A Soldier's Promise. Cynthia Thomason

tea coming?”

      Carrie came into the living room with a tray holding three glasses. She set the tray on a scarred but clean pine coffee table and handed a tumbler to Brenna. Brenna sat on the other end of the sofa and smiled at the faded images of deer frolicking around the frosty outside of the glass.

      “It’s instant,” Carrie said, looking down at Brenna. “Dad said I should learn to make it from real tea bags, but I don’t see why.”

      Mike picked up a glass and took a sip. “I just thought you might like to do things the way your great-grandmother did.”

      Carrie gave him an incredulous look. “Why would I want to do that? Everything was such work back then.”

      He crossed and uncrossed his legs, cleared his throat, took another sip of tea and finally stood. “I’m going to change out of this uniform.”

      “Good idea, Dad,” Carrie said. “You have grease on your shirt.”

      “Goes with the job,” he said and headed toward the hallway off the living room. “I’ll just be in there. You ladies talk all you want.”

      A few seconds later, Brenna heard a door close. Carrie sat in the spot vacated by her father and leaned close. “Do you see how awful it is out here, Miss Sullivan?” she said, keeping her voice low.

      Brenna didn’t want to put herself in the middle of any family dispute. Besides, she truly didn’t find Carrie’s living conditions to be “awful.” Remote, yes, especially for a teen who was still more than a year away from getting her driver’s license.

      “I know it’s hard to believe,” Carrie said, “but my father really likes it out here. He keeps talking about nature and fresh air until I just want to scream. Spiders and mice are nature, too, you know.”

      Brenna smiled. “Your cabin is really only about three or four miles out of town,” she said. “I’ll bet some of the people in town have spiders, too.”

      “I suppose, but we might as well be a hundred miles away for all the times I get to go to the stores and do fun stuff.”

      “Your dad never takes you shopping?”

      “Oh, sure, to the grocery and the hardware store.” She grimaced. “I guess that’s his idea of fun. And any time I complain he just tells me that we have all we need.”

      Brenna doubted that statement. “Other than some specialty stores, gift shops and local antique dealers, we don’t have much. But there are malls in Libertyville, Athens and Augusta.”

      “Dad has taken me to those a couple of times,” Carrie admitted.

      Poor deprived child...

      “But this dumb town is nothing like California, where I used to live. Out there we had tons of cool places to go, outlets and twenty-four-screen movie theaters.”

      Brenna understood that moves required periods of adjustments. Some people needed a lot of time to get used to a new environment, whereas others just seemed to fit in almost instantly. Brenna had been like that when she moved to Mount Union. The people who lived here, the town itself, offered much of what she wanted, the closeness of a community along with the privacy she needed, and especially a job she appreciated for many reasons. The students came from good, mostly two-parent families and didn’t arrive at class with heartbreaking baggage every day. Brenna had had too much experience trying to deal with students’ sad home lives, and she appreciated Mount Union’s solid family values immediately.

      For four years now she had done an admirable job in the classroom while maintaining the independence and separation she expected in a town like Mount Union. Okay, maybe she’d never been voted teacher of the year like Diana, but no one had ever complained about the job she did. Now here she was sitting in a backwoods cabin listening to a morose, lonely girl complain about the place Brenna had come to love. And she didn’t know how she was going to handle it.

      So she took a stab at counseling even though she knew it wasn’t her strong suit. “You know, Carrie, maybe you should give Mount Union a chance. You’ve only been here a few months, right?”

      The girl slumped down in her seat. “Three long, miserable months. It feels like ten years.”

      “Once you make some friends...”

      She sat upright. “Friends? How can I make friends when I’m not allowed to leave this—” she stared around the room as if she were watching a horror movie “—this prison.” She grabbed Brenna’s hand. “Talk to my dad, will you, Miss Sullivan? Tell him to cut me some slack. He doesn’t know anything about being a father.”

      “I’m sure that’s not true. He seems like a nice—”

      “You don’t understand. Not only does my dad not know anything about being a dad, he doesn’t even know me. You ask him any question about me—what music I like, what movies I’ve seen. Heck, ask him my favorite color—he won’t know. He never tried to know me. Not when I was growing up and especially not now.”

      The girl was close to tears. Brenna patted her hand. “What are you talking about? Why wouldn’t your dad know you?”

      “He was in the army the whole time I was a kid. He hardly ever came home, and if he did, he stayed a couple of weeks and left again. He was always in Afghanistan or Iraq or someplace.” Her eyes grew moist. “That’s not the way a family’s supposed to be, is it, Miss Sullivan?”

      Brenna had no idea how to answer. Her own family situation had been very different from Carrie’s. Brenna’s father never kept a job for more than a few weeks at a time, so he was home too much. Because of her dad’s inability to find steady work, Brenna hadn’t experienced stability in her life, either, for reasons very unlike Carrie’s.

      “He didn’t have to be in the army all that time,” Carrie continued. “He wanted to be. It’s like he forgot he had a family.”

      Agreeing with Carrie would mean betraying Mike, a man Brenna suspected was trying in his own way to make up for lost time. To disagree with Carrie would only alienate a young girl who was opening up about her feelings. After a moment Brenna said, “You know times of war are hard on everyone, the soldiers and their families.”

      “Yeah, well, maybe. My mom just told me to appreciate the times Dad was home. But truthfully, the two of us learned to get along without him just fine. We didn’t need him.” She stared down at her lap. “At least until...”

      “Until what?” Brenna asked.

      She remained silent for several seconds, and then a voice, soft and low, came from the hallway. “Until her mother died,” Mike said.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      MIKE’S GUT FELT as if it had just been slammed with a cinder block. Why had he said that? Five minutes ago, he’d gone into his bedroom to shed his dirty uniform and put on shorts and a T-shirt. He’d intended to walk Miss Busybody out the door to her car and wave goodbye. Yet, he just blurted out the one fact that Brenna could use to explain the dysfunction in his relationship with his daughter. No wonder Carrie was sitting on the sofa slack-jawed and wide-eyed.

      “Dad, I can’t believe you told Miss Sullivan about that,” his confused daughter said. “I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about Mom.”

      “I said until we knew people better.” His defense sounded weak, but he had advised his daughter that the tragedy they’d suffered was best kept secret until they’d settled into their new town and started over. He didn’t think his daughter needed the well-intended sympathies of people who were practically strangers. And he knew he didn’t.

      Well, he couldn’t take the revelation back now. And in a way, he was relieved Brenna knew. This nosy home ec teacher had worked pretty hard the past few days to find out what was going on with him and Carrie—lying and snooping and telling him what she intended to do about his daughter—maybe she had earned