May 1940

Thomas Wesley was a quiet man by nature. He used his words sparingly, but when he spoke, he was heard clearly. He had a steady hand and cool eyes, a reputation as a stable man who worked tirelessly to ease the suffering of the sick in his care. All of these qualities made him an excellent surgeon, respected by both his fellow doctors and his patients, but none of these qualities helped him think of a thing when sitting across the dinner table from his son.

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Abbey had been gone for five years, yet there were still nights when Thomas rolled over in his sleep and reached for her only to be confused by her absence, still moments when his grief was this tangible thing that swelled in his throat and robbed him of his breath. His Abbey had been gone for five years, yet there seemed to be no end for his mourning.

He met Abigail while working at the veteran’s hospital in Philadelphia in the fall of 1919, just weeks after his return from the trenches of France. She served coffee and apple pie at her family’s shop on the corner and she quickly became the brightest point in his day. With her sparkling hazel eyes and pale pink lips that always seemed to be pulled back into a grin, she was the perfect antidote to his days spent elbow deep in blood and gore, his days spent holding saws against the flesh of men who had survived the horrors of warfare abroad, only to lose their limbs to infections in hospitals at home.

It took him weeks to work up the courage to ask her on a date, and she accepted readily. She confessed over dinner that she had been waiting for him to ask her out since the first time he’d sat down in her section. He touched her hand across the table and said he hoped it was worth the wait. They married three weeks later.

After his discharge from the Army medical corps, they lived in a tiny apartment near the hospital where continued working as a surgeon. After the first year, Abbey became a little frantic as she made no secret of her desire for children. All of her sisters had become pregnant immediately after marriage, so she turned to the church, lighting a candle with a quick little prayer everyday on her way to her family’s diner, where she continued to work part time to keep herself busy while she waited to be blessed with a child.

Finally, after three years, she found herself with child. They were on top of the world. Abbey stayed home, spending her days readying the second bedroom of their apartment into a nursery. Despite their difficulties with conceiving, the pregnancy went by breezily. Thomas recalled many nights of lying next to her as she slept, his hands resting on top of hers on her rounded stomach, feeling the gentle movements of their child inside of her. He could not wait to become a father, but even more than that, he could not wait to watch her as a mother. Just as medicine was his calling, motherhood was hers.

James William Wesley was born a hale and healthy in December of 1922, and Thomas and Abbey focused on that, focused on their healthy son instead of the complications that rendered Abbey unable to carry further children. They were a happy family, a loving husband and wife with a bright, cheerful boy, and then out of the blue, just before James’s thirteenth birthday, Abbey discovered she was again pregnant.

From the very beginning, Thomas had a bad feeling about his wife’s state. She laughed at his concerns, saying that God was answering their prayers, but from the beginning she was confined to bed. Twice, Abbey began bleeding and he was sure she was losing the baby, and twice she recovered, apparently unscathed.

James was attentive, often bringing her chocolates from the candy shop he passed on his way home from school, or making her tea and sitting on a chair next to her bed as he completed his homework assignments. He was the one who found her slumped forward in bed with her chin resting against her chest, a fashion quarterly open in her lap. They later determined that she had been bleeding internally for days, suffering in silence, likely believing that her agony was just another part of an already difficult pregnancy.

By the time a neighbor who had heard James’s shouts for help fetched Thomas from the hospital, it was already too late. A doctor deemed it necessary to attempt an emergency Caesarean surgery to attempt to save the life of the child; though even through the misty clouds of shock Thomas knew it was futile. The baby, another boy, lived for less than two hours.

The baby was buried next to his mother in an impossibly small coffin as Thomas and James watched on in silent, dull shock, neither having had the ability to fully process the magnitude of what had happened. It seemed as if one minute she had been there, and the next she was gone.

When he was offered the job in the small town of Hamilton as a general practitioner of medicine, he accepted after little consideration. It would do them good to get out of the city, he believed. As a small town doctor, his working hours would be less demanding, less erratic, which would mean less time that James would eat his meals alone.

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Thomas sipped at his tea thoughtfully, watching as James paged through a French text book. He was very nearly a man now, with his graduation just weeks away, and his leaving for school in New York just a handful more weeks after that. In these times he had no choice to think of the family dinners of years before, with his beloved wife sitting at his side, bubbling with enough life to lead a thousand conversations. There had never been drawn out quiet dinners then.

He cleared his throat after a moment. “Are you going to the Prom?”

James looked up from his book, surprised. “What?”

“I heard that the Prom is coming up,” Thomas said. “Will you be attending?”

James jerked his shoulder and turned his eyes back to his book. “I might. It depends.”

“It depends on what?” Thomas asked.

James looked up again. “It just depends.”

“Do you have a date?”

James laughed. “No.”

“Oh.” Thomas frowned and sipped at his drink again. They fell into silence again, the only sounds being the gentle scrape of paper whenever James turned a page of his book and the quiet clink of silverware against china as they ate. It’s times like these that he missed his wife—not just because his love was gone, but because he had zero idea of how to talk to his own son.

It was hard to decide when to push and when to let the boy be. His excellent grades had earned him a spot at Columbia University, so he had no room to complain about the young man’s school work. James seemed to be well liked at school, according to the often-chatty teachers that were patients, and had captained the newly formed Hamilton High School basketball team the year before. Yet, at home, he was quiet, with sadness behind his eyes that worried him.

After dinner, James carried both of their dishes to the sink, running water over them briefly so that they wouldn’t be too crusty in the morning for Eleanor, the woman who had been tending to their house since their move to Hamilton. She managed the laundry, kept the pantry stocked, and picked up the odd jobs that fell between the cracks of a household that lacked a wife and mother.

James glanced at his watch and set his book back on the table. “May I please borrow the car?”

“Where are you off to on a school night?” Thomas asked, even as he pulled his keys from his pocket and tossed them.

James caught them one handed. “I am meeting Matilda O’Malley to help her with French.”

Thomas glanced at the French textbook on the table, knowing full well that James had not elected to take additional French classes this year, instead taking an addition course in anatomy. He smiled knowingly after a moment. “Why don’t you ask Matilda to the Prom?”

James looked at his father, momentarily horrified, before turning a bright pink. “I won’t be late,” he muttered as he rushed out of the room. Thomas waited until he heard the front door slam shut before laughing quietly. So that was the way the wind was blowing these days.

Thomas put a kettle on for tea, tided the kitchen while he waited, and retired to his office. He turned on the radio and picked up the newspaper Eleanor left next to his favored armchair everyday, frowning at the further news of Hitler’s invasion of Brussels. He was grateful of the United States’ lack of involvement in the latest war in Europe, and hoped that it would remain that way for the sake of his son. He wished that James might go to college without incident, without having to experience the horrors of war that Thomas experienced at too young an age.

James drove along searching for an open spot along Main Street. It was growing more difficult every day, as the weather turned warmer, the good people of Hamilton came out of the homes they had burrowed in over the winter, flocking to town for scoops of ice cream and root beer floats from Lawry’s, walks along the tree lined roads. It had been a particularly frigid winter, which only made the warm spring more pleasurable.

After he had parked the Ford coupe his father had bought just a few short months ago, he made his way down the busy street, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, lost in thought. His father had caught him off guard with his suggestion to ask Matilda to the prom. That was the very thing he had planned to do that night.

They had been friends since that smoldering summer when they had walked into town together. Those first few years, she was akin to the sister he never had, or at least he convinced himself as such. He often walked her home from school, even took her to the cinema a few times when there was a show they both wanted to see. He became a fixture at the O’Malley house, often being invited over for dinner when his father had to work late. He was still good friends with Michael, as well, which kept most from raising their eyebrows concerning the close friendship that he and Matilda carried on.

Then last year, everything changed.

She had campaigned for months, but finally her parents had granted her permission to travel to Baltimore for the summer to study at the Baltimore Ballet Conservatory, given she would stay with her aunt and uncle who lived in the city. She had left shortly after the completion of her ninth year of school, and returned old weeks prior to the beginning of her tenth. They had written each other frequently that summer, her raving about her classes under a former prima ballerina from London. He wrote of their mutual acquaintances in Hamilton, a mix of local gossip and events that kept her from feeling too terribly homesick.

She returned that August, and her family celebrated her return with a small picnic. He remembered clearly walking up to her house the afternoon of the picnic, he remembered when she first spotted him. She ran barefooted across the yard, her pale green dress billowing behind her. She threw her arms around his neck in a giggling hug. “I missed you most of all,” she whispered, her warm breath tickling his ear.

His reaction had been immediate and precisely the reaction you didn’t have for a sister. There was no accounting how three months had changed so much, but nonetheless, things were most definitely different between them, even if Matilda hadn’t seemed to notice.

He had made many excuses over the past year to spend time with Matilda, running into her as she left her ballet lessons on his way to the store, when it was rare that he ever needed anything at all. He would walk her home from school, even when he needed to be back at school not long after for basketball practice. And when she had complained of struggling with her French class he dusted off his text book and dug out his old notes so he would be ready to help.

James arrived at the library first, scoping out a table farthest from the hissing librarian that got agitated whenever her extraordinary hearing picked up the sound of human voices. All too often, he and Matilda lost focus on conjugating irregular verbs and got going on some other topic—anything from his anticipation of college to her nerves over her upcoming recital.

It wasn’t long after he had settled that Matilda was rushing up to the table on a cloud of infectious energy. “Bonjour,” she said brightly, unloading her bags on the floor next to her chair. She wore a pleated skirt and pale yellow cardigan sweater, but her hair was pulled into a tight bun, indicative of the excessive amount of time she spent in the ballet studio.

“Salut,” James said with a slight smile. “Comment allez-vous?” As the scent of lavender registered in his consciousness, he made up his mind once and for all.

“Ca va bein,” Matilda said brightly. “Sorry I’m late. Have you asked anyone to Prom yet?”

James eyes widened at the sudden change of topic, and he laughed nervously. “Not exactly, not yet.”

“Well, you’d better hurry up,” Matilda urged, sliding into her chair and leaning forward with a big smile. “Because you have to go, and you have to save me a dance.”

“What?” he asked in confusion.

“You’ll have to save me a dance,” Matilda repeated, practically vibrating in the chair next to him. “Robert Sullivan just asked if I would be his date.”

James’s baffled smile remained frozen on his face. “What?”

“He just asked me,” Matilda said, pulling out her French book and flipping open through the pages. James stared, transfixed, at her trembling hands. He could hear the excitement in her trembling voice, and he felt ice settle in the pit of his belly. “Robert Sullivan?” He thought of his classmate, a popular football player who displayed a special sort of ignorance of basic grammar in their mutual English class.

“He was waiting for me after rehearsal,” Matilda continued, oblivious to James’s reaction. “He actually offered me a ride home, and when I told him I was coming here, he walked with me. He was so sweet.”

“Robert Sullivan asked you to the Prom?” James repeated.

“Yes,” Matilda said, her head tilting at the funny, pinched look on his face. “You, sir, had better save me a dance.

James took a moment, looking down at the table as he swallowed the lump that had formed in his throat. So much for that brilliant plan, he thought. “Of course. Now, do you want to go over your assignments first?”

James took Rachel Thomas to the Prom, clumsily danced with her all night, and ducked out early before he could be held to the promised dance with Matilda. He kissed Rachel underneath the oak tree in her front yard, and liked her enough to date her through the summer, even though they both knew that things were likely to end shortly after his relocation to Columbia.

Even though he wasn’t terribly attracted to Rachel, she was a kind girl and seemed to enjoy his company, and he needed someone new to take to the cinema, because it wasn’t long before Matilda was going steady with good ol’ Robert Sullivan.