It takes him three days to come to his senses. He doesn’t call Allegra and doesn’t text her, although her name starts with A and is right there at the top of his contacts.
He knows he’s being stubborn, stupid, and rude. When he dropped Allegra off at her house on Lily Street after his birthday party Tuesday night, following some pretty serious kissing in the front seat, he said, “I’ll call you tomorrow.” By “tomorrow” he meant Wednesday. But Wednesday came and went and Bart didn’t call, and then Thursday came and went.
What was his problem? Was he being a typical male, playing games? Was he enjoying the thought of Allegra Pancik wondering what had happened, checking her phone in anticipation, possibly even pining for him?
No! Not at all! It was something else; it was the same old thing, his neuroses, his mind sickness. He didn’t call Allegra because he didn’t feel he deserved to be happy. If the eighteen fallen Marines couldn’t feel the sweet sensation of a woman’s lips meeting theirs, then Bart didn’t deserve to feel it either.
Centaur. He kept thinking of Centaur.
Bart’s very best friend in his platoon—his brother, for all intents and purposes—had been Centaur, baptized Charles Buford Duke. Centaur was born and raised in Cosby, Tennessee, in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. He was a huge Volunteers fan; he bled orange and white, he said, and he told Bart about the boats that would line both sides of the Tennessee River on game days. You could walk a mile at least, going bow to stern on those boats, and be enthusiastically offered a cold Budweiser on each one. Centaur didn’t have the temperament or the grades for college himself, but when Centaur and Bart met at basic training, Centaur had a girlfriend named Ruby Taylor, who was a freshman at UT, rushing Chi Omega.
How many hours did Bart listen to Centaur talk about Ruby Taylor—how pretty she was, how sweet, how devoted? Centaur had fallen in love with Ruby in third grade at Cosby Elementary. She had kicked him during recess and left a dark-purple bruise, and that was that. Bart had never known a person as blindly besotted as Centaur. Bart saw Ruby’s picture. She was no beauty; she had red hair, as expected, but her skin was pasty, her eyes sunken a bit too far in her face, like raisins pushed into dough, her smile too wide, her hips a little wide as well. But that, somehow, made Bart admire Centaur’s devotion even more. When they were running around Munich hooking up with buxom blond fr?uleins right before they deployed to Sangin, Centaur remained true to Ruby Taylor. It wasn’t a hardship to resist temptation, he said, when you were in love—and he hoped that someday Bart knew what that felt like.
Centaur was intending to marry Ruby Taylor as soon as he got home. Even in the darkest days of their capture, even on Centaur’s final day, he was talking about marrying Ruby, buying land, building a house, having kids. He wanted five: four boys and a girl, in that order.
Centaur has now been dead for nearly a year. Back in June, Bart received an e-mail from Ruby Taylor, saying she was getting married after her graduation from Tennessee—to one of her teaching assistants, a South African fellow with an unpronounceable Dutch last name. Not even an American. And certainly not an American hero like Charles Buford Duke.
Bart never responded to Ruby’s e-mail because he didn’t want to hear the story. He already knew the story. When Bart and Centaur’s convoy went missing, when they stayed missing for nearly two full years, everyone gave up hope. (No, Bart thinks, not everyone. Not Mitzi.) But Ruby Taylor gave up hope. She fell crying into the arms of her teaching assistant, who smoothed Ruby’s hair and told her the future still held promise and light. This all may have happened before Centaur died.
What is Bart to think but that girlfriends, women, love, and marriage are pursuits best left to others.
On Friday, Bart wakes up and feels just the opposite. He thinks that if Centaur could see him, he would scream in his face like Sergeant Corbo, the meanest, ugliest, toughest drillmaster in the USMC, and tell Bart to “GO GET THE GIRL!”
Bart spends $150 on a bouquet from Flowers on Chestnut, and he walks right in the door of Bayberry Properties. Allegra is sitting at a desk in the very front of the office. She is wearing a soft white sweater, a patchwork suede miniskirt, and a pair of suede boots. She looks even more beautiful than she did when she was dressed as a geisha. Her dark hair is now long down her back.
“Special delivery,” Bart says, holding out the flowers. “For Miss Allegra Pancik.”
Allegra sees him and the flowers and puts two and two together, and whereas she has every right to tell him to buzz off for not calling or texting when he said he would, she gifts him a radiant smile.
“I thought you forgot about me,” she says.
“Forgot about you?” he says. “Impossible.”
Allegra floats around the office, holding the flowers up like a trophy.
“I need to find a vase,” she says. “And I want to introduce you to my aunt and uncle.” She beams at him. “I thought I’d imagined everything that happened Tuesday night. I thought I’d dreamed it.”
“Not a dream,” Bart says. He suddenly remembers that when he blew out his birthday candles, his wish was that he and Allegra would live happily ever after. “I just had stuff to do the past few days. My family was all visiting, and I pretty much ignored them at the party, so…”
“I know,” Allegra says. “I felt so bad about that.” She finds a vase under the office’s kitchen sink, and she fills it with water. “These are going right on my desk where everyone can see them.” She touches his arm. “Thank you, Bart.”
He wants to kiss her, but there are other people in the office. Most of them are at desks, on their phones or engrossed with their computer screens, but Bart can’t risk compromising Allegra’s professionalism. Even now her phone is ringing. He needs to let her go.
“Have dinner with me tonight,” he says. “Fifty-Six Union, seven thirty. I can pick you up, or…”
“I’ll have my dad drop me off at the restaurant,” Allegra says. “And you’ll get me home after?”
He nods. “See you then.”
When Bart gets back home, he finds Mitzi on the side porch smoking a cigarette. Bart checks the time on his phone. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon—four and a half hours until he will next see Allegra. But Mitzi smoking in the middle of the day is a new development, and not a good one.
“What’s up, Madre?” he says.