“Listen. You’re — you’re Evelyn, right?” He took a deep breath, eyes wrenching shut. “I’m James’s father. Ricky Falcone. I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
I sank into the armchair, no longer able to feel my legs.
The explosion had ripped straight through the hull, he said. James had died trying to save his fellow sailors. Smoke inhalation, shrapnel wounds . . . An honorable death. But it didn’t matter. I felt dishonorable — I’d never properly ended things with James. He died thinking I loved him, that I’d been true. He’d never heard my words. My declaration of me. Hot tears of shame and grief needled at my eyes, threatening to spill.
“James told me he wanted to make a wife of you when he returned,” Ricky continued. His eyes never really found mine. “If you’re in a — a situation, or you need money, or anything —”
“No. No, I couldn’t, Mr. Falcone.” James had been a good man and a good friend; I thought I’d loved him once. But I couldn’t accept his father’s help. “You’re very kind, but I . . . I’m very sorry for your loss.”
I was no one’s responsibility. I was my own woman, for good and bad.
When Mr. Falcone left, I slumped against the door and allowed myself a few raw tears. James deserved to be mourned. He deserved someone better than me — but no, I told myself, that wasn’t quite right. He’d deserved someone different from me. Someone who could have loved him fully. Didn’t we all deserve that? I wanted to believe so.
Frankie didn’t land the part, but we celebrated anyway. I’d set aside City of Angels; in truth, Frankie was all I could think of those days. I saw her in my mind when I awoke and tasted her on my lips when I fell asleep. That, and factory production had ramped up, and everyone said Berlin would fall to the Allies any day. Frankie and I worked double shifts, side by side, daydreaming of how we’d use the money from our war bonds when we cashed them in.
“A mink coat,” she said with a swoon, “just like Marlene Dietrich.”
“A house of our own,” I said.
Frankie rolled her eyes, though she was smiling — that smile was like a hook where I always hung my coat. “A night at the Brown Derby.”
That was Frankie — she was the comet blazing through the sky, and I wanted to be the tail. But it was dangerous to think anything was a guarantee with a girl like her. Every moment with her slipped too quickly from my grasp.
A commotion at the factory; gasps and squeals threading through the raucous din of the machines. Frankie! Frankie! They called her name like the legions of fans she dreamed of outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Frankie pushed her goggles up into her kerchief-wrapped hair and shut down her equipment.
A hardness formed in my gut, clenching like when I’d written my letter to James, like when his father had sat me down to tell me of his death.
A swarm of girls pressed around the corner, ushering a young man on crutches with them. “Francesca,” he said, like she was the sweetest honey. And she was.
But I also knew, then, that she was no longer mine.
He’d been rescued with a dozen other army privates from a camp and spent weeks recovering in a hospital bed in England. He was feverish, too ill to write to her, but as soon as he was mended he received a medal and an honorable discharge and came straight for her. I overheard all this with the dozens of other girls crowded around, swooning and clutching their hands to their hearts. They’d been dazzled by Frankie and her lies and exaggerations and her starlight.
She never returned to the factory after that day. Soon more servicemen trickled in, claiming their girls or, more often, claiming our jobs. The shift mother called me to her office and asked me if I wouldn’t mind stepping aside for another GI who’d come home and, she said delicately, needed the work more than I did. He’d served his country, after all. When I started to mind, though, I realized she wasn’t really asking.
We declared victory in Europe, though the battles in the Pacific raged on, over the same stretch of sea where James had lost his life believing I was waiting for him back on shore. I wandered Los Angeles and all the places Frankie and I had been. The drugstore where we got milk shakes, now packed with soldiers and their gals. The place she shared with her roommate — twice I tried to find the nerve to knock, to call, but the third time, as I paced the sidewalk, I saw a young family leaving the apartment, crossing the parking lot under the hot white gleam of California summer.