"The coffee shop's open," said the floor nurse hospitably when the operating room orderly had arrived to wheel Roman's bed away.
"Momma?" called Roman, craning his head around to see her.
"Yes, Ro?" Mirelle went quickly to his side.
"You'll be here when I wake up?" His eyes could barely focus on her.
"Right here," she assured him.
"Okay, then," he mumbled, relaxing again.
"Neither of us had any breakfast, Steve. Let's go eat."
"Any idea how long it'll take?" Steve asked the floor nurse.
She shrugged. "Not long, but I'll page you when he's brought down. Ordinarily he'd be sent to the recovery room a while but as today's Sunday, he'll come down to his room instead. Your husband looks green, Mrs. Martin. You'd better feed him," she added over her shoulder as she walked away.
Mirelle looked at Steve and agreed.
"Come on."
"She needn't have said that." Steve swallowed hard. "Hell, to think that the kid walked down the hill… Oh, God, Mirelle, with a broken arm and that leg wide open."
Mirelle stared at her trembling husband. She pulled him into the elevator and punched the coffee shop floor.
"You're over-reacting badly, Steve. And it's not just Roman. Does it have anything to do with Ralph?" she asked very gently.
His horrified look was all the answer she needed. She steered him into the coffee shop and ordered quickly from the waitress standing at the counter. The woman nodded and gestured towards the empty tables. Mirelle guided Steve to a secluded one by a window.
"You always look that way whenever Ralph's wound is mentioned. Now I know that Ralph couldn't have been so badly wounded, in spite of your mother's tale. So what is the real story?"
Steve took the arrival of coffee as an excuse to delay his answer. He sipped half a cup before he began to talk, but the intensity of that tightly controlled voice startled Mirelle. She'd never seen him this way.
"I'd always wanted a paper route, too, but my mother wouldn't let me have one. She was afraid of what might happen!" Steve's fist came down on the table in frustrated emphasis. "She was always afraid of this happening, or that occurring. And she damned near killed both her sons with her fears."
"She thought she was doing the right thing, Steve," Mirelle said softly, wondering why she was defending her mother-in-law. But Steve sounded so vicious, so totally unlike himself.
"She was. Only she did it the wrong way." Steve shrugged helplessly. "And there were both of us, unprotected when we needed protection the most and not enough sense to know how to get it."
"But, Steve, you must have got over it. You were decorated."
Steve made an impatient, vulgar noise. "So I carried a mortar up a cliff that couldn't have been scaled and pinned some krauts down… in full view of a general, as it happened," he looked at Mirelle and covered her hands with his, "but I wasn't the only guy doing unusual things, and I'd been in combat a long time by then. I'd learned, the hard way, all the things Roman can do now.
"I never told you about breaking my arm, did I? In basic training." He made a disgusted noise deep in his throat and his eyes looked out at some far distant point. "Yeah, I broke my arm and sat there, crying like a baby for my mother! I sat there for nearly four hours until it dawned on me that mother was not going to come help me this time. We were on maneuvers and for all I know I'd be sitting there yet but I had the good luck to be 'captured' by the 'enemy'. And when the medico asked me how long it'd been broken, I was soashamed that I lied, and said I'd knocked myself out in the fall and only just come to before I got captured." There was deep disgust and bitterness in his face when he looked at Mirelle. "No, I could never have done what Roman did this morning: got up in the bitter cold and walked myself home."
"And Ralph?" Mirelle asked gently.
Steve let out a sour laugh. "Ralph got a flesh wound, a lousy little flesh wound in the arm. But he sat down and waited, too. For mother to come succour her little boy. And damned near died of frostbite and pneumonia. He could have walked two miles to the nearest town-we'd occupied it and it was French anyhow - and got help. But he lay there, among the dead, waiting until he was damned near a corpse, too."
Mirelle couldn't think of anything to say to ease Steve's bitterness or reassure him. She'd often thought that Ralph's injury had been minor, just as she'd known that Marian Martin had over-protected her children, but she hadn't realized how seriously the woman's attitude had handicapped her sons. It accounted for Steve's attitude toward injuries of any kind and the self-sufficiency that he'd insisted all three of his children develop. The latter was almost a mania with him.
The waitress appeared with the coffee pitcher and a sympathetic smile, and the second cups of coffee took up more time.
"I'll bet she's forgotten to call us," Steve said finally, anxiously glancing at his watch. "Let's get back to his room." He paid the check and they went.
"He's not down yet," the nurse told them.
"But it's over an hour," Steve said.
"Oh, don't worry, really," she said reassuringly and continued briskly on her rounds.
They had waited another fifteen anxious minutes before Roman was wheeled in. Will Martin, still in his surgical gown, entered right behind him.
"Nasty breaks, but they should heal well," Will said.
"They?" Steve asked.
"Sure, broke both bones in the forearm. I'm a little concerned about that open shin wound. It was mighty cold out there this morning. So I think we'll keep him here at least two days." Then Will caught sight of Steve's expression. "Oh, for God's sake, Steve. I'm not anticipating trouble, but I am a cautious bugger."
"How long before Roman's conscious?" Mirelle asked.
"Oh, he's been round once, but I've ordered sedation, so he won't be with us much today."
"I'll stick around a little while," Mirelle said, throwing her coat over the chair.
"I'll get on back to Mom and Dad," Steve said.
Responsibility flooded back to Mirelle. "Oh, Lord, Steve, and there's no dinner meat defrosted. Nothing ready."
"I'll take everyone out to eat," Steve reassured her.
"Please tell them how sorry I am that their visit's been spoiled."
"Hon, this isn't your fault," Steve said gently.
Will Martin snorted and, waving a hand in farewell, left the room. Steve kissed her, looked down at the still form of his son, and then resolutely he bent and kissed Roman's cheek. He left without a backward glance.
Mirelle yanked the one upholstered chair into a position where she could watch Roman's face and composed herself to wait.
Roman woke a half-hour later, long enough to satisfy himself that his mother was where she'd promised she'd be, and then he dropped off to sleep again. Mirelle waited another hour, thinking that he might not remember his first awakening and believe that she had neglected him. She was about to phone Steve to pick her up when Sylvia Esterhazy peered around the door.
"Up yet?" she asked, her face anxious.
"Not totally," Mirelle said in a soft voice.
Sylvia looked down at the sleeping boy.
"I called your house to thank you for the evening and Steve told me the gay tidings. Imagine that! Walking himself home! Steve's very proud of him. So I decided that hisbravery merited a reward, and brought him some reading matter." Sylvia handed Mirelle a bundle in drug store wrapping.
"Comic books? Did you buy out the store?"
"One each of every title in stock," Sylvia said with a laugh. "I also came to take you home because hell hath broke loose there or I misread the omens."
"Which ones?"
"I don't know, Mir," and Sylvia was suddenly serious. "But Steve sounded as if he were choking on every word he said and he twice covered the phone to speak to someone. Then he asked me if I could pick you up."