Free Cast Me Gently by Caren J. Werlinger

Lucy.
    “Oh, better not tell Ma about this.”

CHAPTER 7
    “But why do you have to go?” Ellie sobbed.
    With a patient sigh, Daniel turned from packing his suitcase and sat down on the side of his bed. “Come here, Jellybean.” Ellie sat beside him, and he wrapped an arm around her. “I got drafted. I don’t have a choice.”
    “They’ll send you to Vietnam,” she said, crying against his shoulder.
    “Maybe,” he shrugged. “But maybe not. They need soldiers all over the place. Maybe I’ll be assigned somewhere else.” He pulled away and lifted her face to make her look at him. “You’ll have to take care of Mom until I get back. Make sure she doesn’t work too hard. You understand?”
    Sniffling, Ellie nodded. Daniel kissed the top of her head. “Be good, Jellybean.”
    A raspy tongue and a squeaky meow woke Ellie in the dark as KC licked the salty tears from her cheek. She sat up against the headboard, pulling KC to her. She hadn’t had one of those dreams in a long time. She reached for a tissue and blew her nose. Talking to Teresa had roused a lot of old, unwelcome memories the last few days.
    She squeezed her eyes shut. “Not unwelcome,” she whispered. She didn’t want to forget, no matter how much it hurt to remember.
    She didn’t want to forget Daniel, looking all handsome and proud in his new army uniform; she didn’t want to forget her mother, even when her hair was falling out, and she had become skeletal from her cancer and the awful treatment. She didn’t remember much of her dad, but she did remember sitting snuggled up next to him on the couch on the weekends, reading together—he reading the newspaper and she reading a book. The smell of newsprint always reminded her of him. “Reading can take you anywhere you want to go in the world, Ellie,” he used to say, and sometimes, he would get distracted by her book and end up reading along with her.
    The house had had to be sold when her mom died, but there were so many bills that there was no money left over, the lawyer said. The only thing they hadn’t been allowed to take was Ellie’s small college fund. When social services couldn’t reach Daniel—the army said he was deployed on a classified mission in some undisclosed location, but Ellie knew it was Vietnam—they had placed her with a foster family in Duquesne Heights. The Lockes were nice enough people, especially in the beginning, sympathetic to everything Ellie had been through— they even got her KC as a kitten—but they weren’t family.
    Daniel had come to see her one time, when he was home on leave. It was like a stranger had walked in the door. His face was stretched, making his eyes look sunken in his face. He refused to wear any part of his uniform.
    “You don’t know… It’s not good to be in uniform here,” he’d said. His eyes darted around like he expected someone to jump out at him at any moment. Together, they’d gone by their old house, gone to the cemetery to see their mother’s grave, in a completely separate section of the cemetery from Dad’s. “Well, no one expected two such young people to die,” the man from the funeral home had said matter-of-factly. Daniel had left her with the Lockes that night, dashing her fleeting hopes that he would come home and they could be together again. “You’re not coming back?” Ellie had asked, her chin quivering. Avoiding her eyes, he shook his head. “Can’t. Gotta get back.” He gave her a rough hug and said, “You’re in a good place here. Be good, Jellybean.”
    As soon as she turned eighteen, she had come back to Squirrel Hill. The house, of course, belonged to other people now, but she liked to visit it sometimes, liked to imagine that it remembered her. She managed to find a tiny apartment a few blocks away—not much more than a sleeping room actually, with a hot plate and a shared bathroom that doubled as the kitchen sink. It was smoky and dirty, but the landlord let her keep KC.
    When the