Purple Hearts Page 6

  She closed her eyes, shaking her head. “I don’t know.”

  I tried to make my voice softer. I wanted her to open her eyes again. “What are you worried about?”

  “First, I don’t know you. I think we made that pretty clear the other night.”

  Well, duh, I resisted saying. “We only have a few days that we have to get along. We don’t have to actually like each other.”

  We caught each other’s eyes.

  She bit her nail and spoke, quiet. “I don’t mean that, I mean. Well, maybe I do, but whatever. I mean, how am I going to know you’re not going to fuck me over?”

  I tried to resist the anger that rose, heating my skin. I knew it wasn’t for her. The anger was for a past version of myself, running down Arikara Street with twenties in my pocket. “How do I know that you’re not going to fuck me over?”

  She looked at me like I was stupid. “Because it’s my idea. I’m the one with the medical bills.”

  “Right.” I nodded in the direction of the Cucciolo house. “We tell Frankie. Frankie holds us to it.”

  “Yeah, but then what?”

  I shrugged. “We get . . .” An image flashed of Jake and Hailey outside the church, grabbing hands as people flowed around them. “We get married.”

  Cassie squinted. “So, wait. What’s in it for you?”

  The image of Jake and Hailey again, the phone vibrating, a razor slicing a pill. I tried to look her in the eye, to let her know how deeply I meant it, how much I needed it. Less detail, more truth. “I’m in the hole, too. I need to get it paid off as soon as possible.”

  “What are you in the hole for?” she asked.

  My lungs tightened. Would she get it? No. She’d think I was unreliable. She’d think I’d blow the money on pills. “That’s not something I want to discuss.”

  “Uhh . . .” She narrowed her eyes with a sarcastic half-smile. “It feels kind of important, Luke.”

  I put up a hard line, hoping I wasn’t sweating. “I guess you’ll just have to trust me.”

  “Great.” She gave me a pointed look.

  “Hey,” I said, stepping away from her, steeling myself. “You’re the one who had the illegal idea. We’re par for the course here.”

  “Yes, it’s very illegal,” she said, sighing. “If they find out, you’ll be court-martialed and kicked out of the army. We both could go to jail.”

  “I know that.” I didn’t know that. But if I could get Johnno paid off before they found out . . . Jail was better than Johnno going after my family.

  She began to walk. I followed her. “We’d have to convince everyone,” she said, turning her eyes on me. My heart leaped. She was getting back on board.

  “Right.” We were walking side by side now.

  “It wouldn’t be that hard, I guess,” she mused. “I’m not close to that many people. And you’re about to ship out. We go to the courthouse, we don’t make a big deal.” She was speaking fast now. “Then you come back and we get into a fight. I mean, not really. But irreconcilable differences. That kind of thing.”

  “You could cheat on me, or something,” I suggested, using air quotes.

  She stopped in the middle of the block. “Do I look like someone who cheats?”

  I turned to look at her, confused. “No? I don’t know.”

  “I’m not a cheater,” she said, as if I had accused her of it.

  “Whoa, hey! It was just an idea. Sensitive topic?” It came out more biting than I’d meant it. I’d meant it to diffuse. It ignited.

  “Being cheated on? Yes,” she snapped.

  “I only suggested it because it’s the most clear-cut breakup.”

  “Not gonna happen,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m not going to play the villain to the poor, upstanding soldier. If anything, you’d be the one to break it off with me.”

  “But how am I supposed to cheat? With someone in my company? No.”

  “Then no cheating at all,” she said loudly.

  I raised my voice to match hers. “It can’t be out of the blue, though. We need a reason.”

  “Don’t yell,” she commanded.

  “I’m not!” I yelled. “I’m not,” I corrected, quieter.

  “Why are we talking about this? We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” she said.

  We continued walking, silent for a moment. Two women passed, chatting, one of them pushing a stroller. I kept my mouth shut. Irreconcilable differences seemed more feasible than the marriage. The divorce would be the easiest part.

  “I promise henceforth I will always try to get along with you,” I said.

  “Mm.” She walked faster. “You’re going to have to try harder.”

  My chest had started to get tight again. Cassie could be harsh at the drop of a hat, but at least I would always know where she stood.

  “All right,” she continued as we turned a corner to circle the block, “when do you want to do it?”

  Relief. “So you’re still in?”

  “Yeah, guy. I’m not a quitter.”

  I tried to keep from smiling too big. “Tomorrow?”

  “That soon?”

  “We need time to put on a little bit of a show before I ship out. So it looks real to everyone I serve with.”

  “Yeah, we do.” She grimaced. “I’m not much of an actor.”

  I clenched my teeth, sucking in air. “Yeah. Me, neither.”

  She checked her phone and sighed. “Okay, I gotta go. You fill Frankie in. I’m free all day tomorrow to, you know, nail down the details.”

  “Okay.” My skin was buzzing, ready to take action. I was ready right now. I wanted Cassie to be, too. I gestured for her to hand me her phone and punched in my number. She hesitated again before she got in the car.

  “Hey, what’s your last name?” she asked, putting up a hand to shade her eyes.

  “Morrow,” I said, glancing at her, my eyes traveling down the tattoos on her arms to the CD cases on her dashboard to the granola bar wrappers at her feet. “You?”

  “Salazar,” she said, smiling against the sun.

  The quiet was surreal. A breeze licked one of the swings in the playground behind her. My heart was full of something like gratitude, something big and scared and shaking, but my mind kept getting slammed into Johnno’s Bronco. Jake, slammed into Johnno’s Bronco. JJ watching.

  No, Cassie was going to help me. She was annoying as hell but she was fierce, and she was going to help me protect them. I wanted to shake her hand or hold her. It seemed absurd that we would just go off in our separate directions, like we had talked about the weather.

  But that’s what we did. I glanced back over my shoulder when she reached the road. Though I couldn’t be sure through the afternoon glare, I thought our eyes met, and I waved. She lifted her hand and waved back.

  Cassie

  Someone was knocking on my door. I looked up from my keyboard, the remains of three joints on a saucer next to me, the shells of pistachios scattered under my feet. Pistachios were an expensive but type 2–friendly cure for the munchies, I’d found. I had been pacing, crunching, going back and forth between contacting Luke and telling him we had to call it off and playing piano to calm my nerves.

  I checked the peephole. It was Rita, my landlady.

  Uh oh.

  I opened the door a crack. “Yeah?”

  Rita was holding her dog, Dante, who was panting, cross-eyed. Rita sniffed, her eyes as pink and puffy as her robe. “I noticed your lights were on all night. Just wanted to check if you were all right.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m good.”

  She sniffed again. “Were you smoking weed in here?”

  My pulse quickened. “No.”

  “Yes, you were.” I prepared an excuse, something about buying the wrong incense. Then she said, “You have any left?”

  Phew. “Of course.”

  It was an unspoken agreement that I could get away with a lot in Rita’s attic if I wasn’t stupid about it. There were a lot of uns
poken agreements. I didn’t say anything about her loud weeping, for example, or her occasional parties where it sounded like people were making animal noises at one another, and she didn’t say anything if my rent was a few days late, or about the fact that my subwoofer shook the entire house.

  “Nothing like a good wake-and-bake,” Rita said, settling herself on the couch.

  Wake-and-bake? I looked at my phone. Six. Shit. I hadn’t realized it was so late. Er, early. I was supposed to meet Luke and Frankie in an hour before we went to city hall. And I was supposed to have written a “biography” of sorts for Luke, a collection of facts about my life that he could have reasonably retained in the week or so we’d “known each other and fallen in love.” It was a good idea—he’d suggested it on the phone last night. He was writing one for me to read, too.

  Instead, I’d started writing a song. When I feel something I can’t quite understand, like when I felt smothered by Tyler, or when I found out I had diabetes, or now, for instance, I’d look for the feeling in notes.

  Writing a song is like walking through a forest, foraging for food. You start at the edge, at the organ sound in C major, or E, then you see color somewhere through the trees, maybe a more synthy F-sharp, and you pick it up but it’s not quite right. Not quite the right berry to eat, so you venture further, touching E minor in a vibraphone like you would a familiar leaf, feeling its texture, playing it fast or slow, and there it is. You take it and you start picking more notes nearby. Nutty G chords and back to F, now that it’s ripe.

  I never quite found the right notes for I’m getting legally bound to a person I don’t know. The feeling went in too many directions. Disbelief. Fear. Skepticism. But I found the notes for hope, a bright shapeless thing far off in the woods. I focused on this feeling in particular. Hope, though I didn’t know what it looked like, was leading me forward.

  Playing all night had been a sort of ceremony before the ceremony. A big nod to whatever force had decided to make me fall in love with music enough to do this in the first place.

  Rita handed me the final tip as Dante sniffed around at the empty Accu-Chek boxes and the clothes, in varying shades of denim or black, that covered every surface.

  “My life’s about to change today, Rita,” I said, blowing out a puff.

  “Yeah?” she replied, standing up to call Dante with a whistle. “Good. I try to tell myself that every morning.”

  An hour later, I was ready. I had checked my blood sugar, and eaten a potato and white bean spicy scramble. I’d found my phone in a pile of laundry. I’d even put on a little mascara and some lip color. It wasn’t until I got in the Subaru that I realized what my wedding clothes would be: the same Kinks T-shirt and jean shorts I wore yesterday. My hair was in a bun that would probably fall out soon. My Converses were unlaced.

  I ran back upstairs and found a heavy cotton black sleeveless dress with a deep V-neck. A bit revealing, and it smelled a little like old beer, but it didn’t have stains on it.

  “Shoes, shoes, shoes,” I whispered to myself. Then I remembered I had a pair of red heels from when I was Marge Simpson for Halloween. I slipped them on and looked in the full-length mirror on the back of my closet. Fine, no bun, I decided, and took my hair down.

  It took me a second to find myself in the feminine figure.

  Then I realized that in this dress, the antler tattoo just above my left breast was visible. A protector.

  Oh, there I was.

  Luke

  Apparently, to the hair-sprayed, aging waitress, it seemed totally normal for two men in tuxes to be eating eggs Benedict at seven in the morning, one of them flipping the box of a Walmart-bought wedding ring, the other furiously taking pictures of his companion, of the menu, of the ring, of the row of empty booths, and, within full view of the waitress, of the waitress herself.

  Once she got here, Cassie, Frankie, and I were going to lay down the details of the nine months to come. Frankie was documenting everything as evidence just in case, God forbid, the legitimacy of the marriage ever had to hold up in court.

  “They’ll pick apart every detail,” he was saying, showing me the time-stamped captions to each photo. “How you met, the proposal, everything. So I’m your witness. Look excited,” he finished, pointing the camera at me.

  I raised my eyebrows, tried to open my eyes wider.

  Frankie reviewed the photo. “I said ‘excited,’ not like someone just stuck their thumb up your butt.”

  “Shut up.”

  “There’s a smile.” He took another photo. I pulled my Moleskine out of my army bag and set it near my empty plate, ready to exchange lives with Cassie. Or “Cass,” as Frankie said I should call her. That still didn’t feel right.

  The door to the diner opened, and Cassie walked in. My eyes were drawn toward the antler on her breastbone, visible in her low-cut dress. Her black hair flowed in waves from her face, blending near her shoulders with the S-shaped silhouette of her body under her dress. It made me nervous, how beautiful she was. Beautiful people had one-track minds. You learn that in adolescence, when looks start to matter. Everyone steps out of the way of beautiful people just for the pleasure of watching them pass. They never have to learn how to make do, how to compromise, never have to learn how to find their way into the back doors of places. And this was definitely a back door.

  “What?” she said, approaching the booth. I realized I was staring at her.

  “Nothing.”

  Frankie stood. “Cass!” He stood to kiss both her cheeks. He looked at me, jerking his head.

  I stood, too, towering over her a bit. I bent to kiss her cheek. Frankie snapped a photo.

  We sat. Frankie and I on one side, Cassie on the other.

  “Just coffee. Black,” Cassie said to the waitress. She turned to me. “You get that?”

  I opened my Moleskine, finding a blank spot to scribble it down. Then it seemed ridiculous. “You really think we need that tiny of a detail?”

  “Maybe not, but you’ll need this one,” she said, leaning forward. “I have diabetes. Type two. Hence the medical bills.”

  I remembered that. “And what exactly does that mean?” I started. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “Well, basically my pancreas doesn’t know how to break down sugar in my blood. So I have to watch what I eat so I don’t get hypoglycemic. Or, I guess, pass out from low blood sugar. Like after I eat a meal that has a lot of simple sugars.” She pointed to a piece of pie in one of the display cases. “Or if I don’t eat snacks regularly, or don’t eat a full meal, or if I eat later than usual.” She was putting out her fingers. “Or if I drink alcohol without eating any food, et cetera.”

  “Wow.”

  “It’s a lot,” she said. “It’s going to take some getting used to.”

  “Do you have that written down?” I asked, holding up my notebook. “For our biographies?”

  We paused when the waitress returned.

  Cassie gave me an apologetic smile as she took the steaming cup. She waited until the woman left to start speaking again. “I’ll be honest.” She looked back and forth between Frankie and me. “I’m kind of ill prepared.”

  “What do you mean, ill prepared?” I rested my hand on my notebook, where I’d spent an hour trying to make my handwriting neat enough to read, combing through all my memories and mistakes, trying to decide what was relevant and what was not. We’d decided e-mail was not a good idea, because it left a record.

  Cassie looked chagrined. “I, just, didn’t write it all down. I’m sorry.”

  My chest clenched. “Come on. We’re doing this today. What else took priority?”

  “I’m sorry!” she said louder. “Until, like, an hour ago I wasn’t sure I could go through with this.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly, feeling my heart bang. I tried to breathe. I was getting angry, but that wouldn’t help the situation.

  Frankie put a bite of eggs Benedict in his mouth. “Y’all could just talk,” he said with his
mouth full. “Like normal humans.”

  Cassie and I looked at each other. She appeared to hold the same sentiment that I did: No, thank you.

  “How about you just read what you have, and I’ll respond? Here,” she said, gesturing for the pen and notebook. I tore out a page for her. “Go ahead with your first one.”

  The heat was starting to subside. I cleared my throat, and read. “My name is Luke Joseph Morrow.”

  Cassie started writing her answer as she said it. “Cassandra Lee Salazar.”

  “Lee, huh?” Frankie said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “It was my dad’s mother’s maiden name, I think.” She looked at me, her brown eyes stone. “Oh, um. I don’t have a dad.”

  “Are you going to keep your last name, or—?”

  She knit her eyebrows together, looking back up to me. “Of course I’m going to keep my last name.”

  I held up my hands. “Just asking.”

  She smiled at me across the table, closed red lips, sarcastic. “I will pretend to be married to you but I’m not going to sit at home knitting a blanket until you come back.”

  “I never said anything about knitting.”

  “He’s just trying to be cautious, Cassie,” Frankie said, in a much nicer voice than I could manage right then.

  “Then how about you take my last name?” she muttered.

  I couldn’t tell if she was serious or not. “I don’t want to do that, no.”

  Frankie looked at his watch. “We should keep this moving if we don’t want to wait in a long line at city hall.”

  I read, “I am a private first class in the Sixth Battalion, Thirty-fourth Red Horse Infantry Division, United States Army.”

  From all that, I watched Cassie write the word “private.”

  She looked at me, sipping her coffee. “I play keys and sing lead vocals for The Loyal, a band I started here in Austin.” She smiled a little, glancing at Frankie before she wrote it down.

  I looked at my sheet. “My favorite food is salami on crackers.”