the apartment. Johnny was supposed to have the keys.”
“Sergeant,” Zabrewski boomed. “You got an envelope there for Mrs. Portet? From Captain Oliver?”
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said. He handed over an envelope. “Sir, that’s not what the lady said. She said ‘Por-tay’ or something.”
Zabrewski handed her the envelope. It contained two door keys, and two maps, one of the route from Fort Bragg into Fayetteville and the Foster Garden Apartments, and the other of the Foster Garden Apartment complex itself, showing her the location of Apartment B-14, and where to park the car.
“Great,” Marjorie said. “I’ll go see Aunt Patricia and then have a look.”
“Patricia said she’d go with you and get the car registered,” Hanrahan said. “For some reason, Eighteenth Airborne Corps is on a death-to-unregistered-POV kick.”
It did not seem to be the time to tell him about the MP citation.
“Good girl,” he said. “Honey, I’ve got to run. See you later.”
Aunt Patricia was almost visibly hurt that Marjorie and Jack weren’t going to stay with them until they had a chance to settle in, and Marjorie didn’t have the heart to decline her invitation to lunch.
It was a little after two before she found Apartment B-14 in the Foster Garden Apartments complex and managed to get the door open.
It was a nice apartment, she decided. It had two bedrooms, one of which, she thought, Jack could use as a home office, an area that was obviously intended to be used both as a dining room and living room—she knew there was an elaborately carved Philippine wooden screen, courtesy of Grandfather Waterford, in The Barn. There were animals and naked women carved on it, which Jack, she was sure, would like, that would fit there. The bathroom was all right, and the kitchen, while small, had room for a table and chairs. There was even a small balcony overlooking a grassy interior courtyard.
The only “furniture” in the apartment were a stove and a telephone. The stove lighted right up when she tried, which pleased her. When she bent over and picked the telephone from the floor, intending to call Patricia Hanrahan to see if there was an ETA on Jack, it was as dead as a doornail.
She took a small notebook from her purse and wrote “TELE-PHONE! !!!!!” in it, and then set out in search of Fayetteville Furniture and Interiors.
She explained to a salesman what she was after right now, just a bed and a kitchen table and chairs, and that she would be back later for other things, and then asked him if she could first use the telephone before looking at what he had to offer.
The telephone company said they would be happy to reactivate the telephone already installed in B-14 of the Foster Garden Apartments. They would call her previous telephone company to check her credit, and that out of the way, turn it right on. When they learned she had never had her own telephone before, the telephone company said in that case she would have to come by the office and leave a deposit of $125.
She decided on a natural-wood-looking kitchen table with matching captain’s chairs; a small-screen TV; a large, two-door refrigerator with an ice maker; a Simmons Best Quality king size mattress and spring, and a bed to hold it.
She paid for it with check number 0001 drawn on the account of Lieutenant and Mrs. J. E. Portet, in the First National Bank of Ozark, Alabama.
“Would delivery, let’s see,” the salesman said, consulting a sheet of paper, “the day after tomorrow, in the afternoon, be all right with you?”
“I need this stuff today,” Marjorie said. “Right now. I told you that.”
“Oh, I’m afraid that just wouldn’t be possible, Mrs. Portet,” he said, pronouncing it “Poor Tet.”
“Then forget the whole thing,” she said, hoping he couldn’t see how close to tears she was. “Give me my check back.”
“Just a minute, I’ll see what I can do.”
The furniture, promised for delivery at four, arrived at half past five, and by then it was too late to go to the telephone company and leave a deposit.
With the mattress and bed—that came in pieces, and she had no idea how she was going to manage to assemble it—in the larger of the two bedrooms, the bedroom seemed a lot smaller than it had originally.
When the refrigerator was installed in the kitchen, the door opened the wrong way.
She went in search of a pay telephone, found one outside the apartment