“At least let me make an appointment with Gina.”
Gina ran the salon her mother had patronized for twenty years. “I don’t need a haircut.”
“What about a little waxing?” Her eyes flitted from Theresa’s forehead to the hem of her nylon PT shorts. “That you could use.”
A little waxing, my ass. Her skin care was an often-mentioned affront to her mother, who wanted her daughter slathered, ripped and stripped from eyebrows to remaining ankle, as if smooth skin would balance what was missing. “Do you think I care if I look like a rottweiler?”
“Nah, your fur’s like a Portuguese water dog.” Behind Jeanne, Ray drew a thick middle finger across his eyebrows and grinned.
“Bite me.” She pulled her lips back at her stepbrother, showing teeth.
“Whaaat? I watch the Westminster dogs with Jeanne, so sue me.”
Easy for him to mock, since he wasn’t the recipient of an improvement plan this week, or even this month. The honor was all Theresa’s.
“Don’t you want to look your best for the other doctors?” Nothing diverted her mother.
“It’s PT, not a job interview.” And not a date.
“Job, schmob.” She rolled her heavily outlined eyes. “That Major Brady—”
Her parent kept talking. If she hadn’t had to use both hands on her crutches, she might have made the same talk-to-the-hand signal that her stepbrother mimed from the doorway. Didn’t her mother understand how uncomfortable her injury left other doctors? They chatted with Jeanne instead of her precisely because she’d morphed from doctor to patient. None of them wanted a reminder that hot metal could dice up professionals as easily as lieutenants and grunts.
“He has such deep eyes, and he told me his mother was a Ricci from Bayonne—”
Even if her mother spiked the cannoli, Major Brady wouldn’t ask her out. If he did, she’d crutch the other direction faster than Ray could pop a clutch, because the truth was she was so pissed at every man she knew—Raymond was a smart aleck, Carl smothered her and Wulf hadn’t bothered to send one measly email, the bastard—that she couldn’t endure her mother’s schemes for another second. “Mom, I have things on my mind other than dating. I’m trying not to spend my life as a fucking cripple.”
Her mother shook the water bottle at Theresa. “I don’t care how old you are, or how miserable living here with the people who love you most in the world makes you, you may not use that word unless you want me to wash your mouth out with soap.”
“Even Jeanne can catch you now,” Ray muttered.
By the time her mother turned to glare, the picture of brotherly innocence was holding the front door, looking exactly how he had whenever he was caught with cigarettes in junior high.
Following them past mounds of burgundy asters to her mother’s silver Cadillac sedan she realized that when she had a prosthetic instead of crutches, people would finally walk next to her. At the end of the driveway she blew her breath out hard enough to disturb loose strands of hair on her forehead. “I’m sorry, Mom.”
Raymond held the car door open with one hand while he read phone messages.
“Thanks.” Theresa slipped sideways on the seat, yanking her crutches in before he slammed the door. Thirty more seconds and she’d have been situated to close it for herself, but nobody ever let her try. I still have opposable thumbs. I can work a handle.
Her mother’s silence as Ray started the car clearly meant she’d have to go further to make up for her f-bomb. Last week her mental-health therapist had reminded the group that their injuries changed expectations for their families too. Meeting loved ones halfway, that’s what they’d promised to try this week. She’d always been good at homework. “I didn’t mean to be rude, but I want to focus on my therapy. Maybe later I’ll want to date more.”
“What about that young man at the hospital in Germany?”
“What are you talking about?” She strained into her shoulder belt to stare at her mother, who had half turned in the front passenger seat. “Who was in Germany?”
“I don’t remember his name—he wasn’t Italian—but he was blond and looked like he needed a good meal.” The penciled-in eyebrows went higher, daring Theresa to ask for details. “Carl talked to him. More than once.”
Was it true? Was her dream, the one where Wulf knelt at her bed and pressed his face against her arm and whispered that he’d come for her, but she had to fight to get better, real? “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It didn’t come up.” Her mother gazed past Theresa’s head before she dropped her perfectly timed reply. “After all, you’ve been busy focusing on your therapy.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Afghan fighters asleep in this shed had foolishly reached for assault rifles instead of the sky when Wulf’s squad burst in, so he rolled a body away to lift the tunnel’s trapdoor. The team had waited six weeks for a dark moon to coincide with a Black and Swan contractor’s presence at the target. During those long weeks, they’d rescued a kidnapped high-value Afghan, cleared Taliban out of two villages, visited Dostum and his boys, and trained a parade of Afghan National Army units. Through it all, they’d watched this compound.
The men had talked about after the mission, but they knew that tonight Staff Sergeant Wulf Wardsen would die. All day small gifts had appeared on his bunk or in his boots: his favorite beef jerky and energy bars, a wooden box with the unit crest hand-carved into the lid, waterproof topographic maps. Men who were superstitious about goodbye found ways to speak without words.
Tonight would be the last chance to put himself out front for them. He saw Kahananui and Cruz plug their ears a second before he dropped a flash-bang grenade in the tunnel’s hole. Skipping the rungs, Wulf slid down the ladder’s outside supports. “Clear,” he said into his mike. Weapon up and ready, he advanced, scanning with his night vision gear. Evenly spaced grooves showed where machines had carved this route, and overhead beams supported the ceiling rock. Rounding the first corner, he had less than a second to identify the greenish shape of a man rushing at him as hostile—raised weapon and Afghan dress—and not the contractor they wanted alive. He depressed the trigger.
Bang-Bang-Bang. The guy fell backward.
Shit. He didn’t feel rattled or distracted, but the two rounds he’d wasted wouldn’t pass unnoticed. If the Big Kahuna had already activated the communication relay unit, even the guys stuck aboveground would’ve heard.
Thirty feet away, another human shape flickered across the tunnel’s mouth and threw something.
“Grenade!” Wulf scooped a Russian-style potato masher and lobbed it into an open storage room, then hit the dirt. His heart thumped like mortar fire even though he knew his team had dropped—
Booom. Only a fraction of the explosive force rushed out the door, but the tunnel amplified sound. Expecting rock slabs to crush his back, he almost felt let down by the small chunks that pelted him, although they were a damn good advertisement for the quality of Black and Swan’s construction services.
The fight in the main cavern was similarly anticlimactic. Kahananui took out an Afghan whose weapon jammed, and Cruz dropped the American contractor with a shot to the leg. Hands up and blubbering, that rat wasn’t going down with his corporate ship.
“Alpha team up,” Wulf reported to Deavers. “Target secure, receiving first aid. Over.” Watching the guy moan as Cruz dressed his leg, he heard Bravo team call in similar results in its part of the compound. Start to finish, under eleven minutes.
“Work up more sweat in a drive-through at lunch, dude,” Kahananui said.