Only a Mother Knows by Annie Groves Page B

floor dropped a dime in the juke box. Everything was so normal here, a million miles away from the devastation in London. He listened to the haunting melody of Glenn Miller’s ‘At Last’ fade to be replaced by the whirr and click of another record dropping on the Wurlitzer juke box, with its flashing lights and glass-domed top.
    Drew managed to sit at the diner counter only long enough for the beautifully melodious tones of Vera Lynn’s voice to tell him there’d be blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover, which caused a restriction so tight in his throat he could hardly swallow. The last time he’d heard that song he and Tilly were dancing together, making plans for their future. It was all too much and he couldn’t take any more.
    ‘Skip the order,’ Drew managed to say to the waitress behind the counter who didn’t bat an eyelash at his request as they would have done in England, he noticed, for the simple reason that rationing hadn’t hit here. Maybe it never would, he thought, who knew?
    All he did know was that there was no shortage of food and drink at his mother’s funeral, which had been like a who’s who of his father’s shallow supporters. All of them in the business of lightening his load if he wished to avail himself of their services, all of them his ‘yes’ men.
    Listen to yourself. Drew angrily crossed the sidewalk to the Sedan. You’re already beginning to sound like one of Dad’s people, who use ten words where two will do.
    ‘Oh, Tilly, I gotta get outta here!’ Drew said aloud, ignoring the suspicious stares of people passing by. ‘Oh, honey, why do we have to live so far apart?’ He was so deep in thought he didn’t even see the truck coming, nor hear the screams of the women who tried to grab his arm to stop him walking into the road. He didn’t feel a thing.
    ‘Get outta my way!’ The doctor dressed from head to toe in theatre whites didn’t care if he ran people down as he rushed the stretcher towards the operating theatre after another seizure had gripped Drew Coleman’s body, stopping only momentarily to tell his father he would do everything he could.
    ‘You’d better do more than that!’ Andrew Coleman had growled over a chewed-up twelve-inch cigar hanging from the corner of his mouth. But as doctors later gathered around Drew’s bed in the large, pristine Chicago hospital, they shook their heads in concern. Drew had been unconscious since he came in – he was someplace else, somewhere they couldn’t reach. The best medics in the country had fought to save his life after he was hit by an oncoming truck getting into his automobile two blocks from his own home.
    The daily letters from London, England, were dispatched to the huge safe in his father’s office and remained there. Unopened.
    Surely, thought Tilly, Drew would at least have written telling her he wanted his Harvard ring back if he’d decided their love was over? But what else was she to make of the complete lack of letters from him? Her fingers caressed the gold band she wore around her neck. They had made a pact that he would not ask for it unless he wanted nothing more to do with her, and she vowed she would not part with it unless she found somebody else. And that would never happen. Nobody could replace her wonderful, kind-hearted sweetheart. Nobody.
    Tilly took comfort from the fact that Drew hadn’t asked for the ring back and until he did she had no intentions of returning it. In her heart a small flicker of hope still burned.
    Every night before she went to sleep she took out the band of gold that had initially been a sign of their good friendship. Then later inside the small country church cocooned within the moon’s silver rays this ring had come to symbolise something that had become a deep abiding love between both of them, she was sure. She didn’t know how she knew but she was certain that when Drew was ready he would come back for her one day. And when that day came she would be