He plowed his fingers through his hair. “Look, it doesn’t mean anything now.”
“But it did then.”
“Precious little. Not enough to get me an athletic scholarship, which I was counting on to go to college.”
“What did you do?”
“I went anyway.”
“How?”
“A loan.”
“A government loan?”
“No, a private one,” he answered evasively.
“Who lent you the money—Angus?”
“So? I paid back every friggin’ cent of it.”
“By working for him?”
“Until I left ME.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“Because I’d paid him back and wanted to do something else.”
“That was as soon as you got out of college?”
He shook his head. “The air force.”
“You were in the air force?”
“Four years of officers’ training during college, then active duty after graduation. For six years my ass b
elonged to Uncle Sam. Two of those years were spent bombing gooks in Vietnam.”
Alex hadn’t known he’d been involved in the war, but she should have guessed. He’d been at draftable age during the height of it. “Did Junior serve, too?”
“Junior at war? Can you picture that?” he asked with a rough laugh. “No, he didn’t go. Angus pulled some strings and got him into the reserves.”
“Why not you, too?”
“I didn’t want him to. I wanted to go into the air force.”
“To learn to fly?”
“I already knew how to fly. I had my pilot’s license before I had my driver’s license.”
She contemplated him for a moment. The information was coming too fast and furious to absorb. “You’re just full of surprises this morning, aren’t you? I didn’t know you could fly.”
“No reason you should, Counselor.”
“Why aren’t there any pictures of you in uniform?” she asked, indicating the bookcase.
“I hated what I was doing over there. No mementos of wartime, thanks.” He backed away from her, picked up his hat, gloves, and coat, then went to the front door and ungraciously pulled it open.