Chapter 7

Francine was already out of the shower and dressed in capri pants and a casual top, but no shoes, when Clay tapped on her door at five that morning. When she opened the door he said, "I knew you'd be ready. Good morning, Gorgeous."

"Hiya, Handsome. How do I look?"

"I thought we already established that, Gorgeous."

"Never hurts to hear it again," she said. "I just need to put my shoes on."

She took a pair of strappy flat-heeled sandals out of her luggage and sat down on the bed to put them on.

"Your toenails are pink," he commented. "Yet you don't put anything but clear polish on your fingernails."

"My colleagues don't see my toes. They do see my hands. I keep the polish neutral for the same reason women in the Air Force wear their hair above their collars and keep their makeup understated; I'm a woman in a man's world, and that's the standard."

He nodded. "That makes sense. When I first came on active duty in 1954, WAFs – women in the Air Force – were very limited as to what they could do, and the minute they got pregnant, married or not, they were discharged. We've come a long way since then; now we're admitting women to all of our service academies, and women can be servicemembers and mothers at the same time. Anyway, I like the pink toenails."

"Well, my pink toenails and I are ready to go out and wait for the sunrise."

"Then let's go."

Options for food and coffee were limited at 5:30 on a Sunday morning, so they had to settle for what they could find at a convenience store.

"I promise you something better once the sun is up," he said, as he drove them onto Fort Monroe and parked near the Hotel Chamberlin, a Roaring Twenties-era grande dame of a resort hotel. "Once we watch the sun rise, we'll go find a real breakfast. For now, are you game for a walk?"

"Of course."

Hand in hand, they walked along the beach, mostly in comfortable silence. When it stretched, though, Clay said,
"Still awake?"

"Oh, yes. Just thinking."

"Want to share?"

"Just that if someone had suggested to me even six months ago that I'd be very happily walking along a beach at six o'clock on a Sunday morning – a beach that was not in the Bahamas, Bermuda, Majorca, or the Cote d'Azur, that is – I'd have said they were crazy. Yet, here I am."

"I've been to all those places, and although they are beautiful, with the right person there's no place like home."

The combination of a breeze off the water and Francine's lightweight clothing had Clay offering her the lightweight jacket he wore; she snuggled into it, embraced by the residual warmth of his body.
"Let's get out of this wind," he suggested, so they walked back to the car. When she tried to give him back the jacket, though, he said, "Keep it. You need it more than I do right now."

"I have a light windbreaker in the trunk, in my emergency supplies. I'll get that so you can have your jacket back, and then we'll put the top down and let the winds blow where they will."

"When you were a child, did you parents have any records by Les Paul and Mary Ford?" he asked once they were settled in the car in the dawning light.

"Every song they ever recorded, I think. My mother loved their music. You're thinking about 'The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise", aren't you?"

"Yes. I bought that record in 1951, when I was first allowed to have a record player in my barracks room at West Point."

"After you finished the first year and were no longer a lowly plebe?"

"That's right. I wore that thing out. It was a tough year, and I played to remind me that there would still be a sunrise each day.

"What made it so hard, Clay?"

"My Dad – Lee's grandfather – died that year. Lee doesn't remember him at all, of course, he was only a baby, but I adored that man. He was a heavy smoker, you see, before we knew just how dangerous that was. In those days, everyone smoked."

"I remember. That's why you don't smoke, because it killed your stepdad?"

"Yes. The time I caught Lee smoking when he was about twelve, I just lost it. I didn't hit him, but we had a huge fight. We weren't on very good terms before then, but after that, it was like he went out of his way to rile me. He said he hated me and that he was never going to forgive me, never."

"Well, he was a teenager, Clay; that's what they do. I got caught shoplifting once when I was thirteen. I didn't need to, my parents gave me plenty of spending money, too much, probably, but it was the thrill of it. My dad settled up with the store manager so I didn't have a juvenile record. And he doesn't hate you, far from it."

"I was a rotten parent. After he and Amanda got custody of Leeanne, he said that he'd found out that the learning curve on being a parent was very steep."

"And you pointed out that it was even steeper in your case. After all, he has Amanda to help him. You had no one. Was your mother- Lee's step-grandmother – still alive when his parents were killed?" she asked, and then answered her own question. "No, she couldn't have been, because they would have asked her to take Lee, wouldn't they?"

"She died in 1949, right before Matt married Jenny."

"You lost both your parents in the space of two years, and then your brother and his wife just four years later? Clay, how did you even keep going?"

"Work. I poured myself into my work. I made work my life, so much so that when they asked me to take Lee, I found it very hard to change gears. He spent a lot of time in his room or with a babysitter when he was younger."

"Do me a favor?"

"What's that?"

"Forgive yourself? Lee's forgiven you, I know that; Amanda has told me that. Forgive yourself."

"I can try."

"That's all I ask. Clay, look! Isn't that sunrise gorgeous?"

"Almost as gorgeous as you are."