“You’re here.”
* * *
The door swung open and Gladys walked in. The desk still stood between Margaret and Tom, but they’d been too impatient to move around it. Tom had wrapped his arms around her shoulders and she felt his deep, soulful kiss all the way down to her toes. Margaret—not pulling away from him—waved Gladys away. But she should have known it was an impossibility.
“It’s all arranged, doll!”
Tom turned around and put his hand out.
“Tom Powell.”
“Gladys Sievers.”
Of course, she’d insisted that Oliver keep his name and she keep hers.
“Nice to meet you, Gladys.”
“If you hurt her, I’ll put a bullet in you since the Germans missed.”
“Gladys!”
“Margaret, if he’s going to become a part of our little enclave, he’d better get to know me as I am right now.”
“She’s kidding,” Margaret assured him.
Gladys folded her arms. “I’m not.”
Tom turned back to Margaret. “I’m glad you have such fierce friends. But I promise, Gladys,” he said over his shoulder. “You can keep your gun holstered. You won’t need it.”
Gladys grinned and threw her arms around him. “Welcome to the family.”
She handed Margaret a box. “Dottie pulled this together for you. Your best dress, some stockings, and some shoes. I’m on hair and makeup duty. And, Tom, there are some things here for you too. Those clothes Margaret’s dad lent you are all wrong, so Dottie guessed your size and bought something else.”
“Those are my dad’s clothes? I thought they looked strangely familiar.”
Tom looked down and grinned. “Yeah. Your mom found something he hadn’t worn for a while. They don’t quite fit.”
Gladys rubbed her hand down his arm and grinned. “You can say that again. The army put some muscles on you.”
“Why the clothes?” asked Margaret.
“Why, you’re going out on the town, doll. You and Tom. You’re going out for a nice steak dinner at Delmonico’s, courtesy of George and Dottie. And if you want to stay in the city…”
“Gladys!”
“I’m just saying. You have a lot of catching up to do.”
Tom grinned and shook his head. “I just had a good start with her parents. I’ll have Margaret home at a respectable hour.”
Gladys rolled her eyes. “Respectability is overrated.”
“Not in my book.”
“Oh, geez,” she huffed. “You two squares can have each other.”
Margaret ushered Tom into an empty office and then she returned to Gladys’s—hers, once five o’clock hit—and changed into the clothes that Dottie had so perfectly selected.
When they stepped into the hallway, Gladys whistled.
“Well, aren’t you two the king and queen of the dance?”
Margaret looked down and blushed. She was wearing a pair of new shoes that her dad had made and her mother had embroidered. They had been set aside to put in the display window, but now they had a better purpose.
They walked out, hand in hand, with Gladys leading. Just outside the Navy Yard, Dottie’s new car—this one a buttery yellow—glistened with newly washed sparkle. On the back, tin cans were strung along the fender and a hand-lettered sign read:
JUST MET.
Epilogue
June 1949
Washington, DC, was festooned with red, white, and blue banners that celebrated the fifth anniversary of D-Day. It was the perfect place to meet. George and Dottie came in from Brooklyn and Tom, Margaret, her parents, and the twins came up from Richmond. And William’s family already lived across the Potomac in Arlington.
The Navy Yard had seen the decline that they’d expected at the end of the war, and Brooklyn in general had suffered. Margaret’s job had been eliminated almost as soon as it began and Tom’s yearning for the beauty of Virginia had started to turn her head toward that as a possibility.
They’d originally made the trip to Mount Airy within a week of his return from Europe to meet his parents, and Margaret found that, if anything, his words had not done it justice. Virginia was verdant with trees, lush canopies of them shading out the sky on one-lane back roads. And the Chickahominy River offered a serenity that Margaret didn’t even know existed. It was bliss to sit barefoot by its shores and let the little waves lap over her toes.
Birds chirped instead of car horns, and she finally knew what she wanted—some time away from the city.
She said yes when Tom proposed a few months after he’d returned and shortly after that, they bought a little house of their own between Mount Airy and Richmond. Mr. Powell’s health had declined while Tom was gone, and Tom started taking over the management of the two-hundred-acre family farm. His father would never admit it, but he was glad that Tom had left the military after the war.
Tom didn’t need words, though. His father had placed their wedding picture in the very middle of the mantel.
Margaret’s parents had fallen in love with the area when they came to visit and wanted nothing more than to be with their daughter and her family. They’d opened a shoe shop in the fashionable part of Broad Street, and the ladies of Richmond went crazy for them. They gave Margaret a third ownership, and she and her mother embroidered shoes during porch swing visits.
The store was called Beck & Daughter.
When they were old enough, Margaret’s twins, Dorothy and Willa, would help out. Just as John and Margaret had.
“Balloons!” Willa shouted when the festivities on the mall began. Tom bought four of them. Two for his daughters and two for Joanna and little Georgie.
“Say thank you to Uncle Tom,” Dottie instructed her children.
“Thank you, Uncle Tom,” they said in unison.
William’s mother smiled. “I can’t believe how much they’re all growing. It seems like every time I see them, they’re each six inches taller.” She fidgeted with the little glass pendant on her necklace, filled with the other half of the dirt that Tom had brought back from Normandy.
Margaret patted her girls’ heads. “Willa eats peaches as if we’ll run out. Just like her father. And Dorothy could win a milk-drinking contest if there was one.”
“Guess who!” Margaret felt hands cover her eyes.
She turned around. “Gladys! What are you doing here? And, Oliver! I thought you were heading to Zurich soon.”
Gladys shrugged. “Oliver prefers political reporting to banking stories. He’s accepted an assignment here in DC. And I’m going to march into the office of the editor at the Washington Post and demand that he hire me too.”
Nothing had changed.
“I can’t believe it. How did you know where to find us?”
Gladys and Tom exchanged a look. “Oh, I know someone who knows how to keep a secret.”
Dottie and Margaret hugged her, squeezing her neck tight. “I’m so happy to see you,” Margaret said. “Gosh, I can’t believe we’ll get to do this more often.”
Gladys’s articles about the plights of women around the world had been a mere ripple in the London Times, but she’d always said that a ripple preceded a wave and the right kind of wave was a tsunami.