A Whisper of Smoke by Angela Hoke

Author:Angela Hoke [Hoke, Angela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-01-24T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14: Armed Services Harbingers of Death

I waited under the big silver oak, spinning in leisurely circles in the tire swing. Calvin sounded tense last night on the phone, and I wondered what was bothering him. I hoped that he would tell me about it on our ride today, but I never could predict when Calvin was going to be in a sharing mood.

As I grew dizzy by the spinning tree limbs, I thought of how I couldn’t have gotten through the past few weeks without Calvin. Breaking up with Chip after we had been together for two and a half years had been very difficult, probably the most difficult thing I’d ever done. He was my first boyfriend, and after Calvin, only the second boy I’d ever kissed. And I had given myself to him in ways that still made me blush. We had shared intimacies that inspired in me overwhelming passion and crippling guilt, simultaneously and with equal force.

For the first week or two, I had not been able to eat, and had craved sleep like a drug. I sought oblivion to flee the pain, only barely resisting the urge to use bourbon or vodka to aid in my escape. Calvin had spent at least an hour with me every night that first week, apparently worried that I would do something stupid. He had all kinds of pretenses for coming over, but the one that seemed to have the most practical use was his claim that he wanted to tutor me in algebra.

At first, the tutoring was not very effective because I couldn’t concentrate. To his credit, he was really trying to teach me. So he grew frustrated when I couldn’t get the simplest concepts right. He was patient, though, and by the second week, I was beginning to come out of my fog when I was with him. And I was grateful that he was so annoyingly persistent.

For the hour that we were together, my mood would lift as Chip receded from my thoughts. But when Calvin left, all of the memories would come flooding back in, and I would sink back into my pit of sadness. That’s when Hank would come sit with me.

In the beginning, I was annoyed that Hank would not leave me alone, but I couldn’t bring myself to hurt his feelings by kicking him out. So I had pursed my lips and forced myself to push back the pain so that it didn’t always cover my face like a scary mask.

Sometimes Hank would just sit next to me and quietly do his homework. Other times, he would sit close to me on the couch as we watched TV, content to be near me. But my favorite times, in retrospect, were the times that I was most blue and couldn’t seem to make myself get out of bed. He would climb up next to me, pick up whatever book I’d been reading and start reading to me where I’d left off. He never

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