Chapter 11

Claudia had decided to stay the night in the apartment the Army had so graciously offered her. That way she’d be fresh for the drive back in the morning. Plus she could drive around and see what an Army base looked like. And not just any Army base. This was the one her little brother was stationed at. Or would be stationed at when he was well. She didn’t quite understand that part yet. Why they had sent him off to Boonville, Missouri was one thing she would like to find out. And why they thought she lived there.

But all that could be taken care of later. For the first time in a long time she felt completely at peace. Tony was sucking at a nipple happily. She was relaxed, and so was he. He had handled the trip really well, and that made her happy too.

Her cell phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number, but answered it anyway.

“Hey,” came the voice of the man she had spoken to only an hour earlier. “You got a minute?”

“Of course I do,” she said, excited that he had called her back so soon.

“I need some advice, but I have to ask you a couple of questions first.”

“Okay.”

“Are we close? I mean were we close, like best buds?”

“What an odd thing to ask. I suppose I’d say we were better friends than a lot of brothers and sisters are, but I didn’t share all my deepest secrets with you. You’d have blabbed them all over the neighborhood.”

“Oh,” he said. “But that was back then, when we were young.”

“Yes. When you went away to the Army and I got married, I guess we kind of let things drift apart a little bit.”

“Would you call yourself judgmental?” he asked.

She laughed. “Anybody who is judgmental doesn’t think they are,” she said. “They just think they have better morals than everybody else. What’s going on, Bobby?”

So he told her the story of getting the Any Soldier mail, and about Miss Miller, who he soon began calling Julia, and how she had come to try to find him at Walter Reed. He explained the mix-up as to her actual status, and how they fell in love, and how anxious he was to get away from the hospital. Finally he explained that she was pregnant and they were in love and wanted to get married, but not if it was going to embarrass everyone.

“So let me get this straight,” she said. “My baby brother fell in love with a second grade teacher and got her pregnant and now you want to do the right thing.”

“I want to marry her,” said Bob. “It wouldn’t matter if she was pregnant or not. In fact, I asked her to marry me before I found out she was pregnant.”

“Did she know she was pregnant when you asked her?” asked Claudia.

“No. That was last night. She just took the test this morning.”

“Are you sure you want to do this, Bobby?” asked his very practical sister, who had only the barest bones of the story.

“Positive,” said Bob firmly.

“Well then marry her in a fit of passion, and then have her apologize to her parents and let them throw her a big wingding wedding for family and friends to come to. Then it won’t matter if she has to have a custom gown, because everybody will know she already got married months and months ago. It will still be a close call when the baby is born, but lots of babies come a month early these days.”

“Oh,” he said. “Maybe you should just talk about that with Julia.”

Claudia was reserved at first, but as she talked longer she warmed to the woman on the other end of the phone. What was intended to be a short call for help turned into something that ran Claudia’s battery down until she had to plug her phone into the wall. They ended up talking for two hours before everything was settled.

By then Claudia had heard much more of the story, from Julia’s point of view, and she was no longer concerned that Bobby was leaping off a cliff hoping there was water down below.

By then Claudia liked Julia already, and couldn’t wait to meet her.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” asked Bob nervously.

“Will you get it through your thick skull that I want to marry you?” asked an exasperated Julia.

“I mean like this, at the courthouse,” he said. “I’ll take the flak with your mother if you want to wait until the big wedding.”

“Claudia was right,” said Julia. “If we get married now, nobody will know the baby got made too early. My mother can have her big fancy affirmation of our vows. That’s why I made you write your vows now. I’m going to marry you, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a judge or a minister who does the ceremony. It means just as much to me either way.”

“I love you,” sighed Bob.

“And I love you,” she said sweetly. “Which is why I’m marrying you, you big lug.”

Then it was their turn and they were called before the judge. He asked them a few questions, let them say their vows to each other, and pronounced them married in the state of Missouri, by the power vested in him by said state.

They waited exactly forty-eight hours before Julia called her parents. Her father answered the phone.

“Hi Daddy,” she said.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Does anything have to be wrong?” she came back, a little crossly.

“I can hear it in your voice,” he said. “I always could read you like a book, Julia. It was one of the reasons I never worried about you like I worried about your sisters. I pulled my hair out over Linda and Connie.”

Julia sighed. “Okay, I’m going to tell you and then I’ll tell Mom, because I know you won’t yell at me and Mom is going to need your support when I get done.”

“Shoot, baby girl. I can take it.”

“I met a man...”

“Well that’s good. We were beginning to think you might be gay.”

“Daddy!” she gasped, horrified.

“So tell me about him,” said her father.

“He’s very special,” she said.

“They always are,” said her father wryly.

“My class wrote him a letter - he was stationed in Iraq at the time - and he wrote back to them ... and to me ... and I fell in love with him, Daddy.”

“Don’t you think you ought to wait until you actually meet him?” asked her father.

“He got caught in an ambush and blown up. He lost a leg and they shipped him back to Walter Reed. I went to see him.”

“Oh my,” said her father, suddenly serious.

“I fell head over heels for him, Daddy. And he fell in love with me too. They let him leave the hospital to recuperate fully, but he had no place to go, so I let him come to my house.”

“Uh oh,” said her father. “I can see why your mother is going to wig out. Do you really think that was wise sweetheart?”

“We thought it would be a chance to get to know each other better,” she said.

“And you got to know each other really better,” suggested her father.

“Daddy!” she said with shock in her voice. “I can’t believe you’d jump to that conclusion!”

“Sweetie, I know human nature, and I know what happens when a man and woman who like each other spend a lot of time in close contact.”

“So do I,” she said primly. “Which is why, when I knew I couldn’t resist any longer, we got married.”

There were forty-five full seconds of silence on the phone, before Julia said “Daddy? Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” he said. “I’m just trying to figure out a way to make this nuclear explosion into a firecracker. Girl, you are in so much trouble with your mother.”

“I know, Daddy. But we’ll have a big wedding and reaffirm our vows in front of everybody. I promise. I just couldn’t wait, Daddy. And I didn’t want you to be disappointed in me for being ... bad.”

“I love you, Julia,” said her father. “And for me that means I love you no matter what. I’ll try to ride herd on your mother. She had three other weddings. Maybe that got it out of her system. I doubt it, but she’ll be happy you’re not gay, or lesbian or whatever. So when do we get to meet him?”

“When do you want to?”

“What date did you get married?”

“Two days ago,” she said shyly.

“And you waited two days to call?”

“We were ... busy,” she said.

He laughed. “I bet you were. To answer your question, I wish I could have met him a month ago. But it’s too late for that. I need to try to figure out when your mother will come back to earth after you tell her. I’ll call you and invite the two of you up. How does that sound?”

“Thank you, Daddy. I love you, Daddy.”

“I’ll go get your mother. I recommend you fold up a tissue and put it between the earpiece and your ear.”

Julia giggled. “Okay, Daddy. Thank you for being so understanding.”

“If I tell you a secret, will you swear never to tell your mother?” he asked, his voice low.

“How can I promise until I know what the secret is?”

“Good point. I knew you were the smart one. Well, if the truth were known, I got into your mother’s girdle regularly for a month before we were married.”

Julia’s squeal of horror elicited a laugh from her father. Served the girl right to get all shook up, since she was about to unhinge his wife.

The end of school was only three weeks away, and the happy couple were able to put off both Julia’s parents and Bob’s sister for that long, by explaining that they could stay three or four days if they waited, but only a single Saturday or Sunday if they came before then.

Of course the faculty at David Barton School was told about the wedding. When asked why they hadn’t been invited, since they lived right there in town, Julia explained that, to mollify her mother, she needed to be able to say that there had been no one else at the ceremony except the judge and the witness supplied by the county, who happened to be the court clerk who processed all the paperwork. She said everyone would be invited to the formal wedding, and that satisfied most. Still her peers threw her a wedding shower, to which Bob was invited. They were all eager to find out more about this mysterious man. He said he’d come if he wasn’t the only male there, which is how it developed to be the first known multi-gender wedding shower in school history, perhaps even in Boonville history.

The next week Julia drove over to the parking lot of the farm bureau, where they exchanged places. He needed to go to Fort Riley, and he didn’t want Julia to have to drive him there. As soon as he got into the driver’s seat, he realized how stupid he’d been. There was nothing to use his left leg on. The parking brake was a lever between the seats, and it was an automatic transmission. He had no trouble driving, and even drove back home. He had intended to get a new license in Missouri, even though his car, which was in long term storage at Fort Riley, was licensed in South Dakota. Now he decided to just keep his South Dakota license and not mention to anyone that he had a prosthetic leg.

A week before school was out Bob drove Julia’s car to Fort Riley. He had no trouble remembering where personnel records were, but when he got there it was another cluster fuck. True, he was permanently assigned to Bravo Company, 101st FSB, 1st Infantry Division, but in theory he was TDY, or on temporary duty with the Medical Hold Company, WRAMC. And so, technically, his marriage records and the corrections needed to his DD Form 93 should be made there, rather than at Fort Riley. What saved the day was that the clerk couldn’t even find the soldier’s record, and went to report this fact to the Officer in charge of the records management section, 101st FSB rear detachment, who was Captain Charles Baldridge. The file in question was still sitting on his desk, where it had been laid when Baldridge brought it back from CSM Beck’s office. When he found out what was going on, Baldridge took it upon himself to ensure that things concerning this record went flawlessly.

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Any Soldier

Lubrican

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