George looked into the bathroom again and gave out with a long wolf whistle.
"Hubba, hubba! I could go for you, sailor, but I'm a married woman!"
Leaving her friends' apartment that night, Barbara drove to their airport for one final look around before saying good-bye to it for what she expected would be the duration of the war. While in the office at almost midnight, she heard footsteps outside and wondered who could be there at such an hour.
Before she could get up from her desk chair to go to the door, it burst open and Chet Armstrong stood in the doorway.
Handsome as ever and still with his Errol Flynn mustache, dressed for a formal affair in white tie and tails, he looked as if he had been drinking as he leaned on his cane.
"No, Chet, don't try anything again!" Barbara told him angrily.
Her appearance startled him. "What the hell did you do to your hair, and the rest of you? You look like a boy!"
"Good! That's the general idea. Now get out of here before I scream so loud I wake up the dead!"
"Go ahead. You'll just hurt my ears. No one around for miles."
His words slurred. He obviously had been drinking heavily, again. He came into the room and slammed the door behind him.
"Was at a society thing at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. Remembered you sometimes work late here. Thought I'd drop by and pick up where I left off in California."
She looked around for a weapon to use against him, but couldn't see any.
"Don't you ever get tired of being an asshole?"
He hooked his cane on the inside doorknob.
"Still the same asshole, I'm afraid," he laughed. "Still limp, too. Not between the legs. That's getting harder by the second.
"I mean my leg. But don't need the cane all the time. Mainly use it for military reasons. Had to go back to the draft board a month ago. The fix came unfixed. Seems they think my airplane parts and munitions company can get along without me.
"They're taking just about anyone into the army these days for some big push coming up, even boys like you look. The limp and the cane got me reclassified 4-F. Now the Army'll take my mother before they'd take me."
While he laughed again, she said, "You'd let her go, too."
"Aren't you going to tell me what the get-up is for? It isn't Halloween yet, is it?"