Purple Hearts(17)

I started running after her after she turned out of the driveway, toward a little playground down the street. Her words struck a note. After detoxing, it took me months to find a minimum-wage job with regular hours. Even then, it wasn’t enough to cover a life. It was half of why I enlisted. I had two years’ tuition to repay. And now I had Johnno to consider. When I caught up with Cassie, she was wiping her face, her shoulders hunched, about to get in her beat-up white Subaru.

“Hey!”

She kept her head down, bringing out her keys with one hand. With the other, she lifted a middle finger. She must have thought I was catcalling her.

I started over. “Er—excuse me, Cassie?”

She saw me approaching, narrowed her eyes, recognizing my face. “Oh, hi.”

I put a hand on my chest. “Luke.”

She draped her tattooed arms on her door. “Yeah.” She looked me up and down, pausing at my broken face. “Did you run here?”

I nodded. “I wanted to say, uh—” I stopped. Now that I was able to see her face more clearly, I noticed she’d been crying. “I’m sorry for what happened the other night. At the bar.”

“Thanks,” she said, and glanced at her keys.

I took stock. Why had I come? Her plan. A wedding.

Frankie was focusing on the risks, the alternatives. He wasn’t considering the benefits at all. I guess one thousand dollars meant very little to someone whose parents would pay his way through law school, whose family home was worth seven figures. It wasn’t like Frankie couldn’t be compassionate, but until you’ve wondered how you’re going to feed yourself, there’s a wall between you and everyone who does have to worry about that.

I’m still on the other side of that wall, and apparently I wasn’t alone.

“Well,” she said, sniffing, trying to wipe away the traces of tears still left. “Bye. Enjoy building roads and saving lives.”

“I also wanted to ask you more about your proposal,” I said quickly. “The one you just made. To Frankie.”

She stared at the ground, scrunching her face. “You heard that?”

“Kind of.”

She looked everywhere but at me. “It was crazy. I don’t know what I was thinking.” She sighed.

“But it’s actually a thing?”

“It says so right here in your beautiful little propaganda booklet.” She handed me an army brochure.

“?‘Propaganda’ is a bit dramatic,” I muttered, shaking my head at the stock photos. I couldn’t help myself. “This is about as harmless as IKEA furniture instructions.”

“IKEA instructions aren’t harmless,” she deadpanned. I looked up. “It’s well known that the little stick-figure guy is a socialist.”

I found myself smiling. “Ha ha.”

I paged through it, focusing on the spousal benefits sections. With every mention of money, I saw myself writing my signature on a check. I saw the taillights of Johnno’s Bronco fading, never to be seen again. And then Jake, laughing next to me on the couch while we watched the Cowboys. My dad sinking into a chair beside us, the hint of a smile, proud. I swallowed, then handed it back to her, noticing for a moment how the sun made her eyes spark gold. “This is a genius idea.”

“You think so?”

“If you could find the right person, yeah.” There it was again, my signature. Good-bye, Johnno.

We stood in silence. My heart pounded. Finally, she gestured at me. “Are you recommending yourself, or are you just making vague, positive statements?”

Before I could think, I pushed out the words. “I think I am.”

She raised her eyebrows. She stepped out from behind the car door, and shut it, muscles visible in her legs from her Converses all the way up to the edge of her cutoffs. “I’m very serious about this.”

“Me, too.” I felt my chest tighten. I was saying the words before I could comprehend what they meant. But it felt scary and correct at the same time, like in an animal way, a primal way, like sprinting down a hill or waking up suddenly after a long, sober sleep. We were both trapped in a corner of our lives, snarling and biting until we got out.

She closed her eyes, shaking her head. “I don’t know.”

I tried to make my voice softer. I wanted her to open her eyes again. “What are you worried about?”

“First, I don’t know you. I think we made that pretty clear the other night.”

Well, duh, I resisted saying. “We only have a few days that we have to get along. We don’t have to actually like each other.”

We caught each other’s eyes.

She bit her nail and spoke, quiet. “I don’t mean that, I mean. Well, maybe I do, but whatever. I mean, how am I going to know you’re not going to fuck me over?”

I tried to resist the anger that rose, heating my skin. I knew it wasn’t for her. The anger was for a past version of myself, running down Arikara Street with twenties in my pocket. “How do I know that you’re not going to fuck me over?”

She looked at me like I was stupid. “Because it’s my idea. I’m the one with the medical bills.”

“Right.” I nodded in the direction of the Cucciolo house. “We tell Frankie. Frankie holds us to it.”