paused, bringing his hands to his face again. “It was the loudest sound I’d ever heard in my life. The gunner and I got blown straight out of the trac, and when I came down, a piece of it—a piece of the metal—landed on my leg. And it was on fire.” His voice was steady and matter-of-fact. “My fatigues . . . my leg . . . just burning.”
“Oh, God.” Her heart was pounding, and her face felt cold. She wanted to touch him, and wondered if she could, if he’d want that. She wondered if people would see, and if they’d stare, so instead of reaching for his hand, she said, “Harold, I’m so sorry.”
He nodded without meeting her eyes.
“You don’t have to tell me anymore,” Bethie said. “I’m just so sorry. So sorry that it happened to you. It was a terrible, unjust war—”
“Yeah.” He drew a long, slow breath as Bethie cringed at the inadequacy of her words, at how clichéd they sounded. “I was in a hospital in Japan for ten months. I don’t remember a lot of it. I had surgeries and skin grafts. The doctors took off three of my toes, and for a while, they thought they were going to have to amputate my foot, but I got lucky. They said if I hadn’t been young and strong going in . . .” Harold shook his head. “It could’ve been worse,” he said. “It was for a lot of the men. Soldiers in the hospital with me, they lost their arms, their legs. One man, the whole side of his face was just gone. He’d been burned right to the bone.”
“Oh, Harold. Oh, God.” Bethie’s stomach was clenched tight as a fist. She felt a great, impotent rage sweep through her, fury at the war, and the politicians who’d sent so many young men to be maimed or killed.
“When I was well enough to go, I came back here, to Georgia. To Fort Gordon.”
“Not home?”
Harold shook his head. “My father said the army would make a man out of me. It took me a while to stop being angry about it. I needed some distance. My degree from Michigan was in economics. I got my discharge, and I took a job at the First Bank of the South.” He looked up and gave Bethie a smile that she could tell took effort. “And I kept hearing about this girl who made the best peach preserves down at the farmers’ market. This girl from Detroit. And when I heard that she needed a loan, I made sure I was the one to see her.”
Bethie felt her cheeks turn pink. She wanted to touch him again, and contented herself with looking at him and, very quietly, saying his name.
* * *
Every Saturday night after that, Harold would come to her place, always in a pressed shirt, sometimes in a jacket and tie, and always with a little gift: flowers, or a box of chocolates, the new Aretha Franklin or Stevie Wonder album, and once, on her birthday, a set of combs inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He took her to the movies, always insisting on paying for her ticket, and to outdoor concerts in Chamblee. They ate pizza and drank beer and played Did You Know and Do You Remember, with Bethie realizing that there was very little overlap between the kids she’d known in high school and Harold’s friends, or between the places she’d been to eat and dance and drive, and the places he’d gone. It was as if there was a city under the city, or two cities that existed side by side, both invisible to each other. Music was where they intersected. They both had grown up listening to Motown on the radio. Harold remembered every word to every song, and she’d try to get him to sing, when she could. They talked and laughed, but Harold never touched her. It left Bethie confused and unsettled, flushed and breathless, feeling constantly like she’d misplaced something important, her car keys or her wallet, and she was always having to turn her room or her purse upside down to find it. She liked Harold, more than she’d liked any man since Devon Brady, long ago. She liked his patience, his solidity, the way he smelled. She liked his smooth skin, his big hands, with their neatly clipped square-shaped nails; the way he’d harmonize, almost unconsciously, with every song on the radio when they were driving,