Homefront

by Kristen Tsetsi

  “You take care, Len! Y’hear?” The yelling—and next, a slamming car door—is loud enough to be heard through closed windows.

  I lift Chancey off my lap and get up to look outside. Donny squints up at the building, wet hair stuck to his head. I watch him waver on the walkway to the building and disappear through the door, then hear him dragging up the stairs, stopping now and then to, I imagine, check numbers on doorways.

  When he knocks, I am already at the door and watching through the peephole, but I don’t answer.

  “Mia! Mia, you here? I got to talk to you. Mia! You home?”

  His voice echoes through the stairwell and the red-haired girl across the hall opens her door to glare at him, then slams it.

  Denise comes up behind me and whispers, “Who is it?”

  “Mia!”

  I open the door and pull him in. Rainwater rolls off his hair, drips to the floor. “You can’t just scream at someone’s door,” I say.

  “I have to go, anyway.” Denise stands against the hallway wall. Donny holds his hand out to her, and she shakes it. “Denise,” she says.

  “Donny. Donny Donaldson, Doctor.”

  “Oh, really,” she says, then looks at me.

  “Vietnam,” I say.

  “Ohhh.” She nods. “How nice.”

  “You don’t believe me?” he says. “I got proof.”

  She waits.

  “Not here. What, you think I carry it with me? It’s at home. Come over any time, I’ll show it to you.”

  “I believe you,” she says, and Donny stomps his foot on the floor, says, “Goddamn it, don’t you patronize me. I was a goddamn doctor. Doctor Daniels.”

  “Okay. You’re a doctor.” She looks at me again.

  I tell her not to bother.

  “Two minutes,” he says, “but I made sure they felt no pain those two minutes. Me. I did that for them, and they’d tell me, they’d say, ‘Doctor’—and I told ‘em, ‘Don’t you dare call me Doctor’ ‘cause I don’t want formality when I’m holdin’ their heart, their life, in my hands—‘Doctor,’ they’d say—‘Thank you.’” He grabs her hand and squeezes it, and I see her wrist turning to get free. “’Thank you,’ they’d say. They knew. Y’see? They knew they was dyin’. We all know, just ’fore it happens. And thanks to good ol’ Doctor Donaldson, they went peacefully. Maybe even while havin’ some fun.” He rolls his eyes and smiles, bounces his head around like he’s drugged, high. He laughs, then stops abruptly and steps closer to her, having to look up. Denise is pretty tall, for a woman. At least five-nine. “Point is, I don’t got to show you no goddamn proof.”

  “Donny,” I say, “the living room is right through there. I’ll be there in a second.”

  He dismisses her and says to me, “Thank you.” I hear him grunt when he falls onto the couch.

  Denise backs against the wall and holds herself. “Mia.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think William knew?”

  “No. I don’t. ”

  She nods. “Okay. Right. Okay.” She pats her hair and moves away from the wall, toward the door. “But, not just about that.” She puts a nail in her mouth, and then must taste that it’s fake, because she lets her hand fall. “I’ve been wanting to ask you, and then I didn’t want to ask because I didn’t want to know because it’s—because, if I knew, that would…that would—”

  “What is it?”

  “Did Jake—? I wrote him—William—this letter, and—believe me, I know it wasn’t the right thing to do; I know that now, anyway—but in the—I’ve been relying on the idea that it didn’t get there until after, you know? But what if he read it—”

  “No,” I tell her. I make it sound strong, sure. “Jake would have said something. William told him pretty much everything.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “I’m positive.”

  “Do you promise? That’s stupid, isn’t it? Asking you to promise. But you can’t lie in a promise.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “So? Do you promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Pinkie swear?” She laughs. “I’m kidding.” She hugs me fast and tight, then lets me go. “Thank you. I’ve been so—‘What if?’ You know? What if my letter was what—”

  “You did what you thought you had to do.”

  “No,” she says. “I was selfish.—Don’t. I know what you’re going to say, but I should have waited.” She looks at things on the walls and runs her hands over her back pockets. “Anyway. I have to get back and pack my clothes for tomorrow.”

  We hug again—this one longer—and make promises about emailing. But the door closes behind her and I don’t expect to hear from her, or to write her.

  “Mia! She gone? Hey, what happened in here? Fire?” The sound of a hand slapping the wall. “I’m thirsty. You got any water?”

  “Coming.”

  I pour a glass and bring it out to him. He sets it on the table without drinking any. “I wanted to say…I wanted to tell you, with my whole heart, I’m sorry. You’re an angel. You know that? You are.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You don’t even know what I’m sorry for.”

  “For before. I know. It’s okay.”

  “Damn, girl,” he says. “Here I am, comin’ out in the rain and payin’ ten dollars—it ain’t cheap comin’ here, ‘specially when Lenny makes me pay more for an address—and you act like you want me to leave.” He pulls a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, then searches his pants, back and front. “Got a light?”

  ________

  Donny smokes in the passenger seat and I tell him to open the—

  “I know, I know.” He rolls it down, but the smoke comes in, anyway. He offers one and I say no. There’s not even a craving.

  “Where we goin’, anyway? I live the other way.”

  “I already told you.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Damn it, Donny, yes. I did. I told you twice.”

  “Well, I don’t remember. I’d jus’ like to know where we’re goin’, is all, and on a dark and rainy day with you drivin’ like Andretti, I don’t think—”

  “My friend’s. We’re going to my friend’s house, and then I’m taking you home.”

  “Take me home first.”

  “No, Donny. I already explained—”

  “Take me home! I want to go home. Take me first, then go see your friend.”

  I pull over in the lot of an abandoned tire store. Faded red paint advertises a close-of-business sale, sixty percent off, and a tangled chain hangs from the door handle. The windows are smashed, jagged, and we’re stopped where others aren’t likely to stop. “If you want to get out, get out.”

  “Shit. I was just kiddin’. Why’re—can’t you take a joke?”

  I pull out of the lot and he falls quiet.

  Kudzu drapes roadside bushes and trees, and miles down the sky the cloud line ends.

  “…helicopter crash this morning killed its two pil—”

  I punch the button, search the stations until I find music.

  “Wait! I wanted to hear that!” Donny reaches out and I catch his hand, say, “My car.”

  I don’t know if I’ll stay here, and if I do, I don’t know for how long. I suppose I might save for a while—there’s plenty of time until Jake comes home—and use the money for a truck and first month’s rent somewhere. Somewhere I’ve always wanted to go. Only, there’s nowhere I’ve always wanted to go.

  It hits me, then, that I can go anywhere and that there’s no one to stop me or to choose my destination for me. Not Jake, not Jake’s Army.

  I’ll go north. That much I know. Somewhere where there’s snow.

  ________

  Denise doesn’t answer her door and her lights are off, but her car is outside (as is Brian’s), so I know she’ll get William’s lighter before she leaves. I drop it through the mail slot.

  ________

  On the way home after droppi
ng off Donny, I stop at the grocery store to pick up the snacks Jake asked for, plus some. I’ll add a note to the box: Friends?

  I turn onto my street, and though everyone else is at work and the street-side where I park is bare, my tire bumps up against the curb, then rolls back down. I open the door and float to standing beside the car until I’m looking over the roof, and I can’t remember how to breathe, or that I do breathe, and the mess behind my ribs lurches like I’m on a ride and I remember what Denise said about leave and that his mother said tell Jakey something or something and I steady myself on the door and I think I am smiling, I’m sure I am smiling, and there’s some noise, like a donkey braying, which is strange, and I think I say, “Oh…” and my next thought is the baby, I have to tell him about the baby, but I don’t want to tell him because then his whole visit, so short already, will be focused on the stupid baby, and I have to warn him about the letter, too, tell him it’s bullshit, all of it, that leaving him won’t make it better, but later, I’ll tell him later…

  He pulls me from the space between my car and the door and closes it for me, then steps closer and circles me with his body and says, “How’re you doing?”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Kristen Tsetsi is a former reporter, a former English professor, a former screenwriting instructor, and a former cab driver. Currently, she is the American Fiction editor and an award-winning fiction writer whose work won the Storyglossia Fiction Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives near Nashville with her husband.