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She pulled into the driveway. A wartime accessory she was thinking of getting was a gas cap with a lock and key. Since rationing clamped down, some people liberated gasoline with a siphon and a bucket. They either burned it themselves or sold it on the black market.

“Bastards,” she muttered, then quickly looked around. No, no neighbors out to be scandalized by her unladylike language. Well, good. If she was going to scandalize people, she wanted to do a first-class job.

She walked into the house. One more big sigh in the foyer. She’d spend more time rattling around here like a pea in an oversized pod. Things with Herb weren’t everything they had been or everything they might have been, but she still liked having him around.

A robin hopped on the front lawn, cocking its head to one side as it searched for bugs and worms. Every so often, it caught something. Peggy watched as one fat earthworm wrapped itself all the way around the robin’s yellow beak, struggling for all it was worth against getting eaten. The worm wasn’t worth enough. The robin bit it in half and swallowed the writhing pieces one after the other.

Unexpected tears stung Peggy’s eyes. Wasn’t that poor damned earthworm doing the same thing as all the sorry little people who got caught in the war’s iron jaws? Sure it was. It only wanted to live, the same as they did. But the robin didn’t let it, any more than the war spared those people.

The robin, at least, had the excuse of being hungry. If it didn’t eat bugs and worms, it would starve. What was Hitler’s excuse, though, or Tojo’s? They already headed great nations. What more could they possibly need? Would they be fatter and healthier and happier if they devoured other nations’ small stores of happiness?

They evidently thought so.

Before Peggy quite realized what she was doing, she walked into the kitchen and opened the cabinet where the liquor bottles lived. After a bourbon on the rocks-or, say, two bourbons on the rocks-she might be able to look at the world through a less jaundiced eyed.

Or two bourbons on the rocks might turn into a good many more than two, and she’d wake up tomorrow morning with a head like a drop-forging plant and a mouth like a latrine trench. Then she’d have one to take the edge off … and then everything would start all over again.

It wasn’t as if she didn’t know some quiet lushes, and a few more who weren’t so quiet. But she also knew what she thought of them. Nothing wrong with a drink every so often. Nothing wrong with a drink or three, even, every so often … as long as you were holding the bottle. When the bottle got hold of you, you turned into one of the people other people thought about that way.

So the bourbon on the rocks could damn well wait till after dinner. In the meantime, she lit a Chesterfield. Nothing wrong with cigarettes, by God! Not even if her granny would have got the vapors seeing her smoke one like a loose woman. Nothing wrong with coffee, either. She turned on the stove to heat up what was in the pot sitting there.

When Herb was out of town, time crawled by. A postcard from Reno-which, by the gaudy picture on the front, billed itself as the biggest little city in the West-was no substitute for the man himself. I won fifty bucks at a slot machine the night I got here, he wrote, and I’ve been putting it back a dime at a time ever since. He didn’t say anything about what he was doing way the hell out there, but she wouldn’t have expected him to.

She made one of her own patriotic forays into the Lehigh Valley, which kept her hopping for a few days. A speech at an Odd Fellows hall near the Civil War monument in what they called the Circle in Easton had the crowd eating out of her hand. The next morning, a Sunday, the Easton Democrats who’d sponsored her told her they’d never seen anybody else sell war bonds like that.

“All in the wrist,” she answered, not without pride.

A young man who looked like a black Irishman-the town seemed about a third Irish, a third German, and a third everything else-gave her a lift back to the train station. “I bought a bond myself,” he said. “Paying my own salary, like. I’m going into the Marines next week.”

“Good luck to you,” Peggy said from the bottom of her heart.

“Thanks,” he answered. “I’ll take whatever I can get.” That struck her as a sensible attitude. But if he was so sensible, why was he joining the Marines?

Because he was a man, so he could. Peggy made speeches and did volunteer work and used all the other substitutes for fighting a middle-aged woman could find. And if she sometimes had a drink or three to blunt the edge of loneliness, she did keep hold of the bottle, not the other way around.

She coped. It was with some astonishment that she realized Herb had been gone almost two months. Even by his standards and those of the government that ran him around, it was a long time to be away.

A couple of days after that thought crossed her mind, a fat manila envelope plastered with stamps was stuck in the mailbox. The postmarks on the stamps were from Reno. The return-address label was from a law firm there. “What the hell?” Peggy said, and carried the envelope and the rest of the mail inside.

The envelope held a sheaf of typed and printed legal papers. Paper-clipped to the front was a note in Herb’s familiar scrawl. I’m sorry, Peggy, it said, but honest to God I think this is for the best. I still like you more than anybody, but I just don’t love you any more. As you’ll see, the house is yours, free and clear. So is a big chunk of the bank account, and so is the car. I’ve got myself an apartment not far from the office. Not great, but it’ll do. Take care. When I get home, I’ll explain it all some more-or you can spit in my eye if you’d rather. Herb.

She numbly flipped through the papers. He’d established legal residence in Nevada. He’d petitioned for and been granted an interlocutory decree. Terms were … pretty much what he’d outlined in the note. They were fair: more than fair, in fact.

It all felt like a boot in the stomach just the same. “Jesus Christ in the foothills!” Peggy yipped. “I’ve been Reno-vated!” Then she started to cry.

RAF fighter-bombers streaked low above the Luftwaffe strip near Philippeville. Machine guns and cannon blazing, they shot up anything they saw. Then, their engines roaring flat out, they pulled tight turns and streaked off to the west no more than a hundred meters off the ground.

Hans-Ulrich Rudel and Albert Dieselhorst huddled in a zigzagging trench alongside the runway. A bullet thumped into the back wall of the trench, half a meter above Hans-Ulrich’s head. He dug his nose even deeper into the dirt than it already was.

When the enemy planes disappeared, Sergeant Dieselhorst said, “You know, I’d rather go to the dentist and get a tooth pulled.” His voice sounded muffled. He hadn’t pulled his face out of the dirt yet, either.

“Without novocaine,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. Cautiously, he did stick up his head. He felt like a turtle coming out of its shell to see if the hawks were gone.

They were, but they’d left something to remember them by. One of the squadron’s Stukas burned in its revetment. Earthen walls and camouflage netting hadn’t saved it. The netting was on fire now, too. A column of greasy black smoke mounted from the dead Ju-87 and blew off toward the Reich on the breeze.

Dieselhorst looked out, too. His forehead and chin had mud on them. So do mine, I bet, Hans-Ulrich thought. He rubbed his nose, which was also bound to be muddy. Dieselhorst gave forth with what good news he could: “It’s not our plane, anyway.”

“No, it isn’t,” Hans-Ulrich agreed. “And the Jabos weren’t carrying bombs-or else they’d already dropped them somewhere else. They didn’t crater the runways. We can fly off them.”

“You’re right. We can.” Dieselhorst sounded less than delighted at the prospect. “But are you sure you still want to? It’s a different world out there these days.”