Susan Wiggs - The Summer Hideaway

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Reply to godfrey@georgebellamy.com

Senior accomplished gentleman seeks end-of-life nursing care, full-time, days and nights.

Qualifications:

• age twenty-five to thirty-five
• female (not negotiable)
• must have a positive attitude and a sense of adventure
• must love children of all ages
• must be open to relocation
• no emotional baggage
• nursing skills and valid state certification a plus

Benefits:

• medical, dental, vision, 401(k)
• weekly paychecks with direct deposit

Rustic accommodations provided on Willow Lake in the Catskills Wilderness.

Korengal Valley, Kunar province, Afghanistan

H is breakfast consisted of shoestring potatoes that actually did look and taste like shoestrings, along with reconstituted eggs, staring up at him from a compartmentalized tray in the noisy chow hall. His cup was full of a coffeelike substance, lightened by a whitish powder.

At the end of a two-year tour of duty, Ross Bellamy had a hard time looking at morning chow. Hed reached his limit. Fortunately for him, this was his last day of deployment. It seemed like any other daytedious, yet tense with the constant and ominous hum of imminent threat. Radio static crackled along with the sound of clacking utensils, so familiar to him by now that he barely heard it. At a comm station, an ops guy for the Dustoff unit was on alert, awaiting the next call for a medical evacuation.

There was always a next call. An air medic crew like Rosss faced them daily, even hourly.

When the walkie-talkie clipped to his pocket went off, he put aside the mess without a second glance. The call was a signal for the on-duty crew to drop everythinga fork poised to carry a morsel of mystery meat to a mouth. A game of Spades, even if you were winning. A letter to a sweetheart, chopped off in the middle of a sentence that might never be finished. A dream of home in the head of someone dead asleep. A guy in the middle of saying a prayer, or one with only half his face shaved.

The medevac units prided themselves on their reaction timefive or six minutes from call to launch. Men and women burst into action, still chewing food or drying off from the shower as they fell into roles as hard and familiar as their steel-toed boots.

Ross gritted his teeth, wondering what the day had in store for him, and hoping hed make it through without getting himself killed. He needed this discharge, and he needed it now. Back home, his grandfather was sickhad been sick for a while, and Ross suspected it was a lot more serious than the family let on. It was hard to imagine his grandfather sick. Granddad had always been larger-than-life, from his passion for travel to his trademark belly laugh, the one that could make a whole roomful of people smile. He was more than a grandparent to Ross. Circumstances in his youth had drawn the two of them close in a bond that defined their relationship even now.

On impulse, he grabbed his grandfathers most recent letter and stuck it into the breast pocket of his flight jacket, next to his heart. The fact that hed even felt the urge to do so made him feel a gut-twist of worry.

Lets go, Leroy, said Nemo, the units crew chief. Then, as he always did, he sang the first few lines of Get Up Offa That Thang.

In the convoluted way of the army, Ross had been given the nickname Leroy. It had started when some of the platoon had learned a littleway too littleabout his silver-spoon-in-mouth background. The fancy schools, the Ivy League education, the socially prominent family, had all made him fodder for teasing. Nemo had dubbed him Little Lord Fauntleroy. That had been shortened to Leroy, and the name had stuck.

Im on it, Ross said, striding toward the helipad. He and Ranger would be piloting the bird today.

Good luck with the FNG.