A Very Lusty Christmas (15 page)

On the edge of her rapture, just touching her consciousness, she heard Gerald struggle for breath while Patrick slammed into her, held himself still, and shouted his own completion.

Kate promised to write to her men once a week, because they none of them knew when they’d be able to see each other again. She didn’t really have time to miss them overmuch, however. For the morning after Gerald and Patrick returned to their base, her patients began to arrive.

Although she was young, Kate had amassed a great deal of experience dealing with patients both before and after Pearl Harbor. There wasn’t much she hadn’t seen. She’d dealt with men recovering from simple gunshot wounds, all the way to men missing one or more limbs. She’d discovered early on that soldiers injured in combat could be more than physically wounded. Oftentimes the wounds inflicted upon the spirit were the worst injuries of all.

The meetings she’d had with General Erickson and the army brass had laid out the parameters under which the Lusty Convalescent Home was to operate. She would be sent patients for whom spending time in a relatively quiet and restive environment would be beneficial. This meant there would be no acute care going on in her facility. This donated Home would be used for rehabilitative care. When her patients were ready, they would be sent home—or back to their base.

Dr. Parker managed to be on hand when most of the patients arrived, and between them, they were able to get the men settled in, and into a routine.

Aside from the large bedroom that served as her quarters, there was another bedroom on the first floor. This had been set up with only two beds, and was to be used for the men less able to negotiate stairs.

The other rooms, all on the second floor, were slightly larger and could hold three men apiece. The accommodations were really quite more luxurious and private than what the men would have been used to in the hospital.

By dinnertime Monday, Kate nearly had a full house.

She applauded the decision to use the main front room, which if this were a private residence would likely be a parlor, as the dining room. There were four large tables set up with more than enough chairs to go around. Windows on two sides of the room supplied plenty of light in the daytime, and gave an aura of spaciousness to the room. Books had been donated, as had decks of playing cards. They had checkerboards and chessboards. A radio had also been gifted. In the daytime, men would be able to read or play cards. They could go on walks, and those that were able would be encouraged to lend a hand around the house—doing dishes, helping to prepare the breakfast and lunch, tending to the gardens, or the lawn, or perform whatever small chores Kate could devise for them to do.

Rehabilitation meant a return to normalcy, and that was the goal here.

In the evenings they could listen to the radio—a luxury some of the men hadn’t experienced yet. They could laugh with Abbot and Costello, or exercise their minds solving mysteries with Ellery Queen.

The goal was to help the bodies and the spirits finish healing, and help the men adjust to not being on the battlefield.

Kate hadn’t been sure how everything would work once her patients arrived. This position held a lot of responsibility, and while she was always conscious of that fact, she didn’t shy away from it. By the time the first week was over, she not only felt more confident in herself. Her respect for the townsfolk of Lusty had grown by leaps and bounds.

The fact that the town had provided this facility and footed the bill for operating it, as well as providing a capable volunteer staff to assist her was generous enough, in her mind. But what made Lusty shine for her was the way folks would just drop by, bring magazines and books, cookies and conversation.

It didn’t take long for some of her residents to show marked improvement, either.

Charles and Samuel Benedict were regular visitors, as were their wife and mother. Amanda Jessop-Kendall played a mean game of checkers, and had a way about her that seemed to set some of the most truculent men on their pins.

Also, near the end of the first week, Kate made a new friend. Her name was Miranda Barnes Kendall, and she was the newlywed wife to Martin and Nicholas Kendall. She was also the same age as Kate.

Kate hadn’t met Martin and Nicholas. They were Sarah and Amanda’s grandsons—Chelsea’s boys—and had only been on a brief leave from their roles as instructors at the naval training base in Norfolk, Virginia. They’d come home long enough to visit family and marry Miranda. She’d traveled back to Norfolk with them and had returned to her small apartment there. But now the men had shipped out, headed to war, and the young bride had just arrived back in Lusty.

Miranda had been a teacher at a girl’s private school in Norfolk, but once she’d married, of course, she’d had to relinquish her position.

“Of course you know the theory behind
that
is that a woman’s place is in the home, and if she’s married then she needs to make a home and take care of her husband, not other people’s children.” She shook her head. “That is
not
very modern thinking, to my mind.”

Kate couldn’t help but agree. The same rule was in place for nurses—even nurses in the army. She figured once she got married—
if
she got married because neither one of those Benedicts had said anything about marriage—then she’d likely have to resign her commission, too.

“That’s why I had to come back here. I certainly didn’t want to be alone with nothing to do.” Miranda grinned. “Well, that and the fact that my mother was completely scandalized when I told her I hadn’t just married Martin, I’d married Nicholas, too.”

Miranda seemed to be taking her mother’s attitude in stride. Kate didn’t even want to think about what her own mother would say about Gerald and Patrick.
That’s a topic for pondering best left for another day.

Kate wasn’t one to avoid tough or difficult issues or situations. But she could see no reason to disclose the affairs of her heart to her mother at this point in time.

Because she needed to keep herself busy, Miranda appointed herself as Kate’s assistant, and really, Kate couldn’t object to that move one bit. They both had quite a lot in common. They were both modern women, women of their times. They both held strong opinions about the role of women in modern American society.

They were both in love with two men.

Kate couldn’t deny what she knew was in her heart. How could she have fallen in love so quickly? She had not a clue. It was rather ironic that she, who had eschewed the concept of romance and marriage, period, had fallen so hard, and so fast, for not one but
two
men. But there it was.

Of course she didn’t say anything about how she felt to her two aviators. Another bit of irony. Always in the past Kate would say what she wanted to say, and damn the consequences. But this time, and about this subject, she felt almost afraid to say anything.

She believed them when they said their feelings for her weren’t casual. But she simply didn’t know if what they felt for her was the forever kind of love she needed it to be.

That was another reason she was grateful for Miranda. Her new friend proved to be an able, bright, and personable assistant, and did a good job of keeping her mind off her own emotional roller coaster.

Aside from helping Kate with some of the practical matters of running a home with more than twenty male residents, she was able to use her teaching skills. It turned out that a few of the men weren’t completely literate.

The dining room soon became a makeshift schoolroom as the energetic young woman set about to teach those men how to read and write.

In the evening, when the house had settled, the two women often spent time in Kate’s room, talking quietly long into the night.

As comfortable as she’d been with the older women of Lusty, it was really nice to have a friend who was her own age, and one who hadn’t grown up in this town.

Kate was able to have a lot of the questions that had been lurking in her thoughts answered. And she received answers to some questions she hadn’t even thought to ask, too!

There were no barriers of privacy or modesty between the two women and Kate, who’d prided herself on being fairly conversant with the human body and all of its miraculous functions, certainly got a whole new area of expertise, thanks to Miranda.

She thought back to the journals that Sarah and Amanda had written and understood things they’d alluded to a bit better after talking with the new Mrs. Kendall.

She could hardly wait for the next opportunity to spend time with her men again and test out some of her new knowledge.

Miranda was living at the New House, of course, with her in-laws. Clearly Chelsea Benedict Jessop-Kendall loved her daughter-in-law. It kept being something that Kate noticed—how affectionate and caring Benedicts, Jessops, and Kendalls alike were with each other.

Likely the fact that these families embraced a lifestyle decried by the rest of the world accounted for a good deal of the closeness Kate witnessed.

But she thought the people themselves were simply more loving, more giving, and more tolerant than most folks she’d ever met.

Kate had moments when she wished she’d been raised right here. A part of her acknowledged that thought was likely very unfair toward her own parents. Mildred and George Wesley had done the best they’d known how to do. Getting this glimpse of several generations living and working together helped her to see that her mother was as she was partly due to the very strict upbringing she’d received at the hands of her taciturn Grandmother Richardson.

Kate didn’t remember that woman well, but she did remember thinking even as a child that her grandmother never smiled.

People only knew what they knew, although Kate was learning that people could change if they wanted to. Yes, people knew what they knew, but they could learn, too.

In many ways, that was what this Home she found herself managing was all about. These men had been wounded. Some had lost an arm, or a leg. Her patients, while deserving of sympathy, and the gratitude of their countrymen, were being offered the opportunity to change who they were, in their own hearts.

Some of them believed that without that arm or leg, that being plagued with the haunting nightmares of being alone and wounded on the battlefield, hearing the cries and screams of their comrades as they lay dying, meant they were no longer “whole” men.

That was a belief Kate was determined to eradicate. This town she found herself in was a living testament that people could do whatever the hell they made up their minds to do—
if
they wanted to do it badly enough.

In her heart Kate knew the resolve she needed to show these men who were her charges. They deserved her compassion, but not her pity. If they were willing to see how much they could still do, if they were willing to remake their mental images of themselves, she would move heaven and hell to help them make that happen.

* * * *

The smoke rose in thin, deadly wisps from beneath the engine cover.

“Get your hands off the stick!” Gerald didn’t think he’d ever given a command in a harsher voice. The young airman in front of him immediately lifted his hands up. “Yes, sir!”

“Now you listen to me, young man. I have a woman waiting for me to ask her to marry me back home. We are
not
going to die. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir!”

“As soon as we’re down you open that fucking canopy.”

“Yes, sir.”

That last response sounded a bit more steady.
Good.

Gerald struggled with the steering that seemed now to be more sluggish than it had been. Inside, he felt the kind of panic that he’d only ever felt once before, and that was when his Hurricane had taken a hit over the skies of England.

He’d landed that bitch then, and he was damn well going to land this bitch now. He knew if he had to he could jump, engage his parachute, and survive.

He couldn’t guarantee the young man sitting in front of him would be as lucky. The poor kid had probably wet his pants already, and Gerald couldn’t blame him one bit.

He finally got the plane turned around, and was headed back to the field. The other planes that had been a part of their training group and in the air with them were giving them wide berth. Looking to his left, he saw Patrick, in the instructor’s seat of his Valiant, but clearly in control of his bird. He signaled, and Gerald nodded. He eased up on his air speed, allowing Patrick to get ahead of him.

In what felt like minutes but couldn’t have been more than a handful of seconds, Patrick was back, and gave him a thumbs-up sign. Translated, his brother couldn’t see any flames.

Not terribly reassuring, but the lack of flames meant a slightly less chance of their bursting into a ball of fire if they screwed up the landing.

“So don’t fuck up the landing, asshole.”

“What was that, sir?”

Gerald hadn’t meant to say that self-admonition aloud.

“Pray, son.”

“Yes, sir. Praying, sir.”

Gerald put all his focus on bringing his bird in. He didn’t let his mind stray to his brother, or Kate. He ruthlessly kept his mind on the task at hand.
Down, down, a little more, damn it, too fast.