married.
A little after ten when she had begun to feel more like herself, the voice on her intercom advised her of an urgent call from her Aunt Lena. Fearing that something might have happened to Ricky, she left Mrs. Blanchard in the therapy room and hurried to her office to take the call.
“What is it, Aunt Lena? What’s the matter?”
“Who said anything was the matter? Honey, I need to be off Saturday, and I was wondering if you could keep little Ricky for me.”
“Aunt Lena—”
“Hear me out. Little Ricky fell in love with you, and love is not something he’s had a lot of, and the Colonel’s got things to do. So if you could—”
For the next forty-five minutes, with her head the size of a watermelon, she had to deal with the back, neck and shoulder pains as well as the imaginary aches that plagued Mrs. Blanchard, and she was not in the mood for her aunt’s shenanigans. Further, Mrs. Blanchard would not take kindly to having been abandoned during her treatment.
“Aunt Lena, nothing you can ever do is going to get me tied up with Nelson Wainwright or any other man, and if you knew what I went through with that last one, you’d back off. Get Pamela or Wendy to do it. They’re teachers, they should love children, and Wendy is single. Please excuse me now. I have a patient in there on that table who is probably freezing to death and mad as the devil.”
And the less I see of Nelson Wainwright, the less likely I’ll wind up in his bed.
* * *
In that respect, at least, she and Nelson were of one mind. At about the same time, he sat at the conference table, one officer removed from the Commandant—more an indication of his status than of his rank—and forced his attention on the prospective meeting of the Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU). Audrey Powers spent too much time in his thoughts, and he had to do something about it.
“I want you to go to the strategy meeting, Wainwright,” he heard the Commandant say. “You’ve got plenty of time to prepare for it. See me in my office after this.”
“Yes, sir.” He didn’t want to go to that meeting, but sending him was the Commandant’s way of letting him know he was in for a promotion.
He left the Commandant’s office feeling as if his hard work had begun to pay off. He had the man’s confidence, which meant that unless he faltered, he was on his way to becoming a four-star general. Better get this star first, he thought as he headed for home that afternoon.
He had prepared himself to spend the evening immersing his mind in MEU matters, but Ricky met him at the door squeezing his Audie rabbit, as he called it, and opening his little arms for a hug and a toss in the air. Nelson went through the ritual, greeted Lena, and got into his room as quickly as possible. Inside, he looked around the room...at his king-size walnut sleigh bed, the huge desk facing the picture window, the Isfahan carpet that had cost him a fortune, and all the little things sitting around that spelled his personality. And he thought of Ricky and his loving greeting, of Lena and the efforts she made to make him comfortable.
“Is being married so different?’ he wondered aloud. “I have a woman and a child who depend on me for protection, well-being, and care. But I don’t have the joy that this life is supposed to give.”
He sat down at his desk and tried to work. He didn’t remember a time when work hadn’t been the drug that pacified him when nothing else would, but instead of opening the bulky confidential file, he stared out the window, not knowing what he saw.
The patter of Ricky’s feet in the hall outside his room brought him to the present and the duty that lay before him. The door opened, and he swung around in the swivel chair.
“Unca Nelson, Miss Lena said Audie isn’t coming to see me Saturday. Can I call her, Unca Nelson?”
He picked the child up and sat him on his knee. “Audie is a doctor, and she may have to take care of patients. She’s very
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