Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

Frangie smiles tolerantly. “You didn’t miss much.”

“You have to tell me everything!” he enthuses.

And Frangie thinks, No, Obal, I don’t have to. And anyway, I couldn’t. What words would I use to tell you about soldiers torn and burned? How would I describe the stink of Dachau?

“I’ll tell you the important stuff, how about that?”

Obal snorts dismissively, and Frangie smiles at their mother. “Not everything has to be told all at once.”

They walk down the sidewalk, arm in arm, until a white man comes the opposite direction. Then they part to make way, but the white man snorts. “I ain’t walking between you Nigras! Get out of the way!”

So Frangie steps down into the gutter to let him pass.

“Do you mind very much if I make a stop on the way home?” Frangie asks her mother and Obal.

“Stop?”

“I want to see Daddy’s grave.”

Her mother nods and her brother looks away to conceal emotions he doesn’t think are manly.

“Of course, baby.”

“And then,” Frangie announces, “we are going to write to Harder and tell him that this is his home and his family.”

That night as she lies in her own bed with actual sheets and not even a few lice, it occurs to Frangie that she did not ask, or beg, or even suggest that Harder is now to be welcomed back: she ordered it.

She holds that thought in one hand.

In the other hand she holds the recent memory of her mother and brother and herself stepping into the gutter.

She recalls the faces—the black faces—of men and women with bodies torn apart in defense of America. Some she lost. Some she saved. And not one of those black men and women should ever have to step into a gutter for anyone.

A different fight is coming.

“We’ll win this one too,” she whispers just before sleep—sleep without reveille, without artillery, without desperate cries of pain—takes her.

Rio Richlin, wearing a new uniform with her brand-new, bright, golden staff sergeant’s stripes on the shoulder, pushes the wheelchair down the familiar street.

“You shoulda warned them,” Jenou says.

“When? Transport opens up, you grab it,” Rio says. “I just hope we don’t give anyone a heart attack.”

They’d made it as far as Monterey, California, before being told there was nothing available to take them north. But Rio had managed to convince a civilian truck driver who said he was going within a mile or so of Gedwell Falls and would be happy . . . honored . . . and so on.

Rio and Jenou’s return to Gedwell Falls is in the back of a pickup truck, with Jenou’s wheelchair wedged in by sacks of fertilizer.

“Hail the conquering heroes!” Jenou cries, following it with a sardonic grin as the truck rattles up the highway and passing motorists stare.

They spend the time remembering truck rides past. So many, many rides in the backs of deuce-and-a-halfs.

They cover the last few blocks on foot (and wheel), passing places they’d both known all their lives. Very little has changed. Even the cars are the same—Detroit is shifting back from tanks to cars, but it will take a while for new models to appear.

They walk and roll through the town square. Rio looks too long at the bandstand where Strand first asked her out. She doesn’t know what has become of him, and she fears running into his family or friends. What can she say? That Strand broke?

Civilians will never understand. To them, a young man who flew mission after brutal, deadly mission over Italy and Germany and broke in the end is a coward.

But everyone breaks. Rio herself had finally broken when she saw Jack and then Jenou. Everyone, sooner or later, snaps. What matters is what happens next. Had Strand found his courage and returned to his unit?