That time was only two weeks but it could just as well have been two years. Funny enough, the captain who belonged to the Buick thought highly of Jim and lightly of his crime and helped him get short stockade time and only one demerit. They let Jim have his guitar in there, too. He wrote me three songs, my favorite being “Kate Made Me Late, but I Love Her Anyway.” Leo likes that one. I asked Jim to play it for us last night and he did. We were all snuggled on the couch in the parlor. I lay back on the arm opposite Jimmy. Leo lay with his little back against me and I put a pillow between us to try and ease the pain in my stomach, his short legs sticking out between mine. I hugged him to me and as he laughed at the funny lines of Jimmy’s song, I felt his strong little body jiggle against me.

How strange this dying is. Everything becomes so god-awful clear. Watching Jimmy’s big handsome head sing away to his family, I saw the whole spinning web of how we three got there on that couch.

Jim proposed on our third date. We’d gone strolling together down on Bandera. There was a warm breeze and I remember smelling fried corn tortillas from an eatery. There was an open farmer’s market near the theater and I could hear the cluck and cackle of live chickens. Jimmy insisted we buy one for my mother and Gram though they didn’t need a chicken and he hadn’t even met the widows. I stopped at the sidewalk and wouldn’t go in. The smile left his face and he held my hand in both of his. “All right. Marry me then, Katie Faye.” He looked down at the sidewalk a moment, then back at me, and it took every bit of my panhandle-girl resolve not to bust out and cry right there like a child. I couldn’t speak so I nodded yes and Jim hugged me so hard and so long I don’t remember feeling my feet lift off the ground.

We were married two weeks and a day from that night, on October 14, 1948. Mama insisted on a church wedding so we made it official at the base chapel. Jimmy’s mother and an uncle came down from Massachusetts by train. Our best man wasn’t Toby or Rex, but Jim’s bunkmate of one year, Ryder “Harmonica” Stillwell. Gram sprung for a photographer, a German from New Braunfels who took such care with each shot, I took to calling him Vinny Van Gogh. Before long, in the early days of December, I spent mealtimes feeling sick. It was the same week Jimmy’s enlistment was up, so two hours before my husband wasn’t a soldier anymore I went to the base doctor and was given that wonderful news, courtesy of the U.S. Army.