Earlier in the week, if the weather allowed, he and his father would take canoes to the James River and make their way up to the banks of the Berkeley Plantation, which argued that it, and not Plymouth, was the site of the first Thanksgiving. Preceding the more well-known location by a year and a half.
This is the first time he’d be missing it.
“It will definitely be different this year,” William lamented. “Thanksgiving. Christmas. New Year’s Eve. My mother will cry. Maybe my sisters. Not my dad. He’ll pretend to be strong.”
“Mine too,” Tom added. “I’m their only child. I don’t envy my mom having to be alone with my dad. He’s…he’s got a very strong personality.”
“So it seems. He doesn’t hit her, does he?” Tom could see the alarm on William’s face as moonlight streamed over his bed.
“No. Nothing like that. Never. But when he’s around, it’s like he sucks up all the air in the room and no one else has the chance to breathe.” He looked down and shook his head. “That probably doesn’t make any sense.”
“It makes perfect sense.”
“I just hope someday when I get married, I don’t turn into that. The kind of girl I’d like is one who smiles all the time. And I would never want to be the reason to take that away from her.”
William grinned. “You know, Tom, that there are some very specific and time-honored ways of keeping a perpetual smile on your girl’s face.”
Tom tossed his last pillow at William’s head. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“You’re so easy, Powell. You walk right into these things. No guile at all.” William laughed quietly, though they’d learned that the Browns were hard of hearing at their age and if John’s snoring didn’t keep them up, surely William’s laughter wouldn’t.
And it was so good to finally hear it.
“I just mean that I’d like to have a wife who finds delight in things. Who comes to the dinner table with stories about her day and has an interest in mine. Give and take. I don’t want to rob her of all that makes her what I fell in love with in the first place.”
William tipped an imaginary hat on his head. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you a Thoroughly Modern Man.”
Tom shrugged. “Right shouldn’t be modern. It’s just…right.” He couldn’t find a better word for it.
“It shouldn’t. But all too often, it is.”
“What about you?” Tom was eager to turn the tables. “I saw the smile on your face when you found that note in your sock from John’s sister. Maybe there’s something there. If you play your cards right, he could be your brother-in-law someday.”
William shook his head, and his voice took on a tone that Tom didn’t quite understand. “It’s not like that. First of all, you can’t fall in love through letters.”
Tom paused to consider this and wasn’t sure he agreed. His weekend with that girl long ago had shown him that although being with a girl physically had its delights, what he craved was a connection of the heart. Wouldn’t that make the physical part even better? And what more ideal way was there to make sure that you were really getting to know a girl than through a letter? Where the distraction of her beauty didn’t take away from the words you were sharing.
But he didn’t say that to William. Despite having a few years on them, John and William liked to tease him for his simplistic views about such things.
“What is the second thing?” he asked instead.
“What second thing?” said William.
“You said, ‘First of all, you can’t fall in love through letters.’”
He didn’t speak for what felt like a long time. If William hadn’t been sitting up, Tom might have thought he’d fallen asleep. And maybe he had. His shoulders were hunched over. Tom was about to ask again, when he heard William exhale a long breath.
“It’s not like that for me.”
“What do you mean? You don’t like letters?”
William paused again. “Not letters. Girls.”
It took Tom a minute to think about that. Did that mean what he thought it might? He’d heard about men like that, but he’d never met one in person.
He might have misunderstood. But if he hadn’t, he didn’t want to worry William that it made any difference in their friendship. It was his turn to say something.
“You don’t like…girls?”
William’s shoulders were still hunched, but he shook his head.
“Not in the way you’d expect.”
Tom felt a pit in his stomach. Not so much at the revelation. William was William. Loyal. Smart. And a heck of a paratrooper. It didn’t change all that. But he couldn’t imagine the difficulty William must have to encounter at every turn. What a secret to carry. Tom had so many questions, but William looked fragile in the moonlight, a shell of the robust man that Tom knew him to be. Maybe the best approach for now was to act like he always did.
Tom cleared his throat and forced his voice to sound light. “Dibs on your sock girl, then. Looks like she’s wasted on you.”
William turned his head to him, and his smile told Tom that he’d said just the right thing.
“In your dreams, Professor. She’s probably a dish. She’d be wasted on your ugly mug too.”
“You don’t know that.”
William shrugged. “She wrote a pretty good letter, though. Most girls—if they wrote at all—would have stuck to the kind of basics that you exchange on a first meeting. Not Margaret Beck. Heart and soul, that one. Hard to believe she’s related to that blockhead over there sawing logs. You’d think he was a lumberjack.”
Tom pointed to the box by the foot of John’s bed. He’d received another package today and had promised to open it after dinner, but training had been especially difficult. Four jumps and long walks back through fields, followed by endless training on the makeshift shooting range. He’d fallen asleep as soon as they got upstairs. His boots sat untied on his feet.
“You think there’s more socks in there from the girls?”
“If there is, I’m claiming the one with the red border again. Maybe there’s another letter in it.”
“You’re not going to share?”
“Every man for himself. Get your own pen pal. But I will let you read anything she sends.”
“Whatever you say. Maybe I’ll start writing one of your sisters.”
“Too late. They’re both engaged. Mom’s over the moon. Double wedding planned for after the new year. You missed your chance, buddy. Though I’d trade you any day for the drip my oldest sister is going to marry.”
The moon had shifted since they first started talking, and its light rested now on the package as the rest of the room sat in silhouette.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked William.
Tom shook his head. “We can’t. It has John’s name on it.”
“What, are you getting lawyerly on me now? You know we share all the goods anyway. John won’t mind. Besides, we have an early day. There won’t be time to properly appreciate it if we wait.”