a weedy vacant lot. The giant neon root-beer mug in front cast a sickly yellow glow over it all. But as with our first meeting almost a year before in the school gym, it hardly seemed to matter where we were. The world was only as big as our bodies, and wrapped up in one another like a blanket around our shoulders, we felt warm and safe and far from our surroundings. Nuzzling Tim’s neck, I could smell his father’s Old Spice and a piney, earthy scent that made me think of their trailer in the woods. He pulled back and looked at me, fingering my hair and touching the collar of my blouse like there was something amazing there that he had never seen before.

Settling into the cab of the truck, I asked him about his note. “You said it was something important.”

He took a deep breath, almost a sigh. “Right.” He held my left hand in his lap. “You know how I feel about you,” he began seriously, rubbing my fingers. “I’ve told you before how I see us being together for a long time.”

I nodded and watched his eyes. I had a giddy feeling about what was coming.

“I’ve thought about this a lot. You know we can’t start anything until you finish high school. You know that, don’t you? You’ve got to finish high school first.”

“I know.”

“I’m willing to wait if you are. That’s no problem for me.”

I kissed his hand. “It’s no problem for me, too.”

“I want to get myself ready,” he said. “I want to feel like I can take care of you, and that I’ve got something to offer you.”

“You do! Don’t even worry about that. I don’t need anything—”

“Wait, let me finish. You know I’ve been wondering what I was going to do once I graduated. I wrote you about that, how I’ve been looking around town and all, but, well … there’s just not a whole lot of opportunity available for me here. I mean, there’s my dad’s shop, but you know what that place is like. That’s no kind of future.

“So what I decided—and I hope you won’t object to this—what I decided to do while we wait for you to finish school is I’m going to enlist.”

“You what?”

“Let me explain. I’ve been talking to a recruiter. He came by on career day—”

“You mean like with the army?” This was not at all what I was expecting. I was picturing something involving a ring, a white veil, and a bouquet of flowers. But this—

“Laura. Listen. Wait a minute. That’s what I thought, too. But we got to talking, me and Sergeant Coombs …”

Tim laid it all out for me. It had been the last thing on his mind, he said, but if you thought about it, it made perfect sense. The pay, the benefits, the job security. The education. The army would train him—the sergeant said Tim had “officer” written all over him—and when he got out after three years they’d put him through college. I would just be finishing high school then, so it’d be perfect. Hell, even if he did end up in Vietnam, which the sergeant said was not a foregone conclusion, most of the boys there spent half their time sitting on the beach drinking Budweiser beer and eating steak and lobster. “Imagine that,” Tim said, amazed. “Budweiser.”

As Tim went on, holding my hand and repeating all the nonsense the recruiter had told him, I turned to look out the front windshield of the truck. June bugs swarmed beneath a lamp hanging from a utility pole. Shiny black cockroaches crawled