Chapter 14 #2
“I have a client call coming in,” Ariel said. “Let me call you back.”
Ariel hung up. Crisis averted. She was persistent, so she wouldn’t give up, but at least Stella had more time to figure out what wild story to tell her best friend to prevent her from learning the truth.
Stella placed her third piece of pepperoni pizza on a paper towel, then she slid the half-empty pizza box back toward Jack.
He wiped his mouth and grabbed another slice. They drank Pepsi out of two mismatched plastic cups she’d found in the kitchenette
cabinets.
She could almost pretend they were two regular people, enjoying pizza together, possibly having a date. “The clothes,” she
said. “Does Arnie keep a stash around here somewhere? A magic closet?”
Jack smiled around his cup, took a sip, and then placed it down. “If by magic you mean, does he stock it with our preferred options, then yes.”
“But Darcy’s wearing exactly what I’d expect,” Stella said, biting into her slice.
Jack cocked an eyebrow. “Darcy wouldn’t suffer himself to be a drip.”
Stella agreed. “I can’t imagine him in regular clothes.” She pointed at Jack’s T-shirt. “Why the Yankees?”
He looked affronted. “Why the Yankees? They’re only the winningest team in history with twenty-seven world titles. They’ve been to the World Series
forty times. Then there’s Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra—should I keep going?”
“Superfan,” Stella said. “I had no idea. What other gold nuggets can I dig up?”
Jack playfully rubbed his chin as though thinking. “My favorite song is ‘I’m Stepping Out with a Memory Tonight.’”
Stella shook her head. “I don’t know that one.”
Jack’s shock caused her to laugh. “But it’s a perfect dancing song.”
Stella took another bite of her pizza. “A good reason I don’t know it.”
He pointed to her cell phone. “Arnie’s told me about technology wonders. Can you find the song and play it on your phone?”
Stella wiped her hands on a napkin and searched a music streaming site. She lowered the volume on her phone, tapped Play,
and the song filled the space around them. It transported her to the 1940s, and when she closed her eyes, she could see couples
slow dancing across a gymnasium floor. She’d read Jack’s book repeatedly. His fictional journals in the book didn’t include
these little details.
Another curious thing was the author’s lack of mentioning Jack having a wife or girlfriend. In 1945 a man his age would have
been married already. Fictional Jack had a richer backstory than she knew, proven by his love of the Yankees and Jimmy Dorsey.
What else hadn’t the author included in the published novel?
“Did you have a girlfriend?” What kind of woman was Jack Mathis’s type? Would she be intelligent and beautiful and know how
to cook? Would she be classy and always put together? Stella doubted Jack’s type would eat kids’ cereal or premade macaroni
and cheese while standing up in the kitchen.
Jack chewed slowly and swallowed. “When?”
“When you left for war. Was there someone you left behind?” Stella put down her half-eaten slice. “The author, well, he didn’t
include anything like that in the book, so I wondered . . .” It would have been so easy to fall in love with a man like Jack.
She’d be surprised if other women hadn’t felt the same way.
He took a drink before answering. “There’s always more than what appears in the printed book.
More to the stories captured within the pages.
I didn’t have a girlfriend when I left. A few weeks before, yes.
Ellen.” He said her name like it still unsettled something inside him, and he didn’t elaborate.
Stella’s curiosity flared. “What happened?”
He glanced down at the floor. “You can’t just leave it there?”
Stella made a scoffing noise. “Could you?”
He smiled at her. “I actually thought Ellen and I would get married. It made sense,” he said. “We dated for two years, and
she was a good girl. Capable and kind. I figured we’d settle down and have two or three kids. She liked flowers, so I wanted
land outside the city to give her a garden. Then the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 went into practice. Four years
later, my district was selected, and given that I was classified as a 1-A, I was called into action.”
“Two years was a long courtship for that time, wasn’t it? Didn’t girls get married when they were barely adults?”
Jack studied the pizza box. “When we met, she was seventeen. Her parents weren’t in a rush to marry her off. When we found
out I was going to join the war, she said she cared a lot about me, but she didn’t have ‘that feeling.’”
“What feeling?”
He met Stella’s gaze. “That feeling that she wanted to wait for me to come back. So she broke it off.”
Stella gaped at him. “She broke up with you? After two years?”
He chuckled. “You say that like it’s an impossible idea.”
Stella wanted to say, Have you seen you? You’re gorgeous and thoughtful and well-mannered, and did I mention gorgeous? How could anyone spend two
years with Jack Mathis and decide he wasn’t worth waiting for?
They sat quietly for a few minutes while Stella created images of Ellen and Jack together—in her mind they were dancing on a polished floor while Jack spun her around and Ellen laughed.
Then they were sitting on a picnic blanket in the park, eating grapes and cheese on crackers.
Then they were strolling beneath the moonlight—
Jack interrupted her thoughts. “I wanted to get married.”
“I’m sorry Ellen broke it off,” Stella said. “It seems kinda heartless to do that to a man going off to war.”
Jack lifted one shoulder. “Better before I left than after I got back.”
But Jack had never returned from the war.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to come home, thinking I’d finally be able to get my life back on track, only to have my girl ditch
me,” he said. “If I’d come home.”
“If you had, do you think you would have eventually gotten married?”
A small smile lifted his lips. “I’d like to think so. I wanted a family. A home. All that jazz.”
Stella stared at him. “I wish you could have had it all.”
Jack’s gaze lingered on her. “You said you aren’t in love with Wade anymore, but were you?”
Stella reached for her slice of pizza and stopped. A door opened in her mind. She pictured Wade leaning against the doorjamb
with his boyish smile, arms crossed over his chest, asking her if she was coming in to join him or not. A small part of her
ached to go back to those days with him when he’d made her feel special, but the much larger part of her was so not interested
in his half-hearted romance. “I thought I was.”
Jack propped an elbow on the desk and watched her. “Tell me about him, about the two of you together.”
Stella pinched the bridge of her nose. “I can’t possibly prepare you for the ugliness.”
“I’ve seen some pretty bad stuff, Stella.”
Passages from Beyond the Southern Horizon flashed through her mind—his two closest comrades killed by a mortar shell explosion a few yards from where he stood loading the gun on a tank, raging blizzards and freezing rain, and wounded soldiers freezing to death while Jack slept in a foxhole wrapped in a coat he took off a deceased German soldier.
He’d definitely seen worse than her busted-up relationship saga. “Wade was one of Percy’s friends. He was older by a few years,
but we’d known each other almost our whole lives. When we had Dad’s funeral, Wade was there, and we reconnected. We chatted
off and on for a couple years before anything started happening. He was married— Well, he was separated and had been for more
than a year. But he wasn’t officially divorced.”
Jack sat up straighter in his chair. “You dated a married man?”
“Don’t look so surprised,” Stella said, even as the words filled her with a sickening shame. “It’s not like I’m the first
woman to make a bad decision. He and his wife weren’t living together. I’m not saying that makes it okay, but it made it seem more okay. They were co-parenting their three children, so the kids lived with her full-time, but Wade was basically with
them all the time at her house. His kids were—no, are—his life. That part of his situation was always clear to me. He would do anything for them. A trait of his I admired.”
“Do you have a picture?” Jack asked.
“One,” she admitted and wondered why she hadn’t deleted it yet. “I ditched the rest. I couldn’t stand seeing them on my phone.”
She scrolled through the photo album on her phone until she found the last remaining photograph of Wade—one she’d taken while
they were having lunch a month before he left her. She held out the phone to Jack.
“Decent-looking guy, obviously older than you, but I can see why you were attracted to him.”
Stella shook her head. “I was so desperate for love and comfort that I probably would have been attracted to a mannequin if it had shown interest.”
Jack laughed but then stopped abruptly. “Sorry. I know that wasn’t an easy time for you.”
She waved her hand dismissively. “No, it was meant to be funny. Self-deprecating humor, but it still carries a lot of truth.”
She pocketed her cell phone. “After my dad died, I was in a vulnerable, needy state of mind. Wade and I started talking on
the phone and sending emails, then that evolved into lunches here and there, then a couple dinners. Eventually we were talking
every day and sneaking off to do all sorts of things.”
“Sneaking?”
“Is there a better word for what we were doing?”
Jack frowned. “I suppose not. Continue.”
“At first, we had a lot of fun together. We went to movies, museums, and concerts. We went on a few weekend getaways. We laughed
a lot, and when we were together, Wade seemed freer. Uninhibited by all the responsibilities of work and homelife.” It suddenly
struck her that she was an escape for Wade, a way for him to release his regular life and have a pretend one with her. She
also questioned if she’d really been happy with him or if he’d also been a temporary escape from her pain and loneliness.