Chapter Nine
She made plans, and life changed her plans. So she planned to change her plans in anticipation of life, until the day she surrendered her plans to change her life.
—The Temptress of Pecan Lane, by Mae Daniels
Thwack!
A gust of cool air swept across Anna’s nose. She bolted upright in her desk chair. “Entropy at absolute zero is impossible.”
“Can you leave that crap in the classroom?” Jules tapped her fingers on the blue binder she’d dropped on Anna’s desk. “Quarterly review. Customer. Need a slide flipper. For God’s sake, wipe your chin.”
Anna swiped at her mouth. She worked her jaw around, wincing at an unfamiliar pain on her cheek. She gingerly fingered the abnormally smooth grooved skin. “Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes.” Jules smirked. “You got some shift and caps lock on your face.”
Anna rubbed at her cheek where she’d been laying on her keyboard.
Thermodynamics would kill her yet. “Three more weeks,” she grumbled.
Then finals, but at least she’d be done.
She stood and had to grab her desk when her left leg refused to work.
Apparently sleeping at her desk was bad for her face and her circulation.
“I have a test tonight.” She fingered her skin again. “How bad is it for real?”
“Pretty sure you don’t have to worry about anyone hitting on you today.”
Like anybody in the office would try. Jules was the only one who still treated her mostly the same as she had before the divorce. Anna tested her weight on her leg. Getting better. “Is everybody else already there?”
Jules leaned out the door. “Shirley’s not—no, wait, there she is. Yep, everybody else is ready.”
Anna limped out of her cube, using the walls for support. Her leg tingled. “I seriously hate thermo.”
“It doesn’t like you much either.” Jules grabbed the binder and stalked out of the lab.
Anna gimped along behind her. “Some days I wonder how Brad puts up with you.”
“Are you serious? Somebody has to kill those bloody rays of sunshine he’s always crapping out.” She grinned, still riding the newlywed high. It was like a happiness record for her. “But they do make him kinda cute, don’t they?”
Anna winced. “If you say so.”
“Hey, Brad Skyped with Rodney the other night. He said to tell you even covered in Sprite, you’re still better looking than the goats over there. But he thinks they might sing better.”
That wasn’t nearly as embarrassing as it should’ve been.
They’d almost reached the conference room when Brad himself barreled around the corner, the receptionist jogging after him, insisting he didn’t have clearance to be in the building.
His uniform blouse was unbuttoned, and he hadn’t taken his hat off.
His skin matched the gray camouflage of his uniform.
The sheen of grief in his eyes and his uneven stagger sucked every bit of rightness from the hallway.
Anna’s heart dipped to her toes then ricocheted up like it was on a bungee cord.
Jules went pale. “Ohmigod,” she breathed. “Rodney?”
He crushed her against him, raw pain twisting his face. He blinked rapidly over shiny eyes, and when he spoke, his voice was husky and cracked. “Fuckers got him with an IED.”
“Is he—”
“Gone.”
Anna’s limbs turned to silly putty. She choked on the No! in her throat.
Jules pounded a fist on Brad’s chest. “Shut up,” she said, her tone weak and watery.
She needed to give them their privacy, but she couldn’t move. Any moment now, Brad would say Never mind, gotcha.
Except he didn’t.
He stood clutching his wife, trembling and shaking and gasping.
Anna’s throat clogged and her chest ached. For Brad. For Jules. For Rodney. She tried to swallow, but her mouth had gone dry and her jaw was clenched too tight for her tongue to work right.
Shirley stepped outside the conference room. She surveyed the lot of them, dismissed the receptionist with a flick of her finger, then gave Anna’s elbow a tug. Anna’s joints flexed, and soon she was inside the conference room, the door closed against Brad’s and Jules’s grief.
“His brother,” Anna said. The words rolled past her lips, becoming more real as they lingered in the air.
“Goddamned war.” Shirley’s eyes took on a gloss that disappeared in a blink. “You okay?”
She wasn’t, but she nodded anyway.
Shirley seemed to get it. “Good. We might not be out in the trenches ourselves, but they count on us to get ’em in and out of there. You know enough to brief the customer today?”
She took a shaky breath. “Yes, ma’am.”
Giving the quarterly briefing wouldn’t change Rodney’s fate, but this was something small she could do for Jules. And the presentation was normal, organized and color-coded, something tenuous and logical.
Inconsequential in the grand scheme of life, but normal.
When it was finally over, Jules and Brad were gone.
Anna slipped outside for a hit of fresh air.
The stench of boiled asphalt smacked her in the face instead.
She took refuge at a picnic table beneath an umbrella in a small grassy area behind the building, then pulled out her phone.
Three clicks later, it rang on the other end.
“Dr. Vaughn’s office,” a cheery voice with a familiar Northern drawl said.
“Hey, Trina, it’s Anna. Is Beth busy?”
“I think she’s finishing up a filling. You want me to have her call you back?”
“Yeah, that—” A lump clogged Anna’s throat. “No, actually, I need to talk to her now.”
“Okay, hon, hold on one sec, okay?”
“’Kay.”
Anna tried deep breathing, but the humidity on top of the lump made her feel like gagging. Beth came on the line quickly, thank God. “Hey. What’s wrong?”
“I love you.”
Beth’s surprised laugh rang through the phone. “You called me out of a filling for that? Can you give my kids lessons?”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “A friend of mine at work just lost her brother-in-law.”
“Aw, honey. I’m sorry. That bites.”
“So even though you’re not fighting a war, I want you to know I love you. You know. In case you get hit by a bus or something.”
“I’ll watch out for buses. Promise.”
“And falling space junk.”
“Anna,” Beth sighed.
“I’m serious. You never know when your time’s up, and I might never get another chance to tell you I’m glad you’re my sister.”
“I’m glad you’re my sister too, but Tony’s not falling-space-debris lucky,” Beth said. “And if it makes you feel any better, you’re in my will.”
She blinked at the woven metal tabletop, all neat and even and insignificant. If she’d let Rodney kiss her that night, would it have changed anything?
“I’m joking, Anna-banana. Nothing’s going to happen.”
She blew out a slow breath. She could do this. She could fake normal. “Take me out of the will. I don’t want your gerbil.”
“You are such a dweeb. I really need to finish up this filling, but I can call you back in fifteen.”
“I’m okay. Really. I just needed to hear your voice.”
“I’ll come visit soon. I need a day without sniffing testosterone. Keep your chin up, okay?”
She’d had enough practice lately.
So she said good-bye to Beth and went on with her day. Because while the world had lost Rodney, Anna still had a schedule to keep.
“How’d it go, sugar?”
Anna dropped into the seat across from Kaci at Jimmy Beans that night as if her butt was carrying around the weight of the entire last week.
Considering all the thermo knowledge that had evaporated out her ears during her test the last two hours, she should’ve weighed less than the chai latte Kaci had waiting for her.
“It’s over.” She gestured to the cup. “What do I owe you?”
Kaci sniffed and ignored the question. “I’ve got half a mind to march into ol’ grandpappy’s office and give him what for. Giving a test first class after a long weekend. Humph. I don’t know what I ever saw in that man.”
Anna had a couple ideas. There were the potato guns and his penchant for discussing the ignition points of various substances, both turn-ons to Kaci.
Plus, he’d retired from the service earlier than he’d wanted, to move across the country and try to win her back.
But Kaci had Lance, and Lance had not only voluntarily gone into the training squadron to avoid deployments for Kaci, he’d also stood up to her mother.
Considering Kaci’s stories of ol’ grandpappy flirting with her mother, Anna thought Kaci was better off with number two.
Good for her, but Anna wasn’t ever doing a number two. Not given the way her post-divorce love life had gone.
“You okay?”
Kaci’s tone had that sympathetic note that tended to provoke lumpy throats and stingy eyes. But Anna swallowed both with her chai and met her friend’s eyes. “Thermo didn’t beat me the first time, it won’t beat me now.”
Not what her friend was asking, and she knew it.
Kaci didn’t push. She simply waited while Anna let herself process what she’d been hiding from most of the day.
Shirley had come through with a few details, the most comforting being that Rodney probably hadn’t felt a thing, but for the most part, Anna had shut Rodney and Brad and Jules out and coped by focusing on her test.
But her test was over now.
“He asked me for pre-war sex,” she finally said.
“In case he never came back. And I shot him down. And now I keep thinking, what if he never found his last lay? He loved women. What if I was his last chance? What if he was flirting with me to make me feel better? What if I’d done the same for him?
What if I’d stayed and kissed him and that changed everything in the rest of his life by the right number of milliseconds it would’ve taken to change his destiny?
I don’t want to marry the guy, but I don’t want him dead either. ”
“Anna, if you kissed him, those little puffs of air missing from when you flew out of that parking lot might’ve been the ones settling out the pressure in the jet stream and keeping a tornado from exploding over New York City next week.”
Right. And marriage was forever.
Kaci reached over and squeezed her hand. “You can’t butterfly-effect him back.”