Page 5 of A Hero Comes Home

“Just super. After three surgeries and a titanium rod implant that weighs about five pounds, I still can’t dance.”

“Not even the Shag? Oh, man, you’ll lose your Carolina creds.”

Jake threw the towel at Izzie’s teasing face.

Izzie caught it midair and tossed it back at him. “Remember the dance contest in Myrtle Beach? You and me and the Marconi twins from St. Bernadette’s. I was the winner, as I recall. In more ways than one.” Izzie waggled his eyebrows for emphasis.

“Dream on, brother. Even at sixteen, I could beat your ass in any contest, whether football, swimming, fishing, or . . . dancing.”

“I don’t know about that. I have fond memories of Angela Marconi. She was my partner that night, and . . .” He began to sing “Under the Boardwalk.”

Grinning, Izzie stepped forward to give him a warm bro hug, despite his smelly body.

Jake barely restrained himself from shoving his friend away. He didn’t like to be touched anymore, not even by his buddy since toddlerhood when they’d been dog-paddling side by side in the cool waters of Bell Sound, their mothers best friends since college, fellow teachers at Bell Cove Elementary School for many years. Of course, Jake’s mother was gone now, but he and Izzie had many shared memories.

“Cool digs!” Izzie remarked a short time later, as he sipped at one of the beers he’d snuck in.

Jake was sipping at the other, the first he’d had in the three months he’d been residing there. Didn’t matter that it wasn’t even ten a.m. Beer was the breakfast of champions on occasion.

“A suite, no less!” Izzie continued as he gazed around the large room.

Yes, Jake had a suite, if you could call it that . . . a traditional patient room with an adjoining sitting area featuring institutional-style furniture, a bare-bones couch, coffee table, TV, and dining table, and an alcove for the gym equipment. It was located in a private—in other words, secret—wing of the hospital where Uncle Sam hid those high-profile soldiers it didn’t want the public to know about. Down the hall, at the moment, were a congressman’s pilot son who’d crashed a billion-dollar aircraft in some reckless Top Gun maneuver, and two unidentified soldiers rescued from a work camp in Russia, where they had no business being. Probably SEALs.

“Suite, my ass! They can call it that all they want, but, in the end, it’s a jail. I’m just as much a prisoner here as I was for three years in an Afghan cave.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Yeah, I do. The surroundings might be more comfortable. The food a little better. And I don’t get tortured every other day, except by Nurse Hatchitt and his happy needle.”

“His, as in male nurse?”

Jake nodded. “Marine lieutenant Delbert Hatch, RN, as in registered nutcase. Solid gold butt-inator.”

Izzie smiled at that reminder of the name the two of them, at the age of about ten, had given to anyone, mainly adults, they classified as assholes. “So, no pretty young things prancing around?”

“Be careful where you talk like that, man. Even I, isolated like I am, know what constitutes sexual harassment.”

Izzie pretended to zip his lips.

“And, no, there are no pretty young things here, not that I’ve seen. Personally, I think it’s just another form of legal torture Uncle Sam is inflicting on me. Visual deprivation.”

Izzie popped the caps off two more bottles of beer and handed one to him. They moved to the low couch where they both leaned back and propped their shoes on the coffee table. A flat-screen TV on the opposite wall was showing yesterday’s Yankees game against the Red Sox, with an announcer narrating, at a low volume, the play-by-play in German.

“Seriously, you know what would happen if I tried to walk out of this hospital with you, right?”

Izzie took a long draw on his brew, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and raised his brows in question.

“There would be so many sirens going off you’d think we were being attacked.”

“They’re just trying to protect you.”

“Bullshit! I can’t make a phone call, and my computer is locked so that I can read but not participate in any forum. Not even receive or send email.”

“No interactive porn, huh?”

“Hah! They’d probably encourage that. Do you know what my shrink—Dr. Sheila—asked me last week?”

“I can’t begin to guess.” Izzie smirked.