Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

Cat withdraws, her mouth tightening. Almost as if she dreads the question.

“Can we not stop this bullshit of calling each other by last names? I mean, when it’s just us, when we aren’t around the rest of the platoon?”

Cat relaxes. “Okay, Jenou, no boy back home?”

“No boy, Cat,” Jenou says. “And no home.” She pulls out a short letter and smooths it on the table for the other two to read.

“Gosh, Jenou. That’s a kick in the teeth,” Cat says sincerely.

Rio looks at her inebriated friend. She knows that Jenou’s home life has never been happy. She knows Jenou despises her father and holds her mother in cynical contempt. But she’s never known all the reasons. And on occasion when she has pressed, Jenou has always retreated into sour private smiles and a shaking head.

“You can stay with us, you know that,” Rio says.

“Us as in you and your folks? Or us as in you and Strand?”

“Ha-ha,” Rio says. “My folks, of course.” She blushes and tries to hide that fact by taking a drink.

A Frenchwoman with two little girls in tow comes by. The girls stop to stare, and Jenou says, “Bonjour.” The mother pulls the girls sharply away.

“How is old tall, dark, and handsome?” Jenou asks.

Rio shrugs. “Haven’t seen him since we landed.”

“That’s what’s called being evasive,” Jenou informs Cat.

“Can’t we just be tourists?” Rio complains. “All we’ve seen so far is one big church.”

“Notre-Dame?” Cat says. “That’s what you’re calling ‘one big church’?” She shrugs. “Well, I guess it was big. Anyway, we’ve seen the Eiffel Tower; we drove right by it!”

“Shit. Look!” Jenou jerks her head toward a man across the street. It’s Lieutenant Horne and two other officers, and they are walking down the street in a state of serious inebriation.

“He’s not setting a very good example,” Rio says.

Cat says, “Nonsense, he’s setting the perfect example.” She raps the tabletop with her knuckles. “Garçon! We need something more than beer. What have you got? Anything but Applejack, we drank our fill of that in Normandy.”

The waiter brings three small glasses of Armagnac, which they dutifully down in a single swig.

“Doesn’t look like the Frenchies have had too hard a time of it,” Cat notes sourly. “If even a single bomb has fallen on Paris, I’d be surprised.”

“That’s the advantage of surrendering early,” Rio says with equal cynicism.

Despite mostly warm welcomes in Normandy—despite the catastrophic suffering of locals caught in the crossfire—American soldiers are not quite happy with the Parisians, who they suspect of being collaborators with the Nazis. A rumor has

been going around about French women acting as snipers, defending their German boyfriends. Rio has seen no evidence of this, and she knows well that rumors are wrong most of the time, but it has created a chill between the Americans and the Parisians.

Of course, drunk soldiers making crude approaches to decent French women have not helped either. But the general mood is that the French have not been properly appreciative.

“So, we going to the big museum?” Jenou asks.

“Jen, you don’t have to keep me company, you know,” Rio says, her tongue distinctly looser after the Armagnac.

“Are you trying to ditch me because I’m not a sergeant?” Jenou asks.

“No. No, no, just the opposite. I’m sure Dial and Molina are off having fun, probably with Cat’s two girls. Fun you can’t have with your sergeant lurking around.”

“Ah, it’s lonely at the top, isn’t it?” Jenou mocks. “Come on, Rio, everyone knows we’re friends. They already won’t do anything with me because they figure I’ll tell you.”

Rio frowns. This has never occurred to her. She is a drag on Jenou’s social life. She decides to try harder for cheerfulness. “Well, Cat, what is it we sergeants do for fun in the big city?”