Free The Night Singers by Valerie Miner

“You don’t like it.”
    â€œOh, no, sweetheart,” she dropped her purse and briefcase into the lap of one of their serviceable arm chairs. “Let me just fix a glass of iced tea. It’s sizzling out there.”
    She returned a little calmer. “It’s just that I was thinking we might find some impressionist prints at the museum. And I hoped to put up one of the wedding pictures.”
    â€œSure, the wedding picture should go on the mantle.”
    â€œFine, fine, let’s pick out the picture together.”
    There were so many splendid photos. Her three sisters and brother clowning on the lawn at the reception. College roommates raising toasts to both of them. The pictures of the nuptial mass itself—the two of them on the altar with Father Morse. She had felt so grown up and so small at the same time. Her favourite photo was one with Brandon standing between her parents, all of them looking as if they’d known one another forever. Her family’s initial, almost medieval suspicions about his being an orphan, about knowing nothing of “his people”, had been erased in a few weeks of getting to know the serious, polite, intelligent, sensitive Brandon. When he asked if he might call them “Mom and Dad”, she watched her mother tear up before embracing him and saying, “Of course, sweetheart, of course.”
    Sergeant Mackie nodded, “Brandon was a good soldier. He was also a willful man.”
    Jennifer closed her eyes and saw her dark, handsome, stubborn husband. “Oh, now I get it. That was the inspiration for the Jimmy Dean retrospective you organised at the base cinema.”
    â€œ Brandon organised,” Mackie laughed. “Guess he figured that if he couldn’t beat up his opponents, he would educate them.”
    â€œBrandon said it was very successful.”
    â€œEspecially popular with the wives on the base. That stopped the gay baiting. And Brandon, himself, seemed to enjoy it.”
    â€œYou know,” she shook her head, smiling. “I’ve seen East of Eden fifteen times.”
    â€œI’m not surprised, Ma’am.”
    They spent their honeymoon driving from Corvallis, where they had gone to college and married, to Arizona. Brandon was posted near Phoenix—repaying the Army for college funding. Luckily, she had been able to find a teaching job in suburban Chandler. It was a hot, slow, tense journey, pulling a UHaul trailer, but each night they dove into each other’s arms as if it were their first mating. Jennifer scrupulously used contraceptives. They both wanted children, but knew they needed to wait for a more settled life.
    In Phoenix they made friends, some from the Army; some from school. Jennifer developed a flair for Southwestern cooking. Brandon began to enjoy socialising. He read the paper cover to cover and became a provocative, at times authoritative, conversationalist. She knew he would break out of that childhood silence, would blossom. She felt lucky with her life partner, but also vindicated for despite her family’s early protests, she knew Brandon was the man for her. She had always looked beneath the surface. (During her freshman year at Oregon State, her weird but fun roommate took her to a fortune teller who extolled Jennifer’s sixth sense. She dismissed the old woman’s prophecy and her fake Gypsy clothing as overly dramatic, but Jennifer’s confidence in her own intuition was confirmed.) Brandon was now blooming in the desert, like so many of those unpromising looking cacti.
    â€œWell, here we are, Ms Petrie,” he lowered his voice.
    Jennifer surveyed the ordinary intersection of paved road. How could Brandon have died here, out in the open, in Germany, for Heaven’s sake? Not in Somalia or the Middle East. In Germany over fifty years after World War II. Her eyes filled.
    Ever resourceful Mackie handed her a Kleenex. He used another for himself.
    â€œIt