Ruth was watching “The Virginian.” She wore shorts that hugged her good-sized butt. A tremor rolled through Leo’s groin. He was surprised he’d asked for GP’s address.

Mr. Poitras came back from the den wearing his glasses. He handed Leo a small folded sheet of paper. “Regards to your father. Don’t be a stranger, now. Good night.”

When Leo got to the street lamps of Paper Boulevard, he unfolded the paper and read the address:

Pvt. G. Poitras
#304-48-6329
1st Recruit Training Battalion
Platoon 1210
Marine Corps Recruit Depot
Beaufort, S.C. 29904

Leo stuck it deep into his shorts pocket, and walked home.

17

Allie hadn’t told a soul, but sometime between Monday night and now, Wednesday night, she had started to think of herself as the Warrior Woman instead of the Warrior Girl because girls don’t have babies. All week at the UFO Show she kept sipping cold glasses of Coke and she held her breath whenever she passed the fryolator window. She joked with Sid and Beatrice and served all her lunch and dinner customers as quickly and well as she could. The whole time, though, she thought of Leo and the shoes she wanted him to fill. God, confusion was too small a word. It was a dog’s situation and green-eyed lanky Leo seemed such a puppy. Tonight he didn’t come by or even call. It was also the first night since the weekend that her father skipped driving out to the university to regroup with his comrades. Allie knew she was with her mother on that one: change the world, yes, but keep to your family hearth, mister. That’s what her parents were talking about now, though Allie had only heard the start of the discussion because she was in her closed room and soon they moved upstairs to theirs.

That’s what it was, too. A discussion. In the kitchen, her father had sounded tired, her mother sad but hard about it, like whatever had made him so tired had also brought them to where it would never be the same again and they both knew it and now had to figure out what the new picture would look like.

“Bourbon?” her dad said. Her mother just nodded yes, and after they had gone up with their drinks and somber voices, Allie tried to read a book she pulled off one of the shelves after dinner, The Naked and the Dead. The title seemed to match something she knew, but the actual words she found herself reading over and over again while she thought of taking that drive with her mother-who still didn’t know a thing—to whatever doctor hollowed out the promise of what she carried. After a while, she could hear the muffled gasps of her mother’s lovemaking, and it was a sound she took with her straight to sleep.

18