Nothing but a Smile (25 page)

She opened her mouth to tell him off or thank him or cry, she wasn't sure, but something else happened instead. It was hard to think of it as a kiss. It was more like she pressed her mouth against his to keep herself from yelping and breathed in deeply and held her breath, not moving from this perilous perch until a sob came over her that came crashing out, and she let go, turning away, unable to look him in the eye, and went back into her
apartment and closed the door, knowing she'd be out flat in a matter of seconds and wouldn't remember much of this in the morning, thank God.

He rose before he heard her stirring down the hall and slipped out, leaving through the back door of the shop. His first stop was the hotel he'd first stayed in—when was that? Jesus, over two
years
ago … What the hell had he been doing sitting down the hall from her like a maiden aunt for two-plus goddamn years? It was sick, this thing they had. He couldn't very well put the make on his dead buddy's wife, but he also couldn't just sit there like a nutless pansy.

It took almost five minutes to raise a response at the front desk. The fact that the desk clerk appeared in his bathrobe, none too pleased to be answering the bell, did not bode well for their having a room. “What,” the guy said, an entirely new guy since he'd last been there, “the
NO VACANCY
sign was too complicated for you?”

After explaining that the kid was a smartass and possibly looking to have his teeth handed to him, Wink asked about potential vacancies, anything coming up in the near future. “Long term, I'm talking about.” It didn't make any difference in the answer he got, other than the addition of a
sir,
and the kid lowering his voice.

His next stop was the news shop, to get the papers and scour the apartment listings.

It was incredible. A year after the boys had started coming home, and there still wasn't enough room for them. The only
listings were in Elmhurst, Park Ridge, Mount Prospect, Downers Grove, Palatine—places that seemed as far-flung as Tunisia.

On the off chance he might have heard of something, he asked the old grouch who owned the shop. “Listen,
you
see people every day, you hear stuff—I should ask you: got any idea where I might rent a room?”

“And I should ask
you,”
he said, “got any idea where I could maybe rent a unicorn?”

So that was that. He stopped for a couple bear claws in a sack, breakfast for him and his “roomie,” and started home, turning, somewhere en route, toward Union Station.

He was on his uncle Len's farm in St. Johns, Michigan, by late afternoon. It was the heart of soft red winter wheat season, so his uncle wasted little time on catching up and instead put him immediately to work on the combine.

He hadn't seen the old guy in years, but he didn't look significantly different. He claimed his old bedroom hadn't changed, either. “It's always here for you,” he said. “Kept it just like it always was.”

Which wasn't even remotely accurate, Wink saw, when he finally went up to wash for supper. His old bed remained, true, and his bookshelf and the birch-bark lamp he'd made, but a lot of the clutter was gone. Also missing was the rest of the furniture, replaced by a long metal and glass rectangle crammed into one end of the room that looked to be—and the lingering odor confirmed it—a chick incubator.

The majority of pictures he'd tacked up were gone, replaced with a couple sketches he recognized as his own that he was pretty sure he'd never hung himself, certainly not framed, as they now were. The calendar hadn't been touched. It was an Elvgren
boilerplate, compliments of a Saginaw seed company for the year 1941—the one called
A Knockout,
with the smiling blonde in the corner of a boxing ring, wearing boxing gloves and leaning casually on the ropes like it was all over. One of the man's least steamy, so Wink wasn't that surprised his uncle had failed to purge it.

He recalled having stacks of books that had piled up on the floor, overflowing the bookshelf. And a dresser, topped with a collection of rocks and other treasures he'd found, plus a desk, scattered with more of the same, including jelly jars, containing various homemade experimental rocket fuels, and the science project he'd made in the eighth grade—a working model of stalactites and stalagmites using yarn and reservoirs of water and washing soda. It hadn't been pretty, and it had smelled moldy even back then, but it hadn't been easy to make, so he'd been reluctant to pitch it.

The rug was new—a gaudy rag oval that looked like his uncle had run a circus tent through his combine, though more likely something purchased at a craft bazaar at the church. The souvenir pennant from a Tigers game he'd been too young to remember attending was still there, faded a slate gray and peach and thumbtacked to the back of the door.

After supper, out on the old glider on the screened-in porch, Wink finally dropped a hint that he'd actually found his room to be a little more sparse than he recalled.

“Well, I pared it down some, sure. But the
essentials
haven't changed. I didn't toss any of the important stuff, is what I meant.”

Wink asked him specifically about his missing science project.

“Did you become a scientist? You did not. So how important could it have been? You hang on to what you need. The
rest …”

He flicked at the air like he was brushing away a bug. Maybe he was.

“Plus, you got rid of my old desk and my dresser … What is that—an incubator?”

Uncle Len grinned. “Last year I hatched two hundred baby chicks in there.” He appeared to be proud of himself.

Wink stared at him. This is what happened when men were allowed to remain bachelors for so long.

“I'm not lying.”

He told his uncle he didn't think he was lying; that he could still pick up faint whiffs of “something I'd call Eau de Bad Easter.”

The old man snorted. “Nephew, are you unable to open a window?”

“I
did,
believe me. And it was nice to see you hadn't gotten rid of the
windows …
”

“You've still got that smart mouth, I see. I'm sure that served you well in the big city?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the war?”

“There, too. The United States military values nothing higher than a smart mouth.”

Uncle Len chuckled, then seemed to choke it back, and he reached over, still looking out at the darkening fields, not looking Wink's way, and clamped him firmly on his shoulder. Wink took the cue to look away, too, but sit still and listen: the man had rarely touched him, even when he was little, so this meant he had something important to say.

“I'm sure you were disappointed about your hand, Nephew. Real disappointed—your drawing hand and all. And that
is
too bad. But I don't mind telling you, I was praying real hard every night that you'd just make it back.”

For a second, Wink felt guilty for not coming to the farm sooner, but weighing people down with guilt wasn't really his uncle's habit, and sure enough, as if reading his mind, Uncle Len added, “Didn't have to be
here,
of course—just
back.”

When they turned in and he was back in his room, he stood studying the moonlight pouring in on the incubator and wondered if he'd be able to sleep with that thing in his room. Even empty of chicks, it did in fact retain an odor. And it made him think of babies and breeding, that impulse to see life continue— as if some cosmic commanding officer in the sky or maybe in their blood told them
As you were, soldier—
that all his fellow GIs seemed to embrace so strongly these days, and he had yet to feel.

The old farmhouse was so quiet. He tried to listen for sounds from the next room, but he couldn't make any out. He'd gotten pretty used to at least hearing footsteps and the occasional piece of furniture shifting down the hall and the city outside, rattling itself.

He stood there, looking down at the fields and the darkness stretching out for miles. If he had to long for her, he guessed he'd rather do it close up.

His uncle really didn't seem hurt or put out when he took the first train back the next morning.

Leaving Union Station, he decided to stop at the Zim Zam for a new sack of bear claws, even though these, too, were not the freshest this late in the day, and even though she wasn't expecting bear claws and he hadn't even told her where he was going, anyway.

At the camera shop, she was back behind the counter. She gave him a normal enough smile and a hello, and he offered her some of the pastry as if he hadn't disappeared for a day and a
half. She probably assumed he'd been staying at Reenie's or something. She didn't ask, and he made no mention of what happened in the hallway the other night.

They were stuck with each other, no matter how cockeyed things had become between them; no matter if he
was
starting to wonder if he wasn't maybe a little in love with her.

A few days after she embarrassed herself with Wink—and, she suspected, nearly scared him off—Mort Doerbom, the lawyer, stopped by. He'd always appeared chipper and fresh scrubbed when he was helping them form S&W Publishing and set up the legal papers for the trademarks and all of that, but today she noticed he sported an actual carnation in his lapel.

For some reason, she found herself feeling a little glad that Wink was out visiting a printing plant. Maybe it was because, though Mort had been nothing but kind to them, taking what she considered a very minimal fee, considering what she'd heard a lawyer's help would cost, Wink had made a few disparaging remarks behind his back. It seemed uncharacteristic of Wink, who could be cutting at times, but only when someone was asking for it. She recalled how he'd described Mort after the two men first met: “I don't know,” he'd said. “This character Doerbom— he strikes me as a guy who should wear glasses.”

She told him Mr. Doerbom probably didn't need glasses. As a customer, he never squinted at his negatives or his prints, which he nonetheless examined carefully each time right at the counter before leaving the shop.

“I'm not saying he needs glasses but shirks them; I'm saying he just … should wear glasses. By rights.”

She still wasn't clear on what he was getting at. Maybe it was some sort of 4-F, goldbricker crack, but when she asked him to clarify further, he couldn't—just said, “Forget it, Sal,” shrugged his shoulders, and retreated into the darkroom.

If it was meant to be a crack, it wasn't one of his best, and she wondered why he couldn't do better.

When Mr. Doerbom came by now, starting off asking if she had any issues or questions about the forms he'd helped her file, he led so quickly into a question about having dinner, at first she put the two subjects together and told him if they were going to discuss business, she'd have to check with Wink; that she didn't know his schedule.

“Forgive me, Mrs. Chesterton,” he said, looking a little embarrassed. “I'm afraid I haven't been clear, but I meant this not so much as a business dinner but rather, socially—a chance for the two of us to—”

“Oh. Right.”

She was still thinking of Wink, actually—thinking he might walk in, back early from the printers, and it was with the further thought that perhaps if she opened herself up to such offers a little, she might not find herself at such a humiliating low point as she had the other night, lonely and drunk.

So she told him that would be fine, but reminded him that it hadn't been quite a year since her husband passed, so she would ask that he consider the socializing aspect of the dinner as being “very low key.” She felt rude saying it, but he seemed pleased all the same.

As they settled their plans, she agreed to meet him at the restaurant, thinking, for now, there was no reason to advertise
to Wink or Reenie or anyone else for that matter that she was possibly—maybe—going on a sort of a
date,
of all things.

They figured they were safe enough, given it was September and a little cold to go into the water. The chance of unwanted company, it seemed to him, was slim. He wasn't sure which one of the two girls came up with North Shore Beach—it was a bit of an expedition, all the way up past the Loyola campus—and he hadn't been able to picture which beach it was before they arrived. But when he saw it, lurking quietly at the end of North Shore Avenue, he was glad they'd taken the trouble to travel so far. Oak Street Beach, for example, facing every window on the north side of the Drake Hotel, would have been far more convenient but far less private, open in a big expansive arc to the snooty Gold Coast—the home, of course, of Chesty's rich guardians—besides affording an unobstructed view to every driver and passenger among the constant stream of traffic whizzing along Lake Shore Drive.

This
section of beach, in contrast, seemed like a secret; an afterthought tacked on, off to one side, of a residential dead end, shielded from the houses by a very comforting treeline. The nearest prying eyes, it seemed, would probably have to be way on the other side, unseen, over in Michigan, fifty miles to the east.

It was overcast, the big heavy gray sky, in fact, reminding him of Michigan, the time spent on his uncle's farm. It felt just about as isolated as that. The greatest potential for interruption, he felt, lay in the gulls. They pecked and jabbered at the sand, feeding off some sort of miniature fish that silvered the beach.

Even Reenie, normally game for most anything, appeared to be a little thrown by the carpet of dead sardine-sized fish. She kicked at them with the side of the sneakers she had yet to shed. Sal seemed more interested in getting the beach towels arranged in a position that would put them at nice angles and still frame the long perspective of the shoreline, while simultaneously pestering him about f-stops and the possible need for a filter to correct the overcast sky.

There wasn't any clever story here today or any sort of special props, other than the beach towels and suntan lotion they'd brought more as practical concerns than as gimmicks for visual gags. He'd suggested a picnic basket and an inflatable beach ball or perhaps an inner tube, but the girls had nixed both of these ideas. “Naw,” Reenie had said. “Gee, let's just
go to the beach.
You know?”