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"Hello, Molly." Say something else! "How are you?"
"I'll take your rig over to the barn," Valdez put in.
Valentine released his pack, grateful for something to do with his body.
When he'd had the barn office pointed out and said good-bye to the captain, Molly had the screen door open. She stood a few pounds heavier, her eyes were a little more tired perhaps, but her hair shone with its same golden glory. If anything, it was a little longer and fuller, drawn back from her cheekbones into a single braid. Some of the wariness that he'd come to know all too well on their trip back to the Free Territory still haunted her. She wore a civvied version of the old female Labor Regiment top, cheered up by a set of silver buttons, and a simple jean skirt with a built-in apron-pouch. She smelled like lavender.
The child had her creamy skin, or maybe it just looked light set against the boy's dark hair and eyes. If he and Molly had had a child the boy might have ended up looking like that.
"I'm sorry about Graf," Valentine said.
"Thank you. I'm adapting." Her eyes kept striking the scar on his face, then circling away, then coming back to it, alighting just for a flash before looking away.
Valentine was used to the reaction. In an hour or two, or tomorrow, it would just be another part of his face.
"You never told me-"
"This is Edward," Molly said, picking the boy up with an easy grace that suggested that she did it a hundred times a day.
"Edwid," the child agreed.
"Edward, say 'hi' to David."
The child didn't want to say hi and buried his face in his mother's neck.
"I smell like a long trip," Valentine said.
"Is that why you're limping?"
"I fell badly," Valentine sort of lied, leaving out the bullet entering his leg that precipitated the fall.
"He's two and he's got his own mind about people. Six months ago he giggled at strangers and grabbed their fingers."
Valentine did some mental math. If Molly had given birth about two years ago, the baby had been conceived at the end of his summer as a Quisling Coastal Marine in the Thunderbolt. Tripping over Post's square liquor bottles in the cabin they shared. The phony marriage to Duvalier. Had Molly's stomach quivered that August night the way it had when-
Stop that insanity. . . .
"I want to get cleaned up. Can I do that, and then we'll talk?"
"The only water in here is for the sink. We share flush toilets and showers at the end of the street. There's a hose that works at the stable, too; the vet room has a sluice in the center. Sometimes I'll just hook the hose in the ceiling there after work and shower."
"I'll do that. Back in an hour?"
"Do you want dinner with us?"
"Yes," Valentine said. Probably too eagerly. "If it's not trouble for you and Edward."
"You changed my whole definition of trouble," Molly said, but she smiled when she said it. "No, an extra plate is no trouble at all."
* * * *
Dinner that night passed in uncomfortable small talk.
The bunkhouse had a tiny folding table that just fit the child's high chair and the two adults. A propane stove-natural gas was obtainable in the Ozarks, almost plentiful compared to some parts of the country-with two burners and an oven made up a tiny kitchen annex. A bead curtain partition separated a couple of twin beds that sat under a few pictures and a black-framed set of military ribbons and decorations.
Molly described, in broad strokes, her marriage to Graf Stockard, and life at home for her father and sister-her mother had finally succumbed to the illness that the doctors described only as "malignant cancer" (were there any nonmalignant varieties, Valentine wondered) while he had been crossing the Great Plains Gulag with Duvalier. She largely skipped over "the occupation," and somehow Valentine couldn't ask her about the testing as the horsemeat stew changed place with a strawberry cobbler on the table, if not in the smears on Edward's face. Are you keeping your promise to Post or trying to get back into her bed?
Of course conversing without really talking was an old habit of his and Molly's. They'd been that way ever since the zoo. She grew more animated when she described her duties as a civilian horse trainer.
