Still, she did her share. Duty called. She took Sigrist’s shabby old club and refurbished those rooms into a canteen de luxe. And I can attest she cooked up eggs and bacon for hundreds of these starstruck young men, dazzled them all with her famous charm, organized supper dances and concerts and what have you, anything you could imagine to keep up morale and keep servicemen writing home in rapture about how the Duchess of Windsor herself served them eggs by the plateful, any which way you wanted them.

And when we opened the place last Christmas! Oh, that was a party, all right. I’d had some last-minute appointment with the duchess, I don’t remember what, and wound up driving to the joint in the Windsors’ own limousine with the Union Jack flags. If only the folks in Bakersfield could’ve seen me. The canteen was already jumping, buzzing with Red Cross ladies in a spirit of tremendous female cooperation, laced with Christmas cheer. Standing in a disorderly queue outside, held back by a tolerant police officer of the white-glove variety, milled our first customers in their best dress uniforms. The duke and duchess stopped to wave—slow, decorous waving like they were screwing in a pair of light bulbs. Pop, flash went the cameras. Your Highness, Your Highness went the newspapermen, while Miss Drewes and I slipped right up the front steps and into the duchess’s canteen de luxe. Someone tossed me an apron and a gin fizz. We took about a million orders, and afterward Miss Drewes and I handed out presents from beneath the tree, since the duke and duchess had left shortly after their official performance.

Best of all, when I arrived home, someone was waiting for me beneath the sea grape tree, bearing a bottle of champagne and a small white box, the best kind. Not a ring, of course. But I’d worn that diamond pendant like a talisman ever since, as if it could ward off evil, as if by the act of wearing it I could lure my lover back to me, however far he roamed.

It dangled now between my breasts as I bicycled through the soupy air to the canteen, apron neatly tied for the eight o’clock shift. As I climbed the steps in my natty uniform and headed into the kitchen.