Page 15 of A Soldier's Return

He reached for the back of a chair and pulled it back. Nobody had held a chair out for her in such a long time, it took Melissa an awkward moment to realize he meant for her to sit there.

“Uh. Thanks.”

Shereallyneeded to get out more.

She sat down and Skye plopped into the seat next to her.

“Can I get a root beer?” she asked.

They had a pretty strict no-soda/low-sugar rule 95 percent of the time, but Melissa tended to relax a bit on pizza night. “One. A small.”

“I’ll let your server know,” Gina said. “Here’s a couple of menus,” Gina said. “Our special tonight is the arugula and prosciutto with our house-pulled mozzarella.”

“Sounds delicious,” Eli said. “Thanks.”

The next few minutes were spent perusing the menu. Skye ordered her favorite, half cheese, half pepperoni, while Melissa and Eli both ordered the special, along with salads with the house dressing on the side and, of course, an order of their cheesy bread.

“If I can’t play pool, can I at least go play the pinball machine?” Skye asked. “I brought all my own quarters.”

“All of them? I thought you were saving up for a new scooter like your friend Alice has.”

“I am. But Sonia gave me two dollars for helping her pull weeds yesterday, so I put that in my piggy bank and took out six quarters.”

Skye reached into her pocket and pulled out change that jingled as she set it on the table. “I want to see if I can do better than last time we came.”

“It’s your money. If that’s the way you want to spend it, go for it.”

“Thanks.”

She shoved her chair back and hurried to the row of gaming machines along one wall of the pizzeria. This was an ideal setup, where she could keep an eye on her daughter but didn’t have to stand right over her shoulder.

“She seems like a sweet kid,” Eli said. “I know my dad thinks so, anyway.”

Melissa had made plenty of mistakes in her life—including a disastrous marriage—but her daughter was not among them.

“She’s amazing. Kind, compassionate, funny. I won the kid lottery.”

He smiled at that and sipped at the beer their server had brought him. “Does she see her father very often?”

All her frustrations from earlier in the day rushed back, and Melissa did her best not to tense.

“Not as often as she’d like. It’s been tough to have a relationship when he’s always heading to the next beach with the pro surf circuit.”

“Must have made it tough on a marriage.”

“You could say that.”

“How long have you and Cody been divorced?”

“We split up when Skye was three and officially divorced a year later.”

“And she’s, what, seven now?”

“Yes.”

The sense of failure never quite left Melissa, even after four years. She knew she had no reason to feel guilty, but somehow she couldn’t seem to help it.

She didn’t tell Eli how hard she had tried to salvage the marriage for her child or how even after it became clear that Cody wouldn’t stop cheating, she had chosen to stay in Hawaii, Cody’s surfing home base, so her daughter could still see her father.

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