Free Days Like Today by Rachel Ingalls Page B

to get her tomatoes and I’ve got to feed the kids. Why don’t you take Sherman into the living room, where you can hear yourselves think? Pixie, honey, you put that back, now. That isn’t good for you.’
    Franklin stood up and motioned Sherman to follow. They moved to the living room, where Sherman’s speech was so slow and stumbling that Franklin – remembering how the last time he’d seen him, Sherman had had part of his head blown in – felt obliged to talk and talk. And he asked Sherman to stay over for ‘a couple of days’, to rest up.
    Irene didn’t seem to mind. Sherman didn’t really look like the kind of person she was used to associating with, but she knew how long it could take before a man was able to digest the kind of experience he was likely to meet with under fire. He looked like an old-time prospector: the beat-up hat, the old boots, the beard that wasn’t an intentional, trimmed affair but rather a few weeks’ growth that would be shaved off when the thought occurred to him, and then grown again when he forgot about taking care with his appearance. She knew that he’d been wounded and – even before Franklin explained it to her – she knew who Sherman was. She also knew almost immediately what he was like. But she made him welcome for Franklin’s sake. After feeding the children, putting them to bed and serving a meal for the three of them, she joined the conversation. ‘So,’ she asked. ‘How did you get here?’
    ‘Walked,’ Sherman said.
    ‘Walked? But it’s miles.’
    ‘Well, I lost my license a while back. Took the bus to … um … other side of the mountain, there.’
    ‘You must be tired.’
    ‘Not specially. I used to walk a lot. Been through all the national parks. That’s wild country. I liked that.’
    ‘I’d have liked to do that, too,’ Franklin said. ‘Maybe later, some time. We could go camping with the kids. When they’re a little older.’ He smiled at Irene, who said, ‘You think I can cook and do the laundry for six people out in the Rockies someplace? Oh, that reminds me. Sherman, if you let me have your denim jacket, I can put it into the wash and hang it out on the line with Frank’s dungarees.’
    Sherman nodded, his glance sliding away. ‘Sure. Thanks,’ he muttered.
    Later that night Franklin took him out for another drink. He’d sized Sherman up as a man who was no good at mixing with other people so, instead of dropping in at one of the places where he might be caught up in talk with acquaintances, he chose a bar he didn’t know well.
    Without Irene to help, he found it hard to make Sherman loosen up. The man tended to exude a morose withdrawal from the world until the time when a sarcasm or criticism would come out of him. Franklin reported on the general direction his life had taken since the war; then he got down to the details. The catalogue of events went on and on: talking too much was the form his discomfiture had taken. At last he said, ‘Well, you know about me. I guess just meeting Irene and the kids tells you everything. I had to work like hell to begin with: I went back to school, got throughcollege. I met her after that. She was still in high school but I knew right away, the first time I saw her; she was the girl I was going to marry.’
    ‘I guess you’ve got it made,’ Sherman said. ‘A wife and kids like we used to talk about. Like we used to dream about.’
    ‘No, we didn’t. We used to sit around and have bull sessions about how we were going to come back and mount a surprise attack on the White House and hold the president to ransom for millions. And Captain Pauling was going to call on his cousins’ connections and get all the money snuck into Swiss bank accounts for us.’
    Sherman jerked back his head and laughed with the first sign of genuine enjoyment he’d shown since his arrival. ‘I remember now,’ he said. ‘You’re right. That’s what we were going to do.’
    Franklin laughed too, but he was