Wolver's Reward by Jacqueline Rhoades Read Free Book Online

don't hear that
very often, do you?"
    Other than the name, River hadn't heard much
about World War II, period, so he shrugged. "Not really."
    "Best thing that ever happened to me. Harry
got called up and with the shortage of men, I got a good job. I
found out I was smarter than I looked. Lucky for me, my boss
thought so too. My father managed to get himself run over, by a
beer truck of all things, one night on the way home from the bar. I
moved back in with my mother and sisters, got a promotion and then
another, and moved us out of the old neighborhood. We left our old
life behind right along with the shabby curtains. My sisters stayed
in school and went to things like football games and dances. My
mother started to smile again. Then Harry got himself killed in
Italy."
    She sighed. "Don't get me wrong, I felt bad.
He wasn't a good guy, but he wasn't a bad one, either, and he was
my husband. I kept my vows and I sure didn't want him to die, but I
knew by then that things had changed. I'd changed, and I knew I
wasn't going back to the way I lived before. I was only waiting for
Harry to come home before I told him. The women I met at work and
in the new neighborhood showed me how things could be. Not for me,
maybe, but for my sisters. I used his death benefit to put them
through school. Margie became a nurse and Betty was a teacher," she
said proudly. "They married good men after the war was over. I
stayed with my mother until she died a few years later."
    "So what did you get out of it?" he asked
since it didn't sound like she got much.
    "Oh, son, I got the best of it. I met Paul.
That's who I was thinking of when I stopped for you. I picked him
up just like I did you only he'd just been discharged from the
Army. Things were different back then, but I didn't make a habit of
picking up hitchhikers. There was just something about that
man.
    "I wasn't looking for another husband, but he
was a persistent son of a gun. I fell in love with him, but I
wouldn't marry him. He was a drinker, not a bad one, but he liked
to party now and then, and poker was his favorite game. I'd learned
my lessons the hard way and I swore I'd never take a chance on
learning another of those lessons. I never saw Paul so angry as
when I told him about why I wouldn't marry him. He wasn't mad at my
father and Harry. Oh no, he was mad at me for not telling him
sooner."
    "Much as I thought I knew it all, I learned
another lesson. This one was about love. Paul stopped his wild ways
and never drank another drop. Two years later, I married him. On
our wedding night, he put a big jar by our bedside. It was half
filled with money already and he put what he called his poker and
drinking money in it every week. He filled that jar over and over
and said he was saving it for a big, blowout binge one day. It
became a joke. That jar got filled and emptied for thirty years and
then one day he drives up in this car. He said he'd give me the
world if he could, but it seemed his drinking money didn't go as
far as he thought. All he could manage was this Cadillac and he put
it in my name.
    "I tried to tell him that he'd already given
me the world when he loved me enough to give up the beer in the
first place, but he had some silly notion that I deserved this big,
fancy car. When he passed away, it was already old. Our kids wanted
me to sell it. Buy something new and better." She laughed as if
that was some kind of joke. "As if there could be something
better." Her laughter fled as quickly as it came. "I'm on my way
home from the shop where I took it to see if it could be fixed.
They said the car's on its last legs. It probably is, but I can't
give it up." She glanced over at him and smiled. "You're probably
like my grandson and think I'm an old fool, too."
    "No, ma'am. I get it. Totally. I feel like
that about my motorcycle," River told her. And then, because she
was a stranger and he would never see her again so it didn't really
matter, he told her a bit about his past.
    As