Free Under the Egg by Laura Marx Fitzgerald Page A

“You want to find someone’s record?”
    â€œMy grandfather’s.” I pulled the Veteran’s Affairs letter out of my bag and handed it to Eddie. With the discovery of the painting, I wasn’t willing to leave any questions floating around unanswered.
    Eddie tickled his keyboard some more, referring to the letter here and there. “Okay, here’s his draft record.”
    â€œWhat, just like that?”
    Eddie grinned. “Just like that. See for yourself.” Bodhi and I leaned over the desk. “There’s the serial number, there’s where he enlisted—here in New York, right after Pearl Harbor—see, December 11, 1941. He was eighteen years old; occupation: artist; and he lived in New York. Class: Private.”
    â€œSo he served in the army?” This was news to me. “Where did he go? Did he fight?”
    â€œDoesn’t say. This is just the draft record, which tells us he enlisted but doesn’t say which division he got assigned to. For that, you have to submit an application to the National Archives.” Eddie jumped ahead a few screens. “You can do it all online. There’s just a twenty-dollar fee.”
    My heart sank. Twenty dollars meant a week’s worth of groceries, or keeping the lights (and fans) on for another week, or a dent in my mom’s mounting bill at the tea shop—not the beginning of a wild-goose chase.
    Another card hit the desk, but this one was shiny and silver. (“Platinum,” Bodhi would later call it.) “Let’s do it,” Bodhi said.
    Eddie looked skeptical. “Your parents okay with this?” He glanced at me. “Are you okay with this?”
    If there is one thing that Jack always told me, it’s that Tenpennys pay their way. Tenpennys owe nothing to anyone. Tenpennys do it themselves or do without.
    â€œYes,” I said decisively. “Thank you,” I mouthed to Bodhi.
    Bodhi shrugged and slid the card across the table to Eddie. “So, how long to get the records?”
    Eddie checked the website again. “Anywhere from ten days to six months.”
    I groaned. “Six months?”
    â€œDon’t worry,” Bodhi patted my back consolingly. “It’ll take you that long just to read all these books.”

Chapter Seven
    B odhi’s mom wanted her to fly out to Morocco and meet some Sufi mystic-to-the-stars, so Bodhi headed off for two weeks with a laptop under her arm. “I’ll handle the Internet research,” she said the next morning as she headed for the airport, her head poking out of the taxi’s window. “I’ll have a lot of downtime once our camel caravan gets to the monastery. They have Wi-Fi and a pool.”
    That was fine with me. The minute Bodhi saw the stack of books on my reading list, she took care to inform me that she was “more of a kinesthetic learner.” And frankly, as much as I loved the library, the less time I had to spend around the creepy guys at the computer terminals, the better.
    No, I would spend the following week where I felt most at home: alone with my books and my paintings. After my morning chores, I’d walk the length of the island to the Met or the Frick, exploiting their pay-as-you-wish policies to trade a penny for a few hours with their Renaissance collections. In the late afternoons, I hunkered down in Jack’s studio, sweating over the reading, paging damp fingers through biographies and histories and the For Reference Only monograph Eddie let me smuggle out: three-hundred-some pages of every painting, sketch, and poem to ever leave Raphael’s hand.
    When I wasn’t reading, I was looking, just like Jack always told me. For a man who found something (or someone) to complain about wherever he went, you would be surprised how much Jack looked for beauty in the world. It was like an effort of forced optimism in the face of his own cantankery. He’d stop me in the