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She slid her arm through his and pecked his shoulder. “You have a lot working for you, too.”
He smiled. But he couldn’t help fearing it wouldn’t be enough.
Twenty-Six
One week later
Inever planned on living my life alone. Does anyone ever really plan on that? I don’t think human beings are meant to be single. If not for certain choices, maybe I would’ve had a husband and children like most other women. But I can’t complain. I’ve had a good life overall, with supportive parents, a roof over my head, plenty to eat. That’s more than a lot of people have.
“What are you doing?” Brant asked, poking his head into the bedroom.
Talulah closed the book as she glanced up. She’d dropped one of Phoebe’s journals while trying to slip them into a box she was going to put in her SUV. It’d fallen open to a page halfway through, which she’d started reading. “I’m packing up Phoebe’s journals. I haven’t read this one yet, but I was curious to see if I should put it in the box for later or keep it closer at hand.”
“And? What’s the verdict?”
“The box. She’s much older in this one. It’ll take me a while to get to it.”
“Did she keep a journal of her whole life?”
“Not day by day. Not even year by year. But there are probably ten volumes.”
He leaned against the doorjamb. “Where are you at in her story?”
“Volume two. I’m right where she joins the military as a nurse to help in the war effort in 1941.”
“She was a nurse in World War II?” he asked in surprise.
“She didn’t have any training. But back then, training wasn’t required.”
“Did she see combat?”
“She did. According to what I’m currently reading, she’s working in a makeshift hospital in Bataan, which is in the Philippines somewhere, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.”
“Did she ever talk about being stationed in the Philippines?”
“No. Never mentioned the war, either. Her early life is all new to me. Maybe that’s why I find it so interesting. She was my great aunt, and yet she was almost a stranger to me.”
“So many people saw things they’d rather forget,” he said.
“When I mentioned her stint in the military to my mother yesterday, she said she was too little to remember much about it, but that Phoebe had once told her a large number of the nurses she’d worked with were captured by the Japanese after she came back to the States.”
“They became POWs?” he said. “For how long?”
“Something like three years.”
“Did any of them survive?”
“According to my mother, they all did.”
“Sounds like you’ve got some interesting reading ahead.”
Talulah leafed through some pages of the journal, examining her aunt’s spidery script, before putting it in the box. “Growing up, I saw Phoebe as a crotchety old lady—someone who was demanding and unyielding and not that relevant to my own life. But...”
“You’re starting to like her?” he said.
“I am. She was an incredible woman.”
“So are you.” Coming up behind her, he slipped his arms around her midsection. “It’s so hard to let you leave me.”
