Next she went to the meat cooler and bought bacon and ham and sausage. And then she had the most extraordinary feeling that she was being followed by the pregnant young woman.
Ernie moved from the bacon and sausage display case into one of the aisles. Halfway down it, the pregnant young woman appeared, coming the other way.
Without doing anything that would suggest she was trying to lose the pregnant young woman, Ernie tried to do just that. Fixing an "ooops, I forgot paprika" look on her face, she twice reversed direction, and pushed her shopping cart into another aisle.
And both times the pregnant young woman, whose shopping cart held a loaf of bread and a quart bottle of ginger ale and nothing else, appeared behind her in the same aisle. The second time Ernie reversed direction she moved three aisles away, to the beef section, where she bought a half a dozen T-bone steaks; but that move didn't shake loose the pregnant woman either.
Ken never tired of steak. Which was a good thing, for her culinary skills were just about limited to frying eggs and bacon and broiling steak.
As she maneuvered her cart, Ernie had managed to glance at the young woman (even to study her for a long moment in a curved mirror apparently installed to discourage shoplifters). And by now she was convinced that she had never seen the young woman before. But she was also convinced that whatever the young woman was-and she looked like a nice young woman-she was not a threat.
But she unnerved Ernie. And feeling a little foolish, Ernie cut short her shopping trip. She had steaks for dinner and stuff far breakfast in the shopping cart. She could pick up bread and toilet tissue on the way to the checkout counter. What else she needed she would get tomorrow. Or maybe even later today, if Ken called up and said he would be a little late again.
Ernie didn't see the young woman as she went through the checkout line, but when she pushed the shopping cart out of the supermarket, the young woman was in the parking lot, between Ernie and the LaSalle.
Ernie pushed the shopping cart off the concrete sidewalk onto the macadam and toward the car. The pregnant young woman was now looking at her. Ernie put on a faint smile (the only explanation for her behavior, she suddenly concluded, was that the young woman mistakenly believed that she knew her) and headed for the car.
"Excuse me," the pregnant young woman said, "you're an officer's wife, aren't you?"
Ernie hesitated.
"I saw the Camp Elliott sticker," the pregnant young woman said, making a vague gesture toward a sticker on the LaSalle's windshield. It identified the car as having been registered on the post by a Marine officer.
"The car belongs to a friend," Ernie said.
"Oh," the pregnant young woman said, obviously disappointed, and then added, "I am. A Marine officer's wife, I mean."
"Right now," Ernie blurted, "that's the great ambition of my life. To be a Marine officer's wife."
The young woman smiled. It was a nice smile, Ernie thought, and the young woman was obviously a nice young woman.
"Is there something I can do for you?" Ernie asked.
The pregnant young woman dipped into her purse and came up with a wallet. She took from it a dependent's identification card, which she thrust at Ernie. There was a photograph on it, which made the pregnant young woman look all of sixteen years old. Her name was Dorothy Burnes and she was the dependent wife of Martin J. Burnes, 1st Lt., USMCR.
"Can I talk to you?" Dorothy Burnes said.
"Sure," Ernie said. "Mine is a second lieutenant."
"I've been following you around the supermarket," Dorothy said.
"I noticed," Ernie said. A look of embarrassment crossed Dorothy Burnes's face. "Why don't you sit in the car?" Ernie added.
"Thank you," Dorothy said. She got in the passenger seat. Then Ernie unloaded the groceries from the shopping cart into the LaSalle and pushed the basket to a steel-pipe enclosure. When that was done she walked back to the convertible. The roof was down and the boot snapped in place. The car glistened. Ernie had waxed it, with Simoniz, partly because she had come to understand how important the car was to Ken, and partly because there wasn't much to do with him gone all day.
Ernie got behind the wheel, pulled the door closed, and turned to Dorothy Burnes.
"I'm desperate," Dorothy said. "They put me out of the motel today, and unless I find someplace to stay between now and half-past five, my husband's going to put me on the Lark at half-past six."
"The Lark?"
"The train to Los Angeles," Dorothy explained. "Where you can connect with trains to Kansas City. We're from Kansas City."
"Oh," Ernie said.
"I really thought if I offered them twice as much money, they'd let me stay," Dorothy said. "But the lady said that wouldn't be 'fair to the other girls,' and that I would have to check out."
"Oh, hell," Ernie said.
"So," Dorothy said, trying and failing to sound amusing, "I got this clever idea that maybe if I asked some other officer's wife, who looked like she had some place to stay, maybe she'd know of something. And then I decided the best place to find some officer's wife who had a place to stay was at a supermarket. If she was buying groceries, she would have a place to cook them. So I came here and you came in."
"Good thinking, anyway," Ernie said.
She's just like me. Or, there but for the grace of God and Pick's father, go I.
"But I suppose you're living with your folks," Dorothy said, "and have no idea where I could find a place… anyplace out of rain?"
"I'm living on a boat," Ernie said. "And I don't, I'm afraid, know of any place for rent."
"A boat?" Dorothy asked.
Ernie nodded. "One of those things that goes up and down in the water," she said.
"And you don't have any idea-" Dorothy said.
Ernie shook her head.
"Damn," Dorothy said, and then started to sniffle.
The tears, Ernie knew, were genuine, not a pitch for sympathy. Dorothy Burnes was at the end of her rope. She was pregnant and didn't have a place to stay, and her Marine was about to send her home.
"Sorry," Dorothy Burnes said, wiping her nose with a Kleenex.
"If they threw you out, where's your luggage?" Ernie asked.
"In the motel office," Dorothy said.
"Well, you can stay with us tonight," Ernie said. "And in the morning, you and I will start looking for a place for you."
"Have you got room?"
Ernie nodded.
"I've got money," Dorothy said. "I can pay. I really thought if I offered them twice as much money… I wired my father for money, and I wasn't going to tell Marty-"
"Where's the motel?" Ernie interrupted, as she pushed the LaSalle's starter button.
"I don't know how to thank you," Dorothy said.
"I guess we camp followers have to stick together," Ernie said.
That made Dorothy Burnes giggle. She smiled shyly at Ernie. Ernie was pleased.
Twenty minutes later, Ernie stopped the LaSalle near Pier Four of the San Diego Yacht Club. A hundred yards out on the pier, the Last Time bobbed gently up and down. It was separated from the wharf by five white rubber bumpers the size of wastebaskets, and connected to it by a teak gangplank and electric service and telephone cables.
The Last Time, the property of a San Diego attorney whose firm did a good deal of business with Pacific Far East Shipping, Inc., was fifty-three feet long, sixteen feet in the beam, and drew six feet. She was powered with twin General Motors Detroit diesels.
Her owner had been delighted, when approached, to offer it, via the chairman of the board of Pacific Far East Shipping, to the daughter of the chairman of the board of the American Personal Pharmaceutical Corporation for as long as she wanted it. Not only for the obvious reasons, but also because her normal three-man crew, carried away on a wave of patriotism, had enlisted in the Coast Guard, leaving the Last Time untended.
"Oh, my God!" Dorothy Burnes said when she stepped down into the lounge. "I've never been on one this big. What is it, a Bertram?"