Chapter
JFK used a pry bar to carefully remove the last bit of trim from the rotten sill and frame in Mrs. Walker’s sun room. Sunny weather had aligned with his days off to give him more than enough time to get to the project that should have been done years ago to prevent the moisture from sitting snow to penetrate the wall.
It was in the 40s outside but felt like 90 inside. The outside trim had come off clean, and everything above the sill level he would be able to reuse. Now it was just a matter of taking the time necessary to get the inside trim off without ruining it so that he could get the window off and get some cool fresh air.
“I brought you something to drink.”
JFK glanced over his shoulder and saw Mrs. Walker at the entrance to the sun room with a large glass of what looked like lemonade. She was in her late 80s and moved like it. Putting his pry bar down, JFK stood up straight, and hurried to take the glass out of her hands before she tried to navigate the step carrying that big glass. It had to have at least 250 calories.
“It looks delicious,” he told her, “but I’m off sugar, remember?”
Mrs. Walker held on to the doorframe with one hand and took the hand that JFK offered with the other one.
“Oh, all these new carbo fast purges.” She shook her head. “My granddaughter tells me about a new diet every time I see her.”
None of Mrs. Walker’s family visited her more than a couple times a year, so she couldn’t tell her about new diets all that often. He eyed the glass suspiciously.
Mrs. Walker said, “I bought some new sugar-free sugar to make it with.”
“Sugar-free sugar? That sounds fishy.”
“They call it Splendid I think. Go ahead, taste it. It even tastes like it’s not real sugar.”
JFK gave it a sip and could tell it was fake sugar. It had been a couple weeks since he had gone off sugar and artificial sweeteners just didn’t meet his hankering. But the drink was cold and he was hot so he chugged more than half of it before coming up for air.
As Mrs. Walker settled into a patio chair, she said, “You keep dropping pounds, I’ll have to get me a good stick to beat the girls off when you start going around my yard again.”
“Let ‘em come,” said JFK.
“No way, no how,” said Mrs. Walker. “You need to keep yourself for that girl. The special one.”
JFK downed the rest of the fake drink and asked, “What girl?”
“What girl?” Mrs. Walker swatted the air in front of her. “I was married for 55 years. You think I don’t recognize a man working off frustration with a woman? Frustration was the fuel my Robert built this house on.”
“You two never went through fights.”
“Only on a weekly basis.”
That blew JFK away. He knew his idea of their generation was unrealistically optimistic, but he just couldn’t imagine the sweet Mrs. Walker and her kind, quiet husband fighting with anyone, much less each other. “Yet you stayed together for 50 years?”
“Fifty-five,” said Mrs. Walker. “He was the best thing that ever happened to me and a bigger headache than I ever expected. If I’d known going in …”
Mercy. Nothing JFK had done worked to stop thinking about her. He knew he would never meet anyone like her—her indomitable beauty, her individualistic attitude, her strength to overcome something as impossible as alcoholism. Every morning when he woke up he had to wonder for a bit if she was actually a real person and if he’d actually gotten to know her so well.
“So what’s the big fight about?” Mrs. Walker had caught him daydreaming again as the guys at the station had been doing for the last two weeks.
“She’s too good for me,” said JFK.
The wrinkles on Mrs. Walker’s face deepened as she grinned widely. “I’ll tell you a secret. No man is ever good enough for his wife. And no woman is ever good enough for her husband.”
That might be true, but JFK and Mercy were an extreme example. JFK didn’t want to argue with her and didn’t want to try explaining how far above him Mercy was.
“Tell me this, JFK. Why do you come here?”
He shrugged as he said, “I’m bored. I have so much stinking time off.”
“Don’t give me your tall tales. There are a thousand things a handsome, young fireman could be doing on his days off.”
She was on to him, and he had to find a way out before she convinced him to do something he didn’t want to, so he said, “Your kids are so far away.” And so old. And your grandkids are worthless pieces of crap who don’t take care of you. He picked up the pry bar and turned back to the window. “Someone’s got to keep this house from falling over.”
“More fiddle faddle,” she said, coming out of her chair and inserting herself between him and the window. She was a foot shorter than him, and stared up into his face. “There are a thousand of us old-timers in Park City, you could have adopted any one of us. Tell me why me. I promise to keep your secret.”
JFK had always assumed she knew, but in the eight years they’d known each other, they’d never talked about it. “Your husband was a World War II Vet.”
“There are hundreds of Vietnam and Korea Vets around.” She was not going to let it drop. “What’s the difference?”
“If I tell you, you’ll disillusion me. Like you already did about you and your husband and your imperfect relationship.”
Mrs. Walker simply said, “I’ll try not to.”
How could someone be so frail and yet so firm? “Come back over here and sit down.” He led her to the chair she’d recently vacated then sat on the other chair and turned toward her. “Fine. I romanticize the Greatest Generation. You really were the greatest, otherwise how else could you win a world war? The next generation couldn’t even win in one tiny Asian country. And this current one expects someone else to go out and win a war for them.”
Mrs. Walker considered him, but didn’t speak and he got the feeling she was trying to decide how to make her point—whatever it was—without breaking her promise.
“Listen,” continued JFK, “I know there are politics to the wars and there’s a difference between total war and an armed conflict. Doesn’t change the fact that you all saved the world. The piddly little emergencies I deal with at work are a joke compared to the scale you all succeeded at. Plus, I have this image that you had the balance of raising kids figured out. None of this coddling but also none of this calling your own kid Anus. Life was hard, and people grew up better for it.”
She nodded slowly. “My life was hard growing up. Just like our kids’ lives. Just like your life growing up.”
That was something they definitely hadn’t talked about and he wasn’t about to do so now. “But my childhood made me hard. It’s the reason I’m such a jerk today. You guys weren’t buttholes to your kids, at least not in my mind.”
Under her breath, as if it didn’t count if you said it that way, she muttered, “You can think that if you want, but it’s not true.”
“You promised not to dis-romanticize me, remember?”
With no sign of guile or joking, Mrs. Walker said, “Oh, did I? Sorry. I’m old.” JFK knew it was a ploy. “You think I’m old and senile, but I figure things out. I know you’ve had a hard life. If you would stop and look at yourself honestly, you’d see that you’re worth something. And I know you’re a hero. And I know that girl you’re worried about thinks so too.”
“How can you possibly know that?” He was pretty sure she was making things up and just happened to get lucky with a guess once in a while because this latest one made no sense.
“If she didn’t like you, you’d move on, JFK. You’d find someone else worthy of your strong new body and caring soul.”
“Keep saying things like that and I’ll know you’re senile.”
Mrs. Walker rested a hand on his knee. “You’ve been alone long enough. You’ve carried the weight of those buttholes long enough.”
JFK cracked a big smile. “Mrs. Walker. That language.”
She grinned back and shook her finger in his face. “You need to let it go. Don’t let the people who hurt you tell you who to be for another second because you are a hero.”
“Now who’s romanticizing who?” JFK just wanted to get back to his window project and away from his friend who’d turned into quite the spitfire.
“Don’t be a hero, then.” Mrs. Walker shrugged. “My husband wasn’t a hero when he went away for war. He didn’t even want to go. They drafted him. He was a railroad worker who ended up in a bad situation. Got a purple heart and went back to the front lines two weeks later. The bad times made him be a hero.”
“Comparing me to him is not convincing me.”
“You don’t have to be Robert and you don’t have to be a hero today. Just be JFK. Because that’s all she wants.”
Out of everything they both had said in this frustrating conversation, that was the first thing that really made sense. It was when Mercy had called him a knight in shining armor that he felt the least like a hero. And maybe she really didn’t need or want him to be the hero he knew he never could be. Maybe, just maybe, with one-to-a-million odds, she just wanted him to learn a couple manners and be himself.
The compulsion he’d felt about having to be her hero—which was a goal he would never let himself achieve in his mind—was beginning to lift, as if Mrs. Walker had poked a big hole in the clouds and let the sun shine in. It was almost as if he’d been sabotaging himself by not allowing Mercy to see him in a way that made him uncomfortable.
“What’s her name?” asked Mrs. Walker.
He looked down from the spot on the far wall he’d been staring at. “Mercy.”
“Oh, JFK, do you hear yourself? Oh, mercy,” said Mrs. Walker with a little grin, “you’re done for. Stop fighting it; just give up now.”
The thought of seriously pursuing Mercy as a girlfriend terrified him. Women like her had never done anything but reject him his entire adult life. Childhood for that matter as well. True, he’d been crude and selfish and hadn’t known the first thing about manners, not to mention 80 pounds overweight and way too into beer. But if Mercy had taught him anything, it was that people could change.
Maybe even he could change.
“I see you debating,” said Mrs. Walker. “Now go get her. I want to meet her.”
“Another day,” said JFK automatically. “I need to finish this window.” That was a good excuse. Just saying the words and having an excuse to put it off for a couple days eased the building tension.
“The window will be here another day. I might not.” Mrs. Walker paused, but when JFK didn’t respond, she added, “And she might not either.”
That thought scared him more than anything they’d talked about so far. He’d let in a glimmer of hope that he and Mercy could actually be something someday and now the thought of her not being there made him start sweating all over again. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’d never meet anyone like her again.
JFK stood and looked back at his project. She’d interrupted him just in time since he hadn’t taken the window out yet. “You’re right. I’ll … finish this up tomorrow.”
Mrs. Walker took his hand in both of hers. “You’re too good to me, JFK. Don’t worry yourself about that silly window, I’d rather meet this little paramour of yours.”
After what he’d done, purposefully pushing Mercy away, he couldn’t just go to her and act like everything was normal. Just like there was a certain order in which you had to use your forks at a fancy restaurant, there were things he needed to clear up and take care of before taking a shot with Mercy.
“I know you’re a religious person,” he told her. “I could probably use some prayers.”
“I’m not worried for you at all,” said Mrs. Walker. “You’ve been an angel for me ever since I lost my Robert. You’ve got some heavenly help due you.”
Angel? That was even worse than hero.
“Don’t make that face,” she told him. “I know you don’t believe in churches, but even the good book says that the purest religion is looking after widows in their distress. The good Lord knows what you’ve been up to.”
“Let’s hope not,” said JFK, thinking of all the mistakes he’d made in his life.
“The good book also says love covers a multitude of sins, so you can just stop trying to make an argument against yourself.” She finally let go of his hand. “Now go. I want to meet this girl.”
JFK smiled down at her and nodded, then walked toward the door, wiping the nervous sweat from his forehead. He needed help and he had a good idea where to go for it, but how was he going to find Clover without admitting to Emily that she’d been right? They’d worked two 48-hour shifts since she’d called him out at Pineapple’s and he’d hidden from her as much as possible to avoid more conversations like that.
When it came to Mercy he was willing to swallow his pride and admit he’d been an idiot, but if there was any way to avoid giving his crew ammunition to use against him, he’d find a way.