One Promise That Is Given
By Jillian
(Disclaimer: Pre-Series, written for the "Before the Beginning" challenge. Walker is not mine. The Gundam Wing universe is not mine.)
~*~
My face you'll never see no more.
But there is one promise that is given
I'll meet you on God's golden shore.
~~I am a Man of Constant Sorrow
~*~
They had a potluck after the ten-thirty service. Velma Sinclair brought the fourth crock-pot of spaghetti and as she set it down next to the others on the table behind the two-story suburb house exclaimed, "Well, it's not as if we didn't know Dennis liked his spaghetti."
"You're family is going to be eating this stuff for weeks," His best friend leaned forward taking in the smell of mingling tomato sauces. Norman rubbed the moisture of the steam away from his nose with his free hand. The other hand was familiarly grasping where the fabric of Dennis Walker's flannel shirt rolled up at his elbow. Dennis had missed that contact. Missed it more than he had realized during the long semesters finishing up the last of his studies at the Academy.
Three years in the local high school. One year at Victoria. And now he was leaving again to go to Corsica.
Dennis Walker had been selected to train as one of the Elite. He was going to be a soldier in Lord Treize Kushrenada's Specials. The excitement occasionally caused his heart to ache, but the steady reality of his chosen future began to settle comfortably on his shoulders.
"Fantastic. I'm leaving a legacy of spaghetti."
"At least, Mrs. Sinclair makes the good stuff." Norm leaned closer to speak in a conspiring whisper.
Dennis let his gaze drift around his family's backyard. Most everyone was still wearing his or her Sunday clothes. His mother and grandmother were fussing over the food, adding serving utensils where needed, and his brother, Tony, was bringing out another large barrel of iced tea. Dennis could tell from the steady, but slow, trickle of tan liquid squeezing free from the tap.
"ANTHONY WALKER!" Their mother squeaked, moving with her arms out as if she was going to take the container, but let Dennis's younger brother finish carrying the weight before she started to scold him more earnestly.
Norm snickered quietly, and Dennis turned to look down at the sandy hair that trembled from the combined breeze and continuing laughter. His upturned nose was starting to get the freckles that Dennis remembered from most of their summers of playing together as children. He felt an odd pain in his lungs, and Dennis knew he must have made some movement because Norm turned his unseeing eyes upward and tilted his chin with an unspoken question.
"It's just a little strange, being back." Dennis looked around again, "Leaving again."
"You're distracted," Norm said with a clip of insightfulness, reaching up and using his fingers to find Dennis's chin in order to pull his face back to gain his full attention, "You know how hard this has been on all of us, even Sarah. But she'll be here." Norm fixed his stare on some point beyond Dennis's neck, one way that he unintentionally showed his reluctance to speak. Dennis had a theory he liked to tease his friend with, saying that Norm must have thought he was invisible. Norm seemed to think that no one could truly see him, if he couldn't see them.
"I wasn't talking about Sarah." Dennis shrugged and bumped his shoulder out against Norm's, "I suppose that you're hungry too. Help me make my social rounds, and then we can find our escape without too much fuss from Mom." He turned to watch his mother still wiping at the front of Tony's shirt. The youngest of the Walker sons, Rob, had already started the line for the food and was piling his paper plate with baked beans.
***
"I don't think they'll miss me much. In small ways, they show that they've gotten used to not having me here," Dennis was sprawled on his twin-sized bed, staring at the dimpled ceiling with a narrow crack stretching out toward the center light. The furniture had always been sparse, a desk and chair. Most of his things had been packed away. But some things didn't change. Like the wallpaper of antique jet planes from when at eight years old he decided he wanted to fly, "I'm a visitor now."
"No one forgets you, Denny. You were the first to accept an offer at the Academy," next to Dennis, Norm was lounged propping his head up in his hands, "Everyone remembers the first to go." He ran his fingers upward even as his head tilted down so that the heels of his hands were pressed against his eyes. The sun was setting and the light coming in the window made the floating dust sparkle. He remembered several attempts of trying to describe sunsets to Norm. Evening spent in the hammock and trying put colors in words for someone who had never seen them.
Dennis had been careful to curb his enthusiasm about accepting the offer when it had first come. After wanting to become a pilot, he had researched the best schools and understated his application to Victoria. He'd been cautious about his three-week leave to visit his family before taking the Special's Assignment. He had specifically gone out of his way to treat his mother kindly, avoid fighting with his younger brothers, and had kept Norm close.
The only person who could make him regret following his dream was the softly crying seventeen year old. Dennis immediately rolled on his side and wrapped his arm around Norm's thin shoulders. He could feel the sweaty warmth of Norm's nervousness through the thin grey t-shirt. Regardless, he pulled his friend close.
"Don't," Norm brushed at his tears and his ears had turned nearly purple from keeping his sobs silent, "I'm not sorry. I'm not sorry you're going."
Dennis resisted the urge to ruffle the sandy hair but kept his tone light, "I'd hope not. I named my Aries after you."
***
They had more spaghetti for dinner. Dennis's mother had shown surprise on her face when she found all three of her boys and Norman sitting at the dinner table together. Dennis watched as she brought one hand up to hold her husband's wedding band that she kept on a gold chain around her neck. She'd been a young widow, and, even in junior high, he had admired her remarkable courage.
The first year had been the hardest. Dennis hadn't seen her publicly mourn until he caught her red-eyed leaning against the mint green countertop in the kitchen at two in the morning. She'd longer brown hair then, kept back in a knot. He'd hugged her until his right shoulder ached from her weight. Then she'd dropped into a chair at the table and began to tell him stories about his father. Stories about how they'd met in a grocery store. Stories about how he'd worked so hard at reconciling the relationship between his own father and his uncle.
In those stories, Dennis felt drawn to the legacy one man could leave for his family. For the people who's lives he touched.
"You'll see him again, Mom," He had managed to say at last through parched lips. He felt as if he had been drained of moisture, his own eyes tired and sore.
Remembering that night so vividly, Dennis dropped his eyes and had to concentrate on eating for a few bites before he could look across the table to where she'd taken her same seat. He met her brown eyes then gave her a little smile. She looked past him for a moment, not unlike Norm, before she returned a fragile smile.
***
Tony and Rob had regarded Dennis with more respect than before he had left. They were closer in age and, being so young when their father died, had seen Dennis as more of a father figure to rebel against. Now he thought they looked at him as a bit of a mystery. Physically shorter and sturdier than his older brother, Tony had started to tell him a raunchy story about some woman they were watching on the television, but stopped part way and rubbed at his neck sheepishly. Rob had grown his hair out long, and liked to talk about anything and everything that came to mind quite often changing the subject of his conversation mid-thought.
The television had been moved upstairs from the basement where it had been when they were growing up together. Mrs. Walker had decided she had a renewed interest in current events after Dennis went to the Academy. Moreover, she had received a tip that she might want to monitor her middle boy's rental habits.
Norm had fallen asleep with his head on Dennis's shoulder while they sat on the couch. Tony and Rob had given up on the remote channel surfing and were taking turns showing off their video games skills.
He appreciated how ordinary his last evening at home felt. Nevertheless, Norm's warm breath tracing down his arm and the continuous loop of game music still felt oddly detached from the new reality of military training that Dennis saw whenever he closed his eyes. In his passion to protect what was normal, what was home—he'd somehow disconnected from it.
The droning of the cicada that carried in through the front window was enough to overwhelm the brief moments of quiet when Tony and Rob stopped arguing over which controller worked better than the other. Dennis wondered if he should wake Norm up when he heard a small knock at the door.
"Norm, I'll be back," He stood up, watching as his friend simply shifted to rest his chin against the opposite shoulder. His hands were crossed loosely in his lap, palms upward and trusting as if Dennis's voice was enough to keep him comfortable.
The front door was open to let in the breezes of a late summer evening and as soon as Dennis saw the individual on the other side of the screen door he slipped on his shoes that were waiting there.
"I hear you're leaving tomorrow," She started without preamble. The porch light took away every shadow from her face and rather than shielding her eyes, she turned to look at the porch swing, "It's still broken?"
"I should have fixed that," Dennis responded, glad for the change in the conversation. She was Sarah Frost. Her hair was still girlishly long and blond. During the initial assemblies to recruit promising young pilots into the Specials, Dennis had sometimes daydreamed of her white blonde hair. Seeing her again made him recall with some vividness the moment he gave his oath of loyalty to Lieutenant Zechs Marquis.
She nodded, and he wasn't certain if she was agreeing or if she was simply at a loss to what to say next. Their last conversation had ended in a similar fashion when he refused to reconsider his call to the military.
"From what I hear in the news, I never expected to see you again," She took a step backward and down the porch steps, the shadows reached out to capture the outline of her figure, "Even when I heard you were coming back, just to leave again. I wasn't going to come."
"So why did you?" Dennis said, feeling numb, but some instinctive agitation reminded him why he hadn't tried to break their estrangement.
"Guess," a severe twist of her brows and a set firmness to her lips only served to make her green eyes look as if they were fueled with an unchanged dismissal, "Your friend, Normal, made me promise."
"Norman," his correction was automatic. He'd spent most of his life jealously guarding his friend so that even his time training hadn't made him forget the habit. However, he'd never imagined that sort of cruelty from Sarah, "Clearly nothing has changed between us, but you're no longer the girl I knew either."
"How could I be?" Her voice raised a pitch, before she lifted a hand to cover her flustered expression at hearing her own hysteria, "You didn't care enough to stay with your friends. With me. Or with him even." She added with a hushed snap.
He watched her and his fingers relaxed as everything struck him as incredibly sad, "I'm sorry, Sarah. It is easier to leave than to be left, I suppose. But if our dreams are so unalike, we were never going to be compatible in the way that you wanted us to be."
She let her other foot drop down a stair, "Did you ever really love me?"
Her bluntness caught him off guard again. He shook his head, not in answer but to clear it.
"I see," She turned and was part way to the street before Dennis could lift his feet to follow.
Unblocked by the house, the night wind struck his body with a new coolness that wrapped around him at times as completely as if he'd immersed himself in water. He'd never enjoyed the underwater scenarios during his training, much preferring to be airborne. He'd been slow in overcoming the claustrophobia and trying to appreciate the pressures of submersion in an unadjusted cockpit. Even then, his throat would feel as if thumbs were pressing down on him. Like they were when he grabbed Sarah's arm and forcibly tried to stop her. Words caught in his dry throat, and he flushed with fear that if he opened him mouth he might drown.
"Why are you stopping me?" She tried to pry his fingers away from her wrist.
"I did love you. I do." He tried to gasp the words out before all confidence left him, "But I love flying. It's my mission, my purpose. It's the only way that I feel that I've really accomplished anything significant in my life. Haven't you ever wanted to feel important? Like you've found the reason you were born?"
"By dying in some stupid war with the colonies?" She accused, and he let her go as her free hand started to swing at him. Missing, "I don't understand you."
"I'm not going to die," And then his lungs filled with something other than oxygen and he couldn't speak anymore.
"I hate you. I hate Norman for making me promise to say goodbye. So," Her shoulders heaved and her teenaged body shook so much that he thought her slender limbs would snap, "Goodbye."
He watched until she was in her car and halfway down the block.
~*~
If Sarah's grief and anger had troubled Dennis, he was even more struck by the startling contrast of the ordinariness when his mother was driving him to the train station the next morning. She was chatting rather consistently about the latest grocery store gossip and what new restrictions the government was putting over the use of local utilities. Their demonstrations of and limitations on love led him to stare out the window and try to lose his thought in the blur of the passing buildings.
While confirming the departure time of the train and securing his small luggage, Dennis listened to his mother talk about the possibility of needing car repairs over the cost of a new vehicle. The station held about a half dozen civilians, but he knew at the next stop that most of the travelers would be wearing uniforms just like his.
"Mom, I mean to fix that porch swing when I get back home," he interrupted her and felt as if he'd just come up for a deep breath of air.
"I'd like that," he watched as her tightly coiled muscles relaxed at his voice, "Son."
"I love you, Mom," He reached out for her and drew comfort from the way her fingers pressed into his back.
"You smell nice," She wiped at her eyes, then her face lit up with remembrance, "I have something for you." She reached into her bag and pulled out a parcel wrapped in brown paper.
"What is it?" Dennis took the lightweight package noticing the postmark and address to his home.
"It's just a little something from Norm and your mother," she smiled as if sharing a joke.
"He didn't say anything," Dennis let his fingers pull at the packaging, recalling how honestly Norm had let his lip tremble while he promised to write Dennis every week as usual. Norm had agreed to spend the last night with Dennis, but had declined to accompany him to the station. At the last opportunity, Dennis had indulgently run his fingers through Norm's fine hair leaving his friend flustered but happy.
"He was embarrassed," Mrs. Walker said with no small fondness, "Spent quite a bit of time planning how to get it to you without giving away that it was his idea. Didn't want you to 'regret your choices and send you off doubtful and uncertain' were his words."
Dennis pulled free the gift and found himself looking at a pair of finely crafted flight goggles. "I-I," he choked, "I would have given it all up if he'd told me to, Mom."
She crossed her arms and met his wet eyes with her own tearful smile, "He believes in you. I believe in you. We're all called to make sacrifices for a better future," her smile wavered as the train whistle announced the approaching departure, "The only difference is in perspective."
He kissed her cheek, one hand on her shoulder the other gripping his new goggles with determination, "You'll see me again, Mom."
She nodded without looking away, "I know."
By Jillian
(Disclaimer: Pre-Series, written for the "Before the Beginning" challenge. Walker is not mine. The Gundam Wing universe is not mine.)
~*~
My face you'll never see no more.
But there is one promise that is given
I'll meet you on God's golden shore.
~~I am a Man of Constant Sorrow
~*~
They had a potluck after the ten-thirty service. Velma Sinclair brought the fourth crock-pot of spaghetti and as she set it down next to the others on the table behind the two-story suburb house exclaimed, "Well, it's not as if we didn't know Dennis liked his spaghetti."
"You're family is going to be eating this stuff for weeks," His best friend leaned forward taking in the smell of mingling tomato sauces. Norman rubbed the moisture of the steam away from his nose with his free hand. The other hand was familiarly grasping where the fabric of Dennis Walker's flannel shirt rolled up at his elbow. Dennis had missed that contact. Missed it more than he had realized during the long semesters finishing up the last of his studies at the Academy.
Three years in the local high school. One year at Victoria. And now he was leaving again to go to Corsica.
Dennis Walker had been selected to train as one of the Elite. He was going to be a soldier in Lord Treize Kushrenada's Specials. The excitement occasionally caused his heart to ache, but the steady reality of his chosen future began to settle comfortably on his shoulders.
"Fantastic. I'm leaving a legacy of spaghetti."
"At least, Mrs. Sinclair makes the good stuff." Norm leaned closer to speak in a conspiring whisper.
Dennis let his gaze drift around his family's backyard. Most everyone was still wearing his or her Sunday clothes. His mother and grandmother were fussing over the food, adding serving utensils where needed, and his brother, Tony, was bringing out another large barrel of iced tea. Dennis could tell from the steady, but slow, trickle of tan liquid squeezing free from the tap.
"ANTHONY WALKER!" Their mother squeaked, moving with her arms out as if she was going to take the container, but let Dennis's younger brother finish carrying the weight before she started to scold him more earnestly.
Norm snickered quietly, and Dennis turned to look down at the sandy hair that trembled from the combined breeze and continuing laughter. His upturned nose was starting to get the freckles that Dennis remembered from most of their summers of playing together as children. He felt an odd pain in his lungs, and Dennis knew he must have made some movement because Norm turned his unseeing eyes upward and tilted his chin with an unspoken question.
"It's just a little strange, being back." Dennis looked around again, "Leaving again."
"You're distracted," Norm said with a clip of insightfulness, reaching up and using his fingers to find Dennis's chin in order to pull his face back to gain his full attention, "You know how hard this has been on all of us, even Sarah. But she'll be here." Norm fixed his stare on some point beyond Dennis's neck, one way that he unintentionally showed his reluctance to speak. Dennis had a theory he liked to tease his friend with, saying that Norm must have thought he was invisible. Norm seemed to think that no one could truly see him, if he couldn't see them.
"I wasn't talking about Sarah." Dennis shrugged and bumped his shoulder out against Norm's, "I suppose that you're hungry too. Help me make my social rounds, and then we can find our escape without too much fuss from Mom." He turned to watch his mother still wiping at the front of Tony's shirt. The youngest of the Walker sons, Rob, had already started the line for the food and was piling his paper plate with baked beans.
***
"I don't think they'll miss me much. In small ways, they show that they've gotten used to not having me here," Dennis was sprawled on his twin-sized bed, staring at the dimpled ceiling with a narrow crack stretching out toward the center light. The furniture had always been sparse, a desk and chair. Most of his things had been packed away. But some things didn't change. Like the wallpaper of antique jet planes from when at eight years old he decided he wanted to fly, "I'm a visitor now."
"No one forgets you, Denny. You were the first to accept an offer at the Academy," next to Dennis, Norm was lounged propping his head up in his hands, "Everyone remembers the first to go." He ran his fingers upward even as his head tilted down so that the heels of his hands were pressed against his eyes. The sun was setting and the light coming in the window made the floating dust sparkle. He remembered several attempts of trying to describe sunsets to Norm. Evening spent in the hammock and trying put colors in words for someone who had never seen them.
Dennis had been careful to curb his enthusiasm about accepting the offer when it had first come. After wanting to become a pilot, he had researched the best schools and understated his application to Victoria. He'd been cautious about his three-week leave to visit his family before taking the Special's Assignment. He had specifically gone out of his way to treat his mother kindly, avoid fighting with his younger brothers, and had kept Norm close.
The only person who could make him regret following his dream was the softly crying seventeen year old. Dennis immediately rolled on his side and wrapped his arm around Norm's thin shoulders. He could feel the sweaty warmth of Norm's nervousness through the thin grey t-shirt. Regardless, he pulled his friend close.
"Don't," Norm brushed at his tears and his ears had turned nearly purple from keeping his sobs silent, "I'm not sorry. I'm not sorry you're going."
Dennis resisted the urge to ruffle the sandy hair but kept his tone light, "I'd hope not. I named my Aries after you."
***
They had more spaghetti for dinner. Dennis's mother had shown surprise on her face when she found all three of her boys and Norman sitting at the dinner table together. Dennis watched as she brought one hand up to hold her husband's wedding band that she kept on a gold chain around her neck. She'd been a young widow, and, even in junior high, he had admired her remarkable courage.
The first year had been the hardest. Dennis hadn't seen her publicly mourn until he caught her red-eyed leaning against the mint green countertop in the kitchen at two in the morning. She'd longer brown hair then, kept back in a knot. He'd hugged her until his right shoulder ached from her weight. Then she'd dropped into a chair at the table and began to tell him stories about his father. Stories about how they'd met in a grocery store. Stories about how he'd worked so hard at reconciling the relationship between his own father and his uncle.
In those stories, Dennis felt drawn to the legacy one man could leave for his family. For the people who's lives he touched.
"You'll see him again, Mom," He had managed to say at last through parched lips. He felt as if he had been drained of moisture, his own eyes tired and sore.
Remembering that night so vividly, Dennis dropped his eyes and had to concentrate on eating for a few bites before he could look across the table to where she'd taken her same seat. He met her brown eyes then gave her a little smile. She looked past him for a moment, not unlike Norm, before she returned a fragile smile.
***
Tony and Rob had regarded Dennis with more respect than before he had left. They were closer in age and, being so young when their father died, had seen Dennis as more of a father figure to rebel against. Now he thought they looked at him as a bit of a mystery. Physically shorter and sturdier than his older brother, Tony had started to tell him a raunchy story about some woman they were watching on the television, but stopped part way and rubbed at his neck sheepishly. Rob had grown his hair out long, and liked to talk about anything and everything that came to mind quite often changing the subject of his conversation mid-thought.
The television had been moved upstairs from the basement where it had been when they were growing up together. Mrs. Walker had decided she had a renewed interest in current events after Dennis went to the Academy. Moreover, she had received a tip that she might want to monitor her middle boy's rental habits.
Norm had fallen asleep with his head on Dennis's shoulder while they sat on the couch. Tony and Rob had given up on the remote channel surfing and were taking turns showing off their video games skills.
He appreciated how ordinary his last evening at home felt. Nevertheless, Norm's warm breath tracing down his arm and the continuous loop of game music still felt oddly detached from the new reality of military training that Dennis saw whenever he closed his eyes. In his passion to protect what was normal, what was home—he'd somehow disconnected from it.
The droning of the cicada that carried in through the front window was enough to overwhelm the brief moments of quiet when Tony and Rob stopped arguing over which controller worked better than the other. Dennis wondered if he should wake Norm up when he heard a small knock at the door.
"Norm, I'll be back," He stood up, watching as his friend simply shifted to rest his chin against the opposite shoulder. His hands were crossed loosely in his lap, palms upward and trusting as if Dennis's voice was enough to keep him comfortable.
The front door was open to let in the breezes of a late summer evening and as soon as Dennis saw the individual on the other side of the screen door he slipped on his shoes that were waiting there.
"I hear you're leaving tomorrow," She started without preamble. The porch light took away every shadow from her face and rather than shielding her eyes, she turned to look at the porch swing, "It's still broken?"
"I should have fixed that," Dennis responded, glad for the change in the conversation. She was Sarah Frost. Her hair was still girlishly long and blond. During the initial assemblies to recruit promising young pilots into the Specials, Dennis had sometimes daydreamed of her white blonde hair. Seeing her again made him recall with some vividness the moment he gave his oath of loyalty to Lieutenant Zechs Marquis.
She nodded, and he wasn't certain if she was agreeing or if she was simply at a loss to what to say next. Their last conversation had ended in a similar fashion when he refused to reconsider his call to the military.
"From what I hear in the news, I never expected to see you again," She took a step backward and down the porch steps, the shadows reached out to capture the outline of her figure, "Even when I heard you were coming back, just to leave again. I wasn't going to come."
"So why did you?" Dennis said, feeling numb, but some instinctive agitation reminded him why he hadn't tried to break their estrangement.
"Guess," a severe twist of her brows and a set firmness to her lips only served to make her green eyes look as if they were fueled with an unchanged dismissal, "Your friend, Normal, made me promise."
"Norman," his correction was automatic. He'd spent most of his life jealously guarding his friend so that even his time training hadn't made him forget the habit. However, he'd never imagined that sort of cruelty from Sarah, "Clearly nothing has changed between us, but you're no longer the girl I knew either."
"How could I be?" Her voice raised a pitch, before she lifted a hand to cover her flustered expression at hearing her own hysteria, "You didn't care enough to stay with your friends. With me. Or with him even." She added with a hushed snap.
He watched her and his fingers relaxed as everything struck him as incredibly sad, "I'm sorry, Sarah. It is easier to leave than to be left, I suppose. But if our dreams are so unalike, we were never going to be compatible in the way that you wanted us to be."
She let her other foot drop down a stair, "Did you ever really love me?"
Her bluntness caught him off guard again. He shook his head, not in answer but to clear it.
"I see," She turned and was part way to the street before Dennis could lift his feet to follow.
Unblocked by the house, the night wind struck his body with a new coolness that wrapped around him at times as completely as if he'd immersed himself in water. He'd never enjoyed the underwater scenarios during his training, much preferring to be airborne. He'd been slow in overcoming the claustrophobia and trying to appreciate the pressures of submersion in an unadjusted cockpit. Even then, his throat would feel as if thumbs were pressing down on him. Like they were when he grabbed Sarah's arm and forcibly tried to stop her. Words caught in his dry throat, and he flushed with fear that if he opened him mouth he might drown.
"Why are you stopping me?" She tried to pry his fingers away from her wrist.
"I did love you. I do." He tried to gasp the words out before all confidence left him, "But I love flying. It's my mission, my purpose. It's the only way that I feel that I've really accomplished anything significant in my life. Haven't you ever wanted to feel important? Like you've found the reason you were born?"
"By dying in some stupid war with the colonies?" She accused, and he let her go as her free hand started to swing at him. Missing, "I don't understand you."
"I'm not going to die," And then his lungs filled with something other than oxygen and he couldn't speak anymore.
"I hate you. I hate Norman for making me promise to say goodbye. So," Her shoulders heaved and her teenaged body shook so much that he thought her slender limbs would snap, "Goodbye."
He watched until she was in her car and halfway down the block.
~*~
If Sarah's grief and anger had troubled Dennis, he was even more struck by the startling contrast of the ordinariness when his mother was driving him to the train station the next morning. She was chatting rather consistently about the latest grocery store gossip and what new restrictions the government was putting over the use of local utilities. Their demonstrations of and limitations on love led him to stare out the window and try to lose his thought in the blur of the passing buildings.
While confirming the departure time of the train and securing his small luggage, Dennis listened to his mother talk about the possibility of needing car repairs over the cost of a new vehicle. The station held about a half dozen civilians, but he knew at the next stop that most of the travelers would be wearing uniforms just like his.
"Mom, I mean to fix that porch swing when I get back home," he interrupted her and felt as if he'd just come up for a deep breath of air.
"I'd like that," he watched as her tightly coiled muscles relaxed at his voice, "Son."
"I love you, Mom," He reached out for her and drew comfort from the way her fingers pressed into his back.
"You smell nice," She wiped at her eyes, then her face lit up with remembrance, "I have something for you." She reached into her bag and pulled out a parcel wrapped in brown paper.
"What is it?" Dennis took the lightweight package noticing the postmark and address to his home.
"It's just a little something from Norm and your mother," she smiled as if sharing a joke.
"He didn't say anything," Dennis let his fingers pull at the packaging, recalling how honestly Norm had let his lip tremble while he promised to write Dennis every week as usual. Norm had agreed to spend the last night with Dennis, but had declined to accompany him to the station. At the last opportunity, Dennis had indulgently run his fingers through Norm's fine hair leaving his friend flustered but happy.
"He was embarrassed," Mrs. Walker said with no small fondness, "Spent quite a bit of time planning how to get it to you without giving away that it was his idea. Didn't want you to 'regret your choices and send you off doubtful and uncertain' were his words."
Dennis pulled free the gift and found himself looking at a pair of finely crafted flight goggles. "I-I," he choked, "I would have given it all up if he'd told me to, Mom."
She crossed her arms and met his wet eyes with her own tearful smile, "He believes in you. I believe in you. We're all called to make sacrifices for a better future," her smile wavered as the train whistle announced the approaching departure, "The only difference is in perspective."
He kissed her cheek, one hand on her shoulder the other gripping his new goggles with determination, "You'll see me again, Mom."
She nodded without looking away, "I know."