Promises to Keep by Ann Tatlock

together as though forming a bouquet, a keepsake of fragile images of the happy times with Daddy. I wanted to have at least that much of him. Once my bouquet was complete, I would tuck it away in a safe place, just as Tillie suggested, so that nothing and no one could take it away from me.
    The warm sun was tempered by a soothing breeze, and soon I drifted off. I don’t know how long I slept, and I don’t think I dreamed. After a time I was awakened by Wally shaking my shoulder. “Roz, Tillie says you need to come in now.”
    I drew in a deep breath and stretched. “Your hand stinks,” I said.
    He lifted his fingers to his nose. “I washed,” he said with a shrug. “Hard to get the smell of blood out.”
    “Blood? Yuck. I hate you working for the butcher.”
    “How come?”
    “It’s just . . . creepy.”
    Another shrug. “It’s good practice.”
    “For what?”
    “For ’Nam. For killing the Vietcong.”
    I sat up, shook my head. “I hope you’re kidding, Wally. Or else you’re turning really weird.”
    “You want us to win the war, don’t you?”
    I never even thought about the war. It had nothing at all to do with me, and it wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. “Wally?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Do you think Daddy knows where we are?”
    Wally sniffed in disgust. “Who cares about him?”
    “But, I mean, do you think he can find us?”
    “I don’t know.” Wally sat down on the swing beside me. “Probably. He’s crazy but he’s not stupid. I’m sure he’ll figure out we went to live near Gramps.”
    “But do you think he’d ever come after us? You know, try to get us to go home?”
    “Naw, I really don’t think so. He’s probably already found somebody else he can make miserable.”
    “But . . . what would you do if he did? I mean, what if he came around here and tried to talk Mom into going back to Minnesota?”
    Wally looked out at the street, his head turning left and right like a beacon. And then he said easily, as though he were talking about swatting a fly, “If Alan Anthony ever came snooping around here looking for us, I’d kill him.”

chapter

6
    “Wally is something of an angry young man, isn’t he, dear?” Tillie asked.
    Her words reached me from far away, and Mom’s answer too seemed to float through the air a long time before finally coming to light in my mind. “He has good reason to be angry,” Mom replied.
    I’d been vaguely aware of their voices for some time, but I wasn’t sure where they were, and as I struggled to rise up out of the depths of sleep, I wasn’t even sure where I was. I thought at first I was still on the porch with Tillie, but when I opened my eyes I saw I wasn’t on the porch at all but on the couch in the living room.
    Oh yeah, I thought, now I remember. I had settled down with a book to read, but still listless from the fever of the day before, I drifted off to sleep. Today was Sunday, not Saturday, and Mom was on the porch swing with her mending basket, just beyond the open window. Tillie must have followed her out while I was asleep, and now they were talking about Wally, who wasn’t home. He’d gone over to Grandpa’s to cut the grass, as their gardener was on vacation. Even though Gramps was paying him, I still thought it was good of Wally to go on his day off from his butchering job.
    “Pity,” Tillie was saying. “He’d be such a nice boy if he just got rid of the chip on his shoulder.”
    “I’m not sure I’d call it a chip on his shoulder, Tillie,” Mom said mildly. “He’s been through a lot. It hasn’t been easy for him.”
    “I suppose it has to do with his father. Not that it’s any of my business.”
    Mom didn’t respond for a long moment. I rubbed my eyes. I was fully awake now.
    Finally Mom said, “Wally’s father is dead. He was killed by a sniper in Korea while serving with a MASH unit.”
    “Merciful heavens,” Tillie said quietly. “I’m sorry, Janis. I didn’t know.”
    “Of course you didn’t.