Purple Hearts Read online

  This was a sign, I was pretty sure. Our marriage was doomed. Either that, or it was time to cut off all my hair.

  Luke

  We walked out of the city hall chapel, onto the elevator smelling like everyone’s perfume, and out the doors to the sidewalk. The wind was whipping hard through the buildings of downtown Austin, smacking my tie into my face, and Cassie’s hair was billowing up, catching her earrings. No one said a word. There must have been a storm coming.

  Cassie and I kept glancing at each other, not hostile but not nice, either, more like we were checking to see if the other was still there.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about this neighbor kid I knew growing up. I couldn’t remember his name because it seemed like there was always some neighbor kid Jake and I were running around with in the summer while Dad was at the garage, Mitch or Mark or whoever, but he was the kid you always had to watch your mouth around. He’d pick up any word and poke at it until it seemed like the dumbest thing anyone had ever said. Jake and I could never say we loved anything, like Power Rangers or our dad or Ritz crackers, without the neighbor kid spitting, “Oh, yeah? If you love it so much then why don’t you marry it?”

  It wasn’t like that, Jake and I would always tell him. We didn’t love crackers in the same way we loved people we would marry.

  And yet there I was, married, and when it came time for the sake of the marriage to tell Cassie I “loved” her, even though I didn’t, there would still be a part of me that choked on the words, waiting to be taunted for them.

  And there would also be another ounce of little kid logic that would want to point to someone as beautiful as she was right then, pushing the wild hair out of her face, and answer the taunts back. Well, I did marry her, motherfuckers. See? I did.

  Cassie

  Nothing in the Florien house needed cleaning, but here we were. Mom worked for Green Team, which meant she used tea tree oil and Dr. Bronner’s and vinegar on the tables and toilets of executives at Dell and IBM who decided their offspring should not inhale Lysol fumes. I had come here to talk to my mother about Luke, but there seemed to be no good time for that. How would I tell my mom I was married while I knelt next to a toilet bowl?

  My phone buzzed. Toby, again. I ignored it.

  And how would I tell my hook-up partner that I was married? Scratch that. Did I have to tell Toby anything about this, for that matter? I supposed not. And why was Toby calling me in the middle of the day? Was he trying to up the fuck portion of the fuck-buddy equation to include quickies in the afternoon? Was he trying to up the buddy and remove the fuck? I had no idea, and I didn’t want to find out. I had enough on my plate.

  “Cassie,” Mom said. “Hello. Are you losing it?”

  I looked up. I realized I had been scrubbing one spot on the sink for several minutes. “Whoops.”

  She stood next to me in the kitchen, looking out the window above the sink to the Floriens’ sprawling backyard. A cast-iron table and chairs stood under the shade of a Texas ash. Beyond that, a large swimming pool.

  “How’s your blood sugar?” Mom asked. She snapped on a pair of blue latex gloves.

  “I checked it this morning, like I do every morning,” I replied. It was starting to become like second nature, this organized thing amid the chaos. Check blood sugar. Prepare healthy meal. Set phone timer to make sure I had an afternoon snack. Walk at least thirty minutes a day. Not that my mother trusted me to be on top of it.

  “Have you cracked open the LSAT prep books?”

  “I’ve been busy.” I picked at a piece of lint on my sponge.

  “With what?”

  Marriage. “Music,” I said.

  There’d be more forms to fill out. IRS forms, direct-deposit forms, and Luke had called today about more army paperwork. There was the wedding, and that was it. There were no winks across rooms or fake briefcases or secret handshakes. Unless our “honeymoon trip” to Chili’s this evening was actually going to be a North by Northwest case of mistaken identity, this whole thing was unsettlingly easy.

  Mom picked up a bottle of Windex and headed to the breakfast nook. “If you’re going to stand there, at least polish the silverware.”

  I picked up a fork from the pile near the sink. “We’re probably going to play again at the Skylark.”

  Mom sighed as she stepped on a bench to reach the high windows. “When I was your age I was doing the same thing, going to the bars with my face painted, different places every night, going on dates, trying to find another daddy for you. And look how that worked.”

  I rubbed a butter knife, tense. “It’s not the same.”

  “Nights in bars. Looking for something that isn’t there.”

  “It is there,” I called. “You heard it. And it’s something I’m passionate about.”

  Mom shook her head, laughing to herself as she made small circles on a pane. “What do you mean, passion?”

  “Doing anything else besides it sounds like hell. That’s passion.”

  She stepped off the bench, scooted it to the left, and stepped up again. “Life is hell, Cassie. We do what we can to make it manageable, and we wake up and do it again.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “I know. That’s why you can’t just say ‘I want, I want, I want’ and hope something happens to you. You don’t waste time following. You get into a position where you don’t have to follow anything.”

  “Aren’t you ‘following’?” I asked. “I mean, is this what you want?” I picked up my polishing rag from the counter, shaking it at her.

  She scratched her flushed cheek with the back of her wrist, and resumed scrubbing. “I want to earn my pay, go home and put my feet up, read books, and tell jokes with MiMi.”

  “Is that it?” I pressed. If Mom and her sister lived a reasonable distance from each other, they would be inseparable. Now they just purchase wireless plans for the pleasure of chatting about Rosario Ferré novels, their gardens, and the various ways the weather has failed my mother.

  She stepped down from the bench. “It will be hard to ask myself that question until I know my only daughter has a safety net.”

  Deep down, I had known this all along. Mom couldn’t do so much as think about looking for a different job, going back to school, moving back to San Juan, until she was no longer the person who would catch me if I failed. If I was broke, if I was sick, I still relied on her. But not anymore. Luke and I were married now. Sham or not, I had his extra income and health insurance. And maybe that was something she needed to hear.

  “Don’t freak out,” I said, as quiet as a little girl. “But I might have one now. A safety net.”

  “Like what?”

  I swallowed, and lifted my hands. “I got married.”

  “What?”

  I found myself stepping away, scared, though the top of her poufy black hair came only up to my chin. Her cheeks flared red. “To who?”

  I stammered quickly, “His name’s Luke Morrow. He’s a private in the army. We’re not in love, we did it for the benefits.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “Are you serious? How long have you been planning this?”

  I extended the time period, though it hardly made it seem more reasonable. “A week.”

  “A week.” She stood frozen for a moment, staring at the floor. Then she started peeling off her latex gloves.

  “It’s one thousand dollars extra a month and free health care! You saw the hospital bill after all that diabetes testing.”

  More silence. She started fixing up the rolled sleeves of her polo. My gut burned.

  “Wow, Cassie.” She gave me a closed-lip smile, and turned away. “Wow. Every day you surprise me.”

  “Sorry I didn’t invite you. It was yesterday, kind of quick.”

  She tossed her gloves in the trash, and slammed the lid closed. I jumped. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I’m doing this for you, so you don’t have to help me.”

  “What you could do for me is
get a stable job.”

  “It’s health care and extra money every month. And it’s happening right now. Do you know how long it took me to get that paralegal job in the first place? And then it took three months for my crappy benefits to kick in.”

  “But, Cassie, you’re lying to the army!”

  “Couples do it all the time. We’ve got a story . . .”

  She laughed, bitter. “What did you do, find him on the street?”

  “He’s Frankie’s friend.”

  Mom stepped toward me again, saying through clenched teeth, “Frankie Cucciolo?” I nodded. “Do George and Louise know?”

  Mom still got together with Frankie’s parents for dinner every once in a while. I was tempted to tell her yes. Maybe if Louise approved, she would go easier on me. But I couldn’t lie.

  “Why would I tell George and Louise?”

  “Thank God.”

  I started speaking to her like the doctor had spoken to me when I was diagnosed. Like someone being talked down from a ledge. “It’s very temporary. We have a schedule. We have a shared account. We’re going to get divorced when he comes back from overseas.”

  Except now I felt like I was the one on the ledge, trying to convince my mother it was a good idea to jump. She’d never reacted this way before. Not when I told her I was going to college in California, not when I told her how much I was going to take in loans, not when I told her I was moving back in with her with nothing to contribute but a manic postgrad bitterness and a critical theory degree.

  Mom sat down at the kitchen table. “This is insane.”

  “Well, so is drowning in debt,” I said, shrugging her off. “Even when I was a paralegal. Even when I wasn’t sick. You can’t blame me for trying something different.”

  Mom shook her head, breathing deeply, like she was trying to cleanse herself of what she just heard. “Not if it lands you in jail.”

  “It’s not going to.” I tossed the polishing rag on the table, realizing I had been twisting it into a rope. “I just need a little help right now. I won’t waste this time, Mom. I will make it. I just need a little support to get there.”

  “I will absolutely not support this.” She buried her face in her hands, and then looked up at me. “You’re crazy. You need to get real.”

  I set my jaw. “Well, I did it.”

  She rolled her eyes and stood. “Then you’ll have to fail on your own.”

  “I’m not going to fail,” I said, swallowing. Hoping I believed it. “That’s so dramatic,” I added, but didn’t know if she could hear me.

  She opened the sliding glass doors that led to the backyard, stepped through, and closed them again. I watched her spray and wipe in wide loops.

  I cupped my hands around my mouth, pressing them to the pane. “How can I prove to you that I’m not crazy?”

  Mom narrowed her eyes, her reply muffled. “Who knows.”

  I watched her work, remembering the looking-for-a-man days she had talked about. I was a toddler. I remembered the cat-piss smell of our neighbor Mrs. Klein’s house. Of weeping and weeping until I fell asleep, waking up in the middle of the night and crying again until a grumpy, exhausted Mrs. Klein handed me a dusty juice box and a handful of stale crackers from her bathrobe pocket.

  I remembered the relief when Mom was the one to wake me up in those days. Mom with her dimples and big, soft chest and constant, quiet tongue clicks, like a train slowing down. She wore Lancôme perfume, from a beautiful bottle with gold-plated lettering spelling La vie est belle. I used to sit in her room, tracing the letters with my finger.

  Mom tapped on the glass. Look, she mouthed, pointing to the tall wooden fence that surrounded the Floriens’ pool.

  On the far corner sat a big bird with a green head and a white breast.

  Mom slid open the door, letting in the warm, humid air. “It’s a green heron!” she said, her voice clear and bright, anger lingering at the edges. “The only advantage of working for people with pools.”

  All this talk of dreams and passion. I didn’t know exactly what I meant, either. It was like foraging for notes in the forest. Always not that, not that. Not Mom’s life. Not law school. But it was as if I could never say that, that’s it. I had it briefly at the Skylark, after we’d played, that I knew.

  I would find it again.

  I pointed to the heron, nudging Mom’s shoulder. “Maybe it’s a good sign.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Cass,” she said, wiping her forehead with a blue-rubbered hand as she looked on. “That’s just a bird.”

  Luke

  “Chili’s. Ugh,” Cassie said as we approached the decorative door flanked by cacti. “We’re in one of the culinary capitals of the United States,” she continued. “Why did your friends choose Chili’s?”

  “They’re not foodies, Cassie. They’re just hungry.”

  After Cassie had picked me up in her Subaru, the entire car ride through suburban Austin had been a stream of criticism. Or “just questions I have,” according to Cassie. Why didn’t you tell me we were supposed to dress up? All the army wives are going to look like Jackie Kennedy, aren’t they? Do you guys think drone bombs are taking your jobs, or are you all for drone bombs? Do I salute, too? I had tried to answer her as best I could while the annoyance pressed on my chest. I didn’t realize tucking in my one button-up shirt was “dressed up,” I’d told her, and I didn’t know anything about drone bombs, I was infantry, and, no, for God’s sake, please don’t salute. I assured her we’d be in and out of there, then we’d follow them to the hotel near the airport that Frankie had booked for us and a few other couples, then we would be done.

  Inside, Chili’s was full, loud, smoky from fajitas. A teenage hostess with a too large headset greeted us and held up a one second finger. We nodded.

  “I’m just saying.” Cassie leaned close to me and muttered, “What about barbecue?”

  I sneezed in response.

  “Are you getting sick?”

  “No, your perfume makes my nose itch.” Her car smelled like someone lit a match to a field of herbs. Not unpleasant, just spiky.

  “I don’t wear perfume. Remember? I told you that at the diner.”

  I hadn’t remembered. I was probably too busy being pissed about all the stuff she forgot. “Okay, then the smell of your car makes my nose itch.”

  “Are you allergic to my smell?”

  “No!”

  Cassie was laughing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “The face you just made.”

  I realized my jaw was pretty much wired shut. I tried to loosen it, took a breath, and said quietly, “Can you handle this?”

  “Handle what?”

  “This is the last impression people in my company are going to get of you and me in person. This is, like, our army moment. For an army marriage. So.”

  “So?”

  I was walking on the edge of pissing her off. A familiar place. “So. You know.”

  “What?”

  “Just, don’t ask them questions about drone bombs.”

  “Dude.” Cassie gave me a relaxed thumbs-up. “I’ve been in relationships. Straight back, big smile, laugh at everyone’s jokes. I’m a pro.”

  “And pretend you like me,” I added. My stomach flipped. I’ve heard couples say that to each other, but usually they were joking.

  “Duh,” Cassie said.

  She got quiet, biting her thumbnail, staring absently at one of those tacky black-and-white posters of Marilyn Monroe near the host stand. Reality was approaching. I sensed her nerves.

  I nudged her shoulder. “Just pretend I’m that hot musician. Bon Iver.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “You don’t look like—”

  “Father Jack Misty,” I tried.

  “It’s Father John.”

  “Father John Misty. Dressed like David Bowie. Holding a key-tar.”

  “Now you’re just pandering,” she said. But she smiled.

  We followed the hostess toward the back of the restaurant,
where there was a large room behind French doors. I could hear a burst of laughter, and Armando came into view, a couple of pounds on him since boot camp had ended, and Gomez, her lips painted, and Clark with a red beard he’d have to shave off before we deployed. Then there was Hill, a corporal I barely knew, and his wife. And Frankie and Elena, gelled and crisp, looking like they were about to sign a lease in an ad for expensive condos. Empty pint glasses stood along the table. We entered to a burst of laughter.

  “Nobody told him drills were over!” Armando was saying, pointing at Frankie, out of breath.

  Clark noticed us and stood up, putting a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Morrow! And who’s this?”

  The room got quiet.

  “Hi, y’all,” I said.

  “I’m Cassie, Luke’s wife,” Cassie said beside me.

  “Luke’s wife?” Gomez asked, her eyes widening with surprise.

  Cassie wrapped her arm around my waist. I hadn’t thought about this part. I was ready to eat mozzarella sticks, put my arm on the back of Cassie’s chair, point at her with my thumbs, and refer to her as “this one,” like I’d seen friends’ dads do. I wasn’t ready for their shock. Nor for the possibility that shock might morph into disbelief. You’re going to blow it. And even if you did blow it, no one would care. None of these people know you. They don’t care about you. They’ll turn you in. A bump of Oxy would have really mellowed things right then. I pushed the thoughts away.

  “When did you get married?” Gomez gasped.

  My veins pumped. Cassie looked at me with dewy eyes, squeezing. Ouch. I swallowed and said, “A couple days ago.”

  “It was love at first sight,” Cassie added with a bright laugh. Her voice didn’t sound like her own.

  “How wonderful!” Gomez was saying.

  Armando’s eyes traveled the length of Cassie’s body and he shrugged, approving. I gave him a warning look.

  I led Cassie away from Armando, to the opposite end of the table. As we sat, Cassie leaned close to me, her breath in my ear. “Remember the plan.”