“I said in the office that there never had been a divorce in his family. If there were other reasons why his mother opposed our marriage, I didn’t hear them. By that I mean she may have objected to my religion—the religion I was given—or my Italian background. She did like Betty; Colin never told me why. He came back to Port Smith from the trip with just the statement that she wanted nothing to do with us. She would have no idea how angry or unhappy she made him. It took him weeks to get over it. I don’t know why he bothered to go, for he had predicted the outcome. But in no other way, in nothing he ever did or said, did he show an interest in her.

“He had no mementos or medals from the war, not even his pilot’s wings. He never said that he had shot down any planes. I knew that it had been a fighter squadron and he told me he had flown a Mustang. Is that right? He had been in combat, he did say that, and that’s all.”

“The Mustangs came in toward the end of the war,” Leland said. “In the souvenir book I asked my daughter for is a day-by-day account of what the squadron did. Your husband’s part will be there for you to see.”

She reached for the pack of cigarettes. The crowd had thinned out. Karen had gone, giving him a wink as she had passed on the far aisle. Norma said, “I know that he didn’t go into the war until late, and that he had finished a year at the University of California before he went in. When he came out he was able to start at Jefferson in the spring of 1946. He switched to accounting—what from, I don’t remember, something in liberal arts. He married Betty in 1946, too. That was the summer. The summer of 1949, he was in Nevada. He didn’t go right through college, because there was a time of eight months in 1947 when he lived up here, and he was here again in 1948. He told me these things. In 1949 again he came back; from here he went out west, and returned to Port Smith.