“But jobless and dependent.” She slammed the door. “I can’t fight them to the point where I’m really kicked out.”
He wanted to ask why she couldn’t. He wanted to say, as he had said before, that there were young women, lovely ones, who managed to live on a lieutenant’s pay. But he knew what would follow any such suggestion. It began with the reminder that, when he ceased being a lieutenant in one more year, he wouldn’t have an income at all. When he was settled in civilian life, it would at first be on the minute income of a draftsman in some small architectural office in River City or Green Prairie. “Barely enough,” Lenore had said once in a bitter moment, “to pay my dry-cleaning bills.”
“Do I call back?” he asked.
“I’ll get a ride. This monkeyshine won’t break up till around eleven. Then we go to somebody’s house for what the older veterans of Civil Defense call refreshments and jollification.”
“Ducky.” She swore and stalked down South Hobson Street, making better time than the traffic.
He parked her car beside her house and saw, through the picture window, Beau Bailey sitting in a deep chair with the evening paper, a highball, and the top button, of his trousers undone. Hurriedly he crossed the lawn to: his own yard.
Nora and Ted were studying.
“I thought,” Chuck said to his brother, “you were supposed to be at the switch. One of the minute men?”
“Oh, heck. I am! But they just repeated the same old baloney over and over and it got sickening.” His imagination, vivid when the “attack” had begun, was now a faded thing.
Mrs. Conner had come from the hall with her darning basket. She smiled at her straight, thin son and sat down with a murmur of relief. “Ted’s been very faithful, really, Charles. And it is tiresome. This is your father’s fourth year. I don’t see how on earth he keeps up his enthusiasm.