Bombs Away Read Free Page A

windshield a single sheet of glass, not two divided and held in place by a strip of chromed metal. She liked that. She liked the automatic transmission, too. She could drive a stick—who couldn’t?—but she didn’t believe in working any harder than you had to.
    Keeping her eye on the rear-view mirror to watch for kids on bikes or silly dogs or grownups who weren’t paying attention, she backed out into the street. The cobbler’s was only a few blocks away.
    The shop window had a shoe and a cobbler’s small hammer painted on it, and a legend: FAYVL TABAKMAN—COBBLER. REPAIRS & RESOLING. Under the shoe was another legend in smaller letters from an alphabet Marian couldn’t read. She supposed it said the same thing in Yiddish, but it might have been Russian or Armenian or Greek for all she could prove.
    Inside, the shop smelled of the cheap cigars Tabakman smoked. One was in his mouth. He was about fifty, skinny, with a graying mustache. He wore a cloth cap and short sleeves. A number was tattooed on his arm. He knew more about horror than most people who lived in America.
    What he knew, though, he didn’t peddle. He just touched the brim of his old-fashioned cap and said, “Good morning, Mrs. Staley. Hello, little girl.” He had an accent, but not a thick one. If he’d learned English since the war, he’d done a bang-up job.
    “My name is Linda!” Linda said.
    “Hello, Linda,” Tabakman said gravely. “I had a little girl about your age.”
    “You
had
one?” Linda caught the past tense. “What happened? Did you lose her?”
    “Yes. I lost her.” Behind gold-rimmed glasses, the cobbler’s eyes were a million miles and a million years away. With an effort, he came back to the here-and-now. “Both pairs you left are ready to take home, Mrs. Staley. If you want to see them…”
    “I’m sure they’re great,” Marian said. He showed them to her anyway. He did fine, neat work; you could hardly see where the half-sole ended and the older leather picked up. Both pairs together came to seventy-five cents. She gave him a dollar and waved away the change.
    “You are very kind,” he murmured, touching his cap again. “Have a happy New Year, both of you.”
    Marian only shrugged. She knew the tip wouldn’t blot out the memories Linda had stirred up. It was what she could do, though, so she did it.
    The wide aisles and abundant food at the supermarket made her smile. Riding in the welded-wire shopping cart made Linda smile. The prices…The prices made Marian wish she were on a military base. But Bill had been a bookkeeper for Boeing till the new war sucked him back into uniform. They’d bought the house with the idea that they’d keep it for a long time. Trying to do that on military pay wasn’t easy, but Marian had made it work so far.
    She bought ground chuck instead of ground round, margarine instead of butter, and pot roast instead of steak. If it came to beef hearts and chicken giblets and lots of macaroni and cheese, then it did, that was all. She’d eaten that kind of stuff as a little girl during the Depression. She could do it again if she had to. So far, she hadn’t had to.
    She splurged a little—a whole nickel—on a Hershey bar for Linda. After a moment fighting temptation, she lost and spent another nickel on one for herself, too. When she spread her bread with something that tasted like motor oil, she could look back on the chocolate and smile.
    When they got home, she took Linda inside first with a stern, “Now you stay here till I finish bringing in the groceries, okay?”
    “Yes, Mommy,” Linda said. If she messed that one up, her Teddy bear spent the night on a high shelf and she had to sleep without it. That had happened only a couple of weeks earlier, so the tragic memory was still fresh.
    Marian hated carrying shopping bags in the rain. The miserable things turned to library paste and fell apart as soon as water touched them. Chasing escaped cans down the driveway wasn’t her