Day 694: 5 Minute Freewrite: Friday - Prompt: pink collar

7:45am Monday, on the dot: Captain Lee was back at work at police headquarters, and was settled in reading reports from his division's lieutenants about what had been done while he was away on vacation.

“How lovely to know,” he said aloud to them, “that soon y'all won't need me around here any more.”

They laughed uproariously, thinking he had made one of his rare jokes. Yet they had managed the division's schedule of completing cold cases perfectly in his absence. Much harder cases were just over the horizon, however, so Captain Lee knew his time as a police officer was not to come to an end quite that soon.

Yet he was not at all in jest, although he did not break his young lieutenants' hearts by letting them know that. He had seen a vision of life beyond military and paramilitary service while away on vacation, and would see another after work, after spotting Ms. Maggie Thornton, the commissioner's secretary, rushing out the door at 5:00. Curious, Captain Lee lengthened his stride and followed her discreetly to the nearest cleaners. There, Ms. Thornton was retrieving a dress – a gorgeous white sundress with a pink lace collar. Fabulously feminine, sensuous while still modest – it would have looked very well on her, as she was quite beautiful, but –.

“I'm surprising my cousin Margie,” she said to a friend of hers she ran into at the cleaners. “With Brett having beat on her all those years, she doesn't feel too good about her chances in this world. The divorce is about done, but the depression could last for years. But not if I can help it! This was mine, but … but I haven't worn it since Greg died, and Margie needs it more than I do.”

This was not dissimilar to Captain Lee's own gift of his Sunday best to Pvt. Flip Bolton, whose PTSD had him attempting a mass shooting with a plastic model gun … and ridiculed across the country as “The Toy Terrorist.” All the way to the Fruitland Memorial Veteran's Lodge, where such men were housed and treated and often cured, Pvt. Bolton had alternated between crying and raving and talking about suicide because he had no family, and Benita Morton and the whole country had abandoned him and no one cared if he lived or died, and he was too dumb to even pick a real gun to end it all.

All that had ceased when the man he knew as Colonel Lee had dressed him in his best, and taken him to a beautiful, safe place for men like him, with routines he could connect with, and kind, understanding people, who he met looking his best. When he had gotten his room with a view of Fruitland Memorial Park, he had grabbed hold of the colonel and bawled all over the colonel's full dress uniform – “This is the first time I've known someone cared about me in 20 years!”

That evening, Captain Lee looked through his apartment window to see Ms. Thornton – actually Missus, for she was a widow – and Mrs. Bell taking a walk together. Mrs. Bell was wearing her new dress with the gorgeous pink collar, and glowing in the evening light with her head held high. Mrs. Thornton was likewise glowing in the evening light, happy to see her cousin looking and feeling better.

Captain Lee did not keep a true journal, but the data master kept a notebook of data points of personal interest that he wished to consider further. His cousin's wife, Agnes Hamilton, who was storming Heaven every day about “getting Harry re-married,” would have sensed enormous potential in the five words the captain wrote in his book that evening.

“Mrs. Magdalena Thornton – she resonates.”