Starving, since she’d hardly eaten during the barbeque because she was so busy mingling, she headed straight to the kitchen where a very somber bunch was gathered. That was it. She was getting to the bottom of this once and for all.
“Will somebody please tell me what is going on?”
She could see it in Grace’s face; it was the same look she had when she’d been so worried about Rose being depressed. She bit her lip, looking at Grace then Sal and waited.
Angel spoke first. “Lorenzo got a call today on his way here from your game about Vince.”
Rose felt the air sucked out of her lungs as Grace’s words from the moment she first found out a few weeks ago screamed in her head. Vince’s been deployed to Iraq. She couldn’t move—breathe. Getting the words out was incredible struggle. “What about him?”
“He’s been MIA for days.”
It took a moment for her brain to wrap around that—make sense of what she’d just heard. MIA? Then it came to her from a paper she had to write in high school on the war: missing in action. Her Vincent was missing in action in Iraq, very possibly already dead.
~*~
An entire week later they still knew nothing. Lorenzo had told her everything right down to the expressions on the faces of the first sergeant, the chaplain, and the base commander that had been sent to his parents’ apartment to deliver the news.
On his mother’s request they waited for Lorenzo to get there and explained everything they knew. Vincent’s entire squad had perished during a battle. Everybody but Vincent had been accounted for. It’d been nearly a week since he’d gone missing, and they’d waited that long to notify them because there’d been an investigation, first to rule out the possibility that Vincent had deserted.
Unlike Rose Lorenzo was convinced Vincent was alive. She didn’t want to tell him about the report she’d written in high school, but from her research, more than ninety-eight percent of soldiers missing in action were either never found or found dead.
As if this past year hadn’t taken a big enough toll on her emotionally and physically, this had done it. The first few days after getting the news, Rose lay in bed refusing to get up for any reason. She’d never tell Grace, but she had moments she wished she were dead. Anything was better than having to endure the pain she was going through now. At least when he’d first left, she had hopes of seeing him again someday. It wasn’t until the day Lorenzo showed up teary-eyed, begging her to have faith, that she finally snapped out of it.
“Why am I the only one that believes he’s still alive? Why doesn’t anyone else have faith like I do? I know my brother. He’s a fighter, and more than anything Rose he’d come back for you. If nothing else, he’d do it for you.”
Rose wanted nothing more than to believe that, but one thing nagged at her. “That’s the thing, Lorenzo. What if he never got my letter? What if he really thinks I’ve moved on?”
Lorenzo shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. He’d never give up so easily. You shouldn’t either, Rose. He’ll come home to us; I know he will.”
As much as she knew the odds were stacked against Vincent, that day she forced herself out of bed. Between all of them, Sal, Grace and Lorenzo they convinced her to go to her practices. The finals started that weekend, and her team needed her.
“It’s the distraction you need, Rose.” Grace insisted. “What good does it do you to be home thinking about this?”
Grace was just weeks away from delivering. Rose wasn’t even dreading having to tell her about her anemia anymore. Somehow after getting the news about Vincent, her having to get injections for the rest of her life didn’t seem nearly as dreadful as when she’d first found out. At least she’d live.
Lorenzo had already given her the first shot this week. Being around him at first she thought would be detrimental to her mental state, but it actually helped. Only he was hurting as much as she was.
Rose was putting in a few hours that morning at the restaurant, and then she’d go home and get ready for her game later that evening.
Sal rushed into the back office just as she was walking into the dining room with a tray full of food. Looking up as she placed the dishes on the table, she tried to concentrate on getting everyone’s dish right.
“No I had the enchiladas,” said the lady Rose had put the plate in front of. “He had the mole.”
Rose turned back to her. “Oh, I’m sorry.” She switched their plates and finished serving just as Sal walked out of the back room in a hurry again and waved her over.
She rushed to him. “Something wrong?”
“Well, not wrong, but Grace is having contractions again.”
Rose’s eyes bulged. “Really?”
“It’s still a few weeks too soon,” Sal frowned, “but the doc said to bring her in anyway. I gotta get out of here. Alex is already on his way. Can you hang out just until he gets here?”
Rose nodded quickly. “Sure.”
When Alex arrived, she gathered her things and left. She wanted to go home and get her things ready, so she could at least stop by the hospital on her way to her game.
Knowing she wouldn’t be home long, she didn’t bother parking in the garage like she normally would. Sal hadn’t been parking in there lately either. With Grace so big now, it was hard for her to get in the car if it was parked in there, so he’d started just parking in the driveway the last few weeks.