Free Fireworks Over Toccoa by Jeffrey Stepakoff

most forsaken places, sometimes just hours after the fighting had stopped. After Jake fought to secure the beaches in North Africa, among the heavy weapons and provisions brought ashore by military craft was all the equipment and materials necessary to construct and run a complete Coca-Cola bottling plant, everything necessary to supply the troops with bottles of the carbonated beverage. The images of body bags being loaded onto boats that were simultaneously unloading big canisters of Coke syrup and crate upon crate of those empty famously contoured glass bottles was something Jake would never forget.
    A lot of American companies were sending their products to the men on the front lines. But the “Coke colonels,” Jake had noticed, worked hard not only to keep Allied soldiers sated but also to keep the company’s sixty-four overseas bottling plants operating throughout the war, especially those in Coke’s biggest European market, Germany.
    Jake found it perplexing and strange that an American company seemed at once both patriotic and traitorous, but he had learned that despite what many thought, nothing in war is ever black and white. This was one of the reasons it was so hard to talk to people back home in Lawrence County who saw it that way.
    Did he think her husband had changed? Did he think he had changed?
    How could he explain what it was like to look into the eyes of a man trying his hardest to kill you? The bright flash from the rifle, the slow-motion terror of shell casings popping, one, two, three, and lead slugs flying by so close you can feel the hot air on your cheek. And then watching up close as the slugs hit the man next to you? How could Jake explain? There were no words to convey these feelings, no pictures to do them justice.
    Jake took the night air deep into his lungs, his eyes refocusing on her. “I think the whole world has changed,” he said. “Those of us overseas. And those at home. Everyone. Everything. And the thing is, not everyone knows it yet.”
    Though she wasn’t sure exactly why, Lily felt herself tearing up. She turned away from him and willed the tears to stop. What he said really struck a chord with her. On the outside, everything was as it always was. The world seemed to stand still in Toccoa, and when she looked around and took stock of her life everything was as it should be. But on the inside, buried deep, she knew there’d been a shift of some sort. That warm current again. It wasn’t something she was consciously aware of, like oxygen in the air, but every time she breathed in she knew it to be there, knew it was in the composite coursing throughout her body. It was subtle, indistinct, but nonetheless profound.
    As the emotions washed over Lily, churning inside her, she realized that seeing the firework from her front porch earlier in the day had made her aware of something that had been hidden away inside, shoved and stacked into some secret niche. Meeting this man, being out here with him tonight, it was all coming to the surface, this deep restlessness, and it was stirring her in unexpected ways.
    She didn’t know if Paul would be different, but the honest fact was, she felt different than she did three years ago. How much was due to the world changing and how much was her she didn’t know. But the drift was present and palpable.
    The conversation could have gone in one of several directions. Lily chose one. “So do you have a girl, Jake Russo?”
    “I have my work.”
    “And that’s all?”
    “That’s enough.”
    “I think I’d get lonesome traveling around by myself,” she said gently.
    “I think I’d get lonesome living with my spouse gone for three years,” he said even more gently.
    “He’ll be back in a few days.”
    “And then—?”
    “And then…” She trailed off, looking away from him. It was pretty bold for him to question her like this, something to which she was quite unaccustomed. No one ever spoke to her with this kind of frankness and