Bucky leaned toward a chocolate cake ablaze with twenty-two candles. He imagined that everyone at the long restaurant table believed they could guess his wish, but they’d be wrong. They were all as well lit as his birthday cake but for his mother, who sat sober and unsmiling across from him. He felt her tension and could easily read her wish, her prayer, for him in her eyes: Please God. Let my son survive the war. The same wish for themselves sobered the faces of his University of Oklahoma fraternity brothers. Of the four, two were already in military uniform, their draft numbers called before they could complete their diplomas, and were home on brief leaves before their deployment overseas.

They had cause to be worried. The war was going badly for American forces and their allies in both the European and Pacific Theaters. Europe lay under the Third Reich’s domination after an almost unbroken chain of battlefield successes, and now the German Army was effectively advancing into Russia. In southeast Asia, U.S. forces had surrendered at Bataan and Corregidor, and the Imperial Japanese Army had occupied most of the islands in the South Pacific. His other Phi Delta Theta buddies would be joining up to serve their country immediately after graduation in a few weeks. Only Bucky remained uncommitted, a situation everybody expected to change with the next drawing of the military draft numbers, but Bucky had other plans.

The honoree puckered his lips and drew in a full lung of air to annihilate the candles with one blow. All twenty-two flickered out. “Atta boy, Bucky,” his father said across the table, joining in the guests’ riotous applause. So far, his pudgy face, flushed from food and drink and high spirits, had managed to deflect the concerns on his wife’s.

One of his fraternity brothers sang out, “Tell us how you got the name Bucky, Sam!”

“Yes, son,” urged his father, eyes alight with devilish amusement. “Tell your friends how you happen to be called Bucky.”

Bucky, who preferred to be called Sam since leaving high school, batted away the request with his hand and with forced good humor called down to his friend who’d made it, “Another time, jerk face, when you’re sober enough to remember.”