“I guess I should have asked what you like to eat but—”
“Luke told you everything about me,” she said.
“No.” Dr. Dave looked surprised. “My grandson would probably hit me over the head with one of my own golf clubs if he knew I’d invited you here. He has a true belief that he can solve all his own problems all by himself.”
“And you don’t think he can?”
“I don’t believe anyone can solve their problems all by themselves. What about you?”
“I don’t know,” she said cautiously. “I don’t think I ever thought about it before, but I guess not. I know that I grew up being very attached to Miss Edi, and she helped me with whatever problems I had.”
“Ah, yes, now we get down to it,” Dr. Dave said as he removed the cover off the big soup tureen in the center of the table. “Do you like cold vichyssoise?”
“Love it. But only if it’s from organic potatoes.”
Dr. Dave chuckled. “You’ve spent some time around Ellie.”
“No, just her daughter and all the other relatives.” At the thought of Sara, Jocelyn couldn’t keep her face from turning red.
“So Sara has a new boyfriend, does she? Bit noisy, are they?”
Jocelyn took a sip of the soup. Delicious. “Jim stopped that.”
“So I was told, and my wife made me leave the room when I started to laugh. Jim always was a bit of a prude. I can’t imagine why my daughter married him.”
Joce knew he was teasing, but she didn’t like it. Jim Connor had been very good to her. “Maybe because he’s the kind of man who looks after people and cares about them and helps whenever he’s needed.”
“I see,” Dr. Dave said, sitting down and taking a sip of his soup. “Like father, like son.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just that Luke and his father are very much alike. That’s why Luke got along with the other grandfather so well. I’d offer Luke a trip to Disney World and Joe would offer him two days on a smelly boat. I always lost out.”
“Were you disappointed that Luke didn’t become a doctor?” she asked.
“Why, no,” Dr. Dave said, as though he’d never thought of the idea before. He got up to get some rolls out of the oven. “Mary Alice would skin me if I forgot these. Only Henry, Sara’s father, wanted to be a doctor. The rest of them did what they wanted to.”
Jocelyn broke a roll, buttered it, and took a bite. She’d had enough of chitchat. “So what happened between you and Miss Edi?”
“People don’t know this, but we broke up before we left for war.”
Jocelyn could only blink at him. “But I thought…”
“Everyone, including us, thought we were going to get married. I asked her, she said yes, and I slipped the ring on her finger. But a few weeks after that, Pearl Harbor was bombed and everything changed.”
“Or did things change because of what happened earlier in that year?”
It was Dr. Dave’s turn to look surprised. “You do your research, don’t you.”
“I know that Alexander McDowell supported Miss Edi after her retirement, and I assume it was probably his money that sent me to college. Now why would he do something like that?”
“Would you like some more soup?”
“Love some.”
“And I have sandwiches. Cucumber, tuna, chicken salad, and egg salad. Help yourself,” he said as he put the big plate on the table.
“Okay,” Jocelyn said as she took a tuna salad sandwich and bit into it. “Something happened in Edilean about the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor on the seventh of December 1941, and because of it, a whole lot of things changed.”