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"Thank you. I'm adapting." Her eyes kept striking the scar on his face, then circling away, then coming back to it, alighting just for a flash before looking away.
Valentine was used to the reaction. In an hour or two, or tomorrow, it would just be another part of his face.
"You never told me-"
"This is Edward," Molly said, picking the boy up with an easy grace that suggested that she did it a hundred times a day.
"Edwid," the child agreed.
"Edward, say 'hi' to David."
The child didn't want to say hi and buried his face in his mother's neck.
"I smell like a long trip," Valentine said.
"Is that why you're limping?"
"I fell badly," Valentine sort of lied, leaving out the bullet entering his leg that precipitated the fall.
"He's two and he's got his own mind about people. Six months ago he giggled at strangers and grabbed their fingers."
Valentine did some mental math. If Molly had given birth about two years ago, the baby had been conceived at the end of his summer as a Quisling Coastal Marine in the Thunderbolt. Tripping over Post's square liquor bottles in the cabin they shared. The phony marriage to Duvalier. Had Molly's stomach quivered that August night the way it had when-
Stop that insanity. . . .
"I want to get cleaned up. Can I do that, and then we'll talk?"
"The only water in here is for the sink. We share flush toilets and showers at the end of the street. There's a hose that works at the stable, too; the vet room has a sluice in the center. Sometimes I'll just hook the hose in the ceiling there after work and shower."
"I'll do that. Back in an hour?"
"Do you want dinner with us?"
"Yes," Valentine said. Probably too eagerly. "If it's not trouble for you and Edward."
"You changed my whole definition of trouble," Molly said, but she smiled when she said it. "No, an extra plate is no trouble at all."
* * * *
Dinner that night passed in uncomfortable small talk.
The bunkhouse had a tiny folding table that just fit the child's high chair and the two adults. A propane stove-natural gas was obtainable in the Ozarks, almost plentiful compared to some parts of the country-with two burners and an oven made up a tiny kitchen annex. A bead curtain partition separated a couple of twin beds that sat under a few pictures and a black-framed set of military ribbons and decorations.
Molly described, in broad strokes, her marriage to Graf Stockard, and life at home for her father and sister-her mother had finally succumbed to the illness that the doctors described only as "malignant cancer" (were there any nonmalignant varieties, Valentine wondered) while he had been crossing the Great Plains Gulag with Duvalier. She largely skipped over "the occupation," and somehow Valentine couldn't ask her about the testing as the horsemeat stew changed place with a strawberry cobbler on the table, if not in the smears on Edward's face. Are you keeping your promise to Post or trying to get back into her bed?
Of course conversing without really talking was an old habit of his and Molly's. They'd been that way ever since the zoo. She grew more animated when she described her duties as a civilian horse trainer.
When they said good night under a moth-shrouded lamp, both bled relief into the chill spring night.
Valentine spent the next day with Valdez, who wanted an opinion on some beadwork one of his men had found in a bush. On the way there he expounded on the virtues of sandals for soldiers, waxing eloquent on both their hygiene and durability benefits. They examined the site where the piece had been found, but neither Valentine nor any of the men could find tracks, and they returned to Valdez's office in the cool of the concrete redoubt.
"It's pretty dirty," Valentine said, evaluating what he supposed was a bracelet. "The leather's dried. Looks like Grog work, but I'm thinking a crow spotted it somewhere and decided to add it to his collection. Weren't the Grogs in this area during the occupation?"
"Fighting with the TMCC," the sergeant who brought it to Captain Valdez's attention added, referring to the Trans-Mississippi Combat Corps. Valentine had worn their uniform during his ruse in Little Rock.
"How'd it go with the Carlson girl?" Valdez asked after the sergeant had left, with an order to pass news of the find up to the brigade headquarters in Forrest City. He filled two glass tumblers with water and added a splash of something that smelled like it was trying to be gin.
"Why isn't she the 'Stockard girl'?"
