His lips curve further. I can’t quite decide if I’m insulted or charmed. “I promise I won’t let my lack of emotional fortitude intrude on the story this time.” Hollis’s eyebrows raise and he stares into my eyes. “I promise,” he repeats.
“Ugh. Fine. Where was I?”
“They met at the beach. Elsie lured Rose to her room with chocolates.”
José brings me another Shirley Temple (less heavily garnished this time) and whisks away the empty glass I have no memory of draining. “Right, right. Okay...”
Key West, Florida
December 1944
Rain beat its tattoo against the roof, a persistent rhythm that made Rose’s limbs feel loose and her brain sleepy. She and Elsie worked similar schedules, which seemed like supreme luck until Elsie confessed with an uncharacteristically sheepish grin that she’d arranged it that way. The two women had taken to spending most of their free time together at the beach where they first met, lounging in the sun and staring up at the planes flying low overhead until Elsie’s restlessness inevitably steered them into the ocean’s waves. On rare poor-weather days like today, when the sky dumped bucket after bucket on Key West as if it forgot it was supposed to be in the midst of the dry season, Rose and Elsie stretched out on the plush carpet in the living area of the nurses’ quarters, playing gin rummy. Elsie was an atrocious card player, always too full of energy to focus, yet it did not stop her from beginning each game absolutely certain she would win.
“My bad luck streak is finally ending, I can feel it,” Elsie said as she shuffled the cards.
Rose scratched the resident tabby cat, which flopped down beside her. She smiled at the way Elsie’s nose wrinkled as she began the next game determined to concentrate harder this time.
Again, Rose was victorious.
“I’m hopeless. You’re just too clever,” Elsie said. Rose considered employing false modesty to bolster Elsie’s ego, but then Elsie reached for Rose and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear with the care of a lover. “I’m just grateful you still choose to grace me with your beauty and brains despite my horrendous card playing.”
This was not the first time Elsie had complimented Rose like this, praising her looks and intelligence. While Rose beamed with pride that this fascinating woman found her worthy of her attention and time, it also left her a bit unsettled. Elsie couldn’t know the effect of her words and her careless touches, the way it heated Rose’s blood and made her want things she couldn’t have. It would have been almost cruel if it had been deliberate—which Rose was certain it was not.
Elsie held up a finger, then disappeared down the hallway that led to the bedrooms. She quickly returned with the shoebox in which she kept her candy stash. She held it out to Rose and offered her some of the chocolate-covered peppermint patties a distant cousin had sent from Pennsylvania. Rose grinned as she selected one from the box, and then took another for later; they had quickly become her favorite confection.
Elsie settled again on the floor and popped a piece of bubblegum into her mouth, the pale pink color a perfect match for her lips. “What will you do when the war is over?” Elsie asked.
Rose swallowed the bite of candy, relishing the mint’s coolness on her tongue. She licked a crumb of chocolate from the tip of herfinger. When she looked up, Elsie’s brow was furrowed in a way Rose couldn’t read. “I suppose I might go back to Oshkosh,” Rose said, omitting how she had cried most nights since arriving in Florida, missing everything and everyone she’d left behind so intensely it felt like an illness. The only time she wasn’t homesick, now that she thought of it, was while she was with Elsie. “My parents are there, and most of my siblings.”
“Will you marry? Have children?”
That was the plan; Rose had promised her mother—who was an advocate for large families, and was therefore concerned about her daughter wasting some of her most fertile years in the Navy—that marriage and a family would be her first priority when she returned home. It was the only way her mother would agree to give Rose her blessing when she confessed she planned to fudge her birthdate so she could enlist in the WAVES nearly a year before she was technically eligible to serve. Rose was not a dreamer in the way some girls were; in fact, everyone expressed some surprise that she hoped to join up and leave Wisconsin at all. So she’d seen no reason why she would be disinclined to settle down back home after the war, and agreeing had come easy to her.
“I suppose,” Rose answered, suddenly uncertain if her promise would be as easy to keep as she assumed when she made it. “I have always hoped to be a mother one day.”
As the oldest girl in a family of seven children, Rose spent much of her childhood helping care for her brothers and sisters. She had no aspirations to fill a farmhouse full to bursting with screaming babies, though, and she hoped her future husband would be content with two or three. Her mother would disapprove of such a small family, of course, but Rose thought it more than enough to keep her occupied.
“You’ll make a terrific mother,” Elsie said. She sounded sincere, though her tone was incongruent with the odd, brittle smile stretched across her face.
“And you? Will you also marry and have children?” Rose asked.
Elsie laughed as if Rose had told her a joke. She shook her head, making her moonlight-colored hair dance along her shoulders. “I don’t plan to have time for children. I want to go to medical school, become a surgeon. I want to be inchargein the OR instead of taking orders from pompous jackasses. And honestly, I’ve never seen the appeal of the pitter-patter of little feet when I could be elbow-deep in someone’s bowels.” She stifled a laugh, well aware by this point in their friendship that Rose was cursed with the combination of a powerful imagination and a weak stomach.
“Perhaps,” Rose said once her nausea dissipated, “you could find the appeal in both with the right partner. If you had someone very supportive of your dreams.”
Elsie’s responding smile looked somehow sadder than any other expression Rose had ever seen on her face in the few weeks they’d known each other. “Yes. Perhaps,” Elsie said. She schooled her face back to a pleasant smile and began shuffling the cards again.
5
•••••
The food is incredible. My ravioli sampler looks just like the menu picture—big red plate and everything—and Hollis keeps making these throatymmmnoises with each bite of his fideo and meatballs. I’m finding it both incredibly weird and incredibly arousing.
“Do you always eat with such... gusto?” I ask.
“What?”
“You sound like you’re constantly coming a little over there.”
