Buckeye

Chapter One

What they found out—separately, and years later, after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and threw the country into a panic, after young men stopped waiting for their numbers to be drawn and began to volunteer—was that having one leg two inches shorter than the other was enough to make a person unfit for military service, while having unusually tight hamstrings wasn’t.

That boy, Sean Robison, was sent from Ohio to Mississippi for basic training, and was then sent to Tunisia, and from Tunisia to Sicily, and from Sicily to Germany, where he was shot through the neck in the Hürtgen Forest while reloading his rifle and reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

Cal remained in his hometown and got a job in a concrete plant.

He read comic books and adventure novels into his twenties.

He married a local girl named Becky and eventually went to work in her father’s hardware store.

Sometimes he wondered if he would ever discover what his “special thing” was—his purpose, he’d decided—especially in the face of a world war that wouldn’t have him.

He was so conscious of not being overseas that he found his limp worsening all by itself.

He told people about his leg, people who hadn’t asked and didn’t care.

Sometimes he even pointed to his shoes, ordered now from a medical supply company in Dayton.

“My condition causes hip problems,” he’d say.

Which was true, though he had yet to experience any.

Bonhomie wasn’t nearly so small that everyone knew everyone else, but it was small enough that, sooner or later, most everyone felt as if they’d laid eyes on most everyone else.

Since the start of the war, fewer and fewer young men were seen on Main Street.

Meanwhile, there was no shortage of old-timers—fifty and up—who’d fought in the last big war.

One who’d lost an arm and wore his sleeve pinned, another who got around on wooden crutches because one of his legs had been blown off just below the knee.

Cal’s own father had been awarded a Purple Heart for taking a bullet through his shoulder while pulling a wounded officer into a foxhole in the Meuse–Argonne—though the medal was not to be seen in his increasingly cluttered house and he didn’t want to talk about his war days.

Her forehead was high and her red hair was done up in Victory Rolls.

Her mint-green dress and matching pillbox hat, her white gloves, and her coral lipstick suggested money to Cal.

Her eyes latched on to his as she crossed the linoleum floor.

He told her yes, the store had a Zenith, but it wasn’t for sale; it was in the office.

She asked where the office was. “Basement,” Cal said, nodding toward the stairs just past the end of the counter, and without another word she walked past him—right past the handwritten sign that read Employees Only—and started down the stairs.

“Ma’am?” Cal said. He dropped the washers into the box and followed her.

The basement was used mostly for overstock—though there hadn’t been much to store in the past few years, with production focused on the war effort.

Cal caught up with her as she made her way between two tall sets of half-empty shelves.

He indicated the area in the corner that the store’s owner, his father-in-law, Roman Hanover, had designated as the office.

Across from the cot where Roman took his naps was a pint-size desk where they did paperwork and where Cal ate his lunch, listened to radio programs, and read adventure novels.

He was currently halfway through The Bold Buccaneer.

He tugged on the string for the overhead bulb, and in its glow he noticed the deep jade of her eyes and saw how pronounced her cheekbones were, giving her face a V shape over the smooth stem of her neck.

She was beautiful, he realized. But she looked agitated, impatient.

She motioned toward the radio with one of her gloved hands. “Why isn’t it on?”

He switched on the Zenith, surfed the wheeze and static for whatever she was hoping to hear, and within seconds he found it: Truman, informing the country that Germany had surrendered to the Allied forces.

It was the announcement everyone had been anticipating.

Hitler had been dead for a week. The Nazis had surrendered the Netherlands to the British five days earlier.

Still, the news was breathtaking. Through the hopper window that opened onto the street they heard shouts and whistles.

A car horn tap-tap-tapping. Then another, and another.

“Jeez,” Cal said. “Can you imagine what it’s like in Berlin right now? I probably would’ve been there, if it weren’t for…” He wobbled his shoe with the extra-thick sole.

But she was looking at the caramel-colored radio. Her eyes were glistening. “Do you think—” she said, then paused as if unsure of what she wanted to ask him. She took a breath. “Do you think people will start coming home?”

“From Europe? I hope so. But Hirohito’s still giving us a run. They might send those guys over to the Pacific.”

The woman blinked against the sting in her eyes and, as Truman continued talking, looked at this hardware store clerk who, when he’d been sitting behind the counter, had been almost handsome with his gray-blue eyes, his wavy blond hair that looked as if he’d just raked his fingers through it, his narrow jaw, and an early set of lines framing his mouth.

Now that she could see all of him, he was still almost handsome but in a different way.

He wasn’t very tall, and his stance was off, his hips pitched at an almost uncomfortable-looking angle.

His gold-and-black-striped tie was tucked between two buttons halfway down the front of his oxford shirt and looked wrong that way; she wanted to pluck it out.

Instead, she took him by his shoulders, pulled him toward her, and kissed him.

Cal would have gasped if his lips weren’t against hers.

They kissed until Truman finished speaking.

When they stepped back, she turned off the radio.

He heard her sniffle, offered her his handkerchief.

She touched it to the outside corners of her eyes as she glanced at the cot and pint-size desk, the brown bag with the apple beside it, the library book with the swashbuckling cover. “Does a child live down here?”

“No—” Cal couldn’t account for the alarm in his voice. The awkwardness of their proximity, maybe. Now that the announcement was over, they had no reason to be in the basement. “This is just where we do the invoicing and ordering, and—”

She said, “I’m Margaret, by the way. Salt, like the shaker.”

“Cal Jenkins.”

They shook hands—and smiled at how formal that felt, given what had just happened between them.

“I should go,” Margaret said.

He followed her back upstairs, his shoes clomping unevenly.

She told him she’d been walking down the street and had noticed people rushing to their cars, everyone switching on their radios, she could tell something was happening but hadn’t known whom to approach.

She thanked him, then ran her eyes over the shelves, the endcap displays.

“I’ve lived in this town for almost six years and I’ve never been in here once. ”

Cal just nodded, thinking, I would’ve remembered you.

He watched through the front window as she made her way up the sidewalk.

Car horns were still sounding off. A boy had climbed onto the mailbox across the street and was making a bullhorn with his hands, broadcasting the surrender.

Cal ought to call home, he knew, see if Becky had the radio on.

She would want to know, even if she wouldn’t want to talk to him.

He dragged the back of his hand across his mouth and spotted a smear of coral lipstick on his thumb, astounded all over again by what had just happened.

As long as he remained standing at this window, he told himself, as long as Margaret Salt was still in his sight, he was still the guy who’d had to wipe a beautiful stranger’s coral lipstick off his face.

She turned the corner onto Durbin Street and was gone.

—

Three and a half years earlier, one look at Jenkins, Calvin M.

had told the Army doctor all he needed to know.

Barefoot, Cal was unable to stand completely straight or even hold his shoulders level.

“Try the Citizens Defense Corps,” the doctor said.

“I’m sure they can use you.” It was January of 1942, less than a month after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Bonhomie recruitment center was full of symmetrical young men waiting to enlist.

“Would I get a uniform?”

Someone behind Cal snickered.

“An armband, I think,” the doctor said. “Thanks for coming in, son. Get dressed and go on home.” He wrote something on Cal’s card, stamped it, and handed it to the nurse for final processing.

But Cal had gotten the afternoon off from the concrete plant for this, not knowing how long it would take, and he was living in a single room-with-kitchenette in Mrs. Gautier’s creaky Queen Anne on Third Street—not exactly a place where he wanted to sit around and sulk.

He steered his chalk-red Nash through the snowy streets to Paulson’s Food Market, instead, and bought groceries with his father’s ration book, then drove them out to the old man.