by Trent Reedy
He took a drag on his cigar again. “This tastes terrible,” he said. “Like ashes.” He laughed sadly and flicked his finger against the cigar to knock the ashes off the end. “Twenty-eight days. Less than a month, and then … finally out of Afghanistan.” His eyes were red and filled with tears. “Finally starting our way home.
“Then this morning they told us that we are being” — he made air quotes with his fingers — “ ‘involuntarily extended.’ ” He spat right on the floor. “They were smart to tell us this while we were standing at attention in formation so the guys couldn’t go crazy when they heard the news. When we were released from formation, Staff Sergeant Pratt told our squad to shut their mouths and come to his room in the barracks so we could talk about it. When we got there, Corporal Andrews didn’t say anything. PFC Gardner complained about how his college plans would be pushed back even further. Mac cussed up a storm. But Fast Freddy went crazy, like a caged animal. He kept shouting, ‘This is messed up! This is seriously messed up!’ ” Dad sighed. “What could I tell them? We were screwed, stuck in the war in Afghanistan six months longer than we thought we would be.”
He smoked some more.
“I tell you, Mikey, I feel more like Freddy than he’ll ever know. For a whole year, all I’ve thought about is getting back home to you, Mary, and your mom. Now I’m stuck here longer, a whole half a year.” He wiped his eyes. “I know!” he shouted. “I know that the only way you’ll be watching this video is if I never made it home at all, but right now, while I’m filming this, I still feel like I’m going to make it. And who knows, but maybe I WOULD have lived if the Army would have let me go home in a year like they first said!”
He was silent and still for a long time.
“Your mom wants a divorce. She sent me a letter telling me all her reasons. I got the letter yesterday.” He steepled his fingers with his thumbs pressed to either side of the bridge of his nose, the cigar held between his right index and middle finger. “The Army pays me a lot more if I’m married. Your mom and you kids get certain benefits if your mom and I are married. As soon as I read your mom’s letter, I asked the commander for special permission to use the satellite phone, and I called her. I’ve convinced her not to divorce me until after I get home.”
He pointed the cigar straight at the camera. “But when I get home, I’m going to work this out. I’ll make things better so that we stay together as a family,” he said. “Of course, if I don’t make it home, well, then she’ll just collect a little bit of life insurance money and she’ll have saved herself a lot of paperwork and divorce-lawyer fees.”
He laughed bitterly. I couldn’t move, couldn’t think.
“I wanted these letters and videos to be something that would help you. Something you could turn to, especially when you were confused or upset and needed some advice. I wanted to use them to try to be a real dad to you. I can tell you this, though. One thing I’ve learned from the difficulties with your mother and with a few of the guys I serve with. Stop arguing with people. Let go of your anger. It doesn’t matter who wins arguments, who was right or wrong. Nobody really wins, especially in stupid political disputes. Arguing and anger are just another kind of war, and trust me, war is terrible. Be at peace.”
He looked straight into the camera. “So your mission this time, Michael, is to forgive someone. I don’t mean for you to stir up an argument with someone and figure out whose fault it was. I mean to drop it. Let it go. Find that way to forgiveness.”
A tear trailed down his cheek and he wiped it away. “This has mostly been a downer of a video, and I’m sorry about that. I want to tell you …” He stopped and looked off camera, then he slumped in his chair. “Great. I can hear someone coming. Probably Sergeant Pratt, with some notes I’ll have to tell my guys.” He looked at the camera again. “More soon. I love you, Michael.”
He moved forward and reached out toward the camera. The video stopped.
I sat in the chair, as still as my father’s image in the window. Had I just seen what I thought I’d seen? I backed up the clip a little and played it again. Yes, I’d heard it right.
“A divorce?” I whispered. Mom always sat there and cried every D-Day, talking about how perfect our family had been before Dad was stolen away from us. She acted like the poor wounded widow whose adored husband was killed in the war, leaving her all alone and oh-so-sad, bearing the burden of raising us fatherless kids. She made me feel sorry for her. But she’d been lying to us all this time! How could she do it? How could she ask my father for a divorce while he served in such a dangerous place? Why did she wait until what was supposed to be so close to the end of the tour? Why did she do it at all!?
I stood up and yanked the hard drive’s cables out of the computer, ignoring the stupid pop-up warnings as I shoved the drive into my bag.
Mom started to ruin our family long before the war killed Dad. Who knows, maybe he’d died because of Mom. He seemed really sad, pretty distracted in the video. Maybe one day on patrol, worrying about how his beloved wife wanted to leave him and tear his family apart, he stepped on a mine or something.
Mrs. Potter tried talking to me as I left the library, but I ran out of there, down the hall, and out to the Falcon as fast as I could. I never liked going to the nursing home where Mom worked, but nothing would keep me from having a few words with my mother today.
By the time I’d screeched into the lot at the Sunshine Care Facility and parked the Falcon, there was no sunshine, no light of any kind, left inside me. I had no idea what I would say when I caught up to Mom, but I knew it would not be pleasant.
“Hey, Mike,” Darla the receptionist said when I pushed in through the main doors. “I haven’t seen you around here in so long! I can’t believe how much you’ve —”
“Where is my mother?” I said.
“Oh. I think she’s on break. Probably back in the kitchen having a snack. Do you want me to get her for you?”
I marched past her. “I know where the kitchen is.”
To get to the kitchen, I had to pass through the dining hall and the so-called recreation area, where the staff at the home sometimes screened old movies or the residents played cards. A woman in a wheelchair rolled in front of me, shaking her head slowly. “Ninety-six. Ninety-six years old. I have outlived my husband, both of my children. Lord, let me out of this place.”
I had to come to a halt to avoid running into her. Then I was distracted by a groan. An old gray-haired man sat at a table, hunched over at the shoulders. His head angled down and to the right over his chest, and a string of drool ran from his mouth to his bib. His eyes rolled to the side as he stared at nothing. Another woman sitting near the table pulled off her own blue wool sock and held it up in front of her face for a moment, frowning in confusion. “Is this your sock?” she said to me.
A man at a different table wore a red flannel shirt and gray pants held up way too high by suspenders. He looked up at me from his game of solitaire. “I survived Iwo Jima. For what?” He placed a two of hearts on a three of spades. “To end up in this place. Won’t let me have my cigars anymore. Say they’re bad for my health. I’m ninety years old!”
Not everybody in the recreation area looked so miserable. A group of residents in one corner laughed when one of them finished a story. A woman seemed content sitting in a recliner reading a paperback romance novel.
But when I looked around that room, I saw a lot of lonely sadness. The mournful tone, the defeat in the voices of so many people there, reminded me of the way my father sounded in the video I’d just watched.
In one way my father had been fortunate, I realized. He would never grow old or feeble, never be stored in a place like this, waiting for death and wondering why life went on. And yet despite Dad’s sadness, he still held on to his hope of returning home alive, of making things right with my mother.
Would Mom really have divorced him if he had lived? Maybe it was a misunderstanding, an angry letter sent before she’d had a chance to re
consider. My goal in coming in here tonight had been to yell at my mother, to confront her for threatening to break up our family, especially at a time when Dad deserved our support. But being in this sad place somehow extinguished that angry fire in me. Like Dad had said, it was better to put aside arguments and be at peace.
I had memories from when Dad was alive and home with us. One fall he buried me in a huge pile of leaves, and when Mom came outside, he asked her, “Have you seen Mikey?” She said something like, “No. You don’t think he disappeared, do you?” Now I know they were both playing the whole time, but back then I laughed and laughed when I jumped out of that leaf pile and Mom acted startled. And when I was six or seven, Mom and Dad built this great fort in front of the TV out of blankets hung over the backs of chairs. We had a little picnic in there and watched some cartoon movie, Toy Story or something. Mary and I kept messing around, wanting to bring more and more toys into the fort, but eventually we settled down, and our whole family slept snuggled in the fort that night.
Memories like these, along with things Mom had said, had always led me to believe that we had been a happy family before the war. But Dad’s video also brought back vague memories of Mom crying while she talked on the phone and tore up a letter. Had all that happy-family stuff been a lie?
The only one who had any answers, the only person who could tell me about the relationship between my mom and dad, was my mother, who hated discussing Dad. It might be hard, maybe impossible, to learn anything, but I had to try. As I went to the kitchen, I could almost feel Dad with me, like a more positive version of the way the ghost of Hamlet’s father had been with him when he confronted his mother. I breathed deeply and reminded myself to calm down and be kind.
In the kitchen, Mom sat at a table reading a magazine. “Michael?” She bumped the table as she stood up. “What are you doing here? Is everything all right?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but Mom gasped. “You’re hurt!”
“What?”
She grabbed my wrist and held my arm up to examine a new bruise I’d earned yesterday at practice. With everything on my mind, I had forgotten to make sure I’d covered it up. “Does it hurt? How did this happen?”
“Oh, another little problem at the farm.” I was thinking up some semi-credible story about a work-related mishap when I saw the look of disbelief on Mom’s face. She wouldn’t be fooled twice.
I’d come in here hoping for honesty and the truth, and I’d brought only a lie. Wasn’t that at the core of what had been bothering me? People holding back information? It drove me nuts when Mom wouldn’t tell me anything about Dad. I was furious when the Mystery Mailer wouldn’t reveal himself and when Sergeant Andrews refused to answer my questions. Derek had encouraged me to talk with Mom. Maybe the time had come for me to put the truth out there myself.
“Okay, fine,” I said. “Will you just please promise not to flip out?”
She took a step back. “Why?” Her sharp voice cut into my resolve. “What is this all about?”
“See, that’s kind of flipping out right there,” I said.
“Michael Mark Wilson, where did you get that bruise?”
“At football practice.”
A hard quiet fell on the room. A clock in another room chimed the hour.
“What are you talking about?” She narrowed her eyes. “You don’t play football.”
“I’ve been playing all season.”
“I never gave you permission to join the football —”
“I paid for the physical myself. I wrote your name on the parental consent form.”
“You lied to me. You’ve been sneaking around behind my back for weeks.”
“Mom, you have to understand. I only wanted —”
“I’m your mother! I didn’t even know you were on the team. I’m probably the only person in town who didn’t know it! Someone was paying at the Gas & Sip the other day and said ‘Your boy’s doing a great job.’ I didn’t know what he meant, but I thanked him and guessed that he knew you from work or school somehow. Boy, what an idiot I’ve been!”
“I’ve been doing really well in football, Mom. I’m starting —”
“Not anymore you’re not.”
“Mom, come on. I wasn’t even going to tell you, but I thought that you and I needed to be more —”
“Oh.” She held both hands flat over her heart. “I’m supposed to pat you on the back because you were going to lie to me. Again. And then you chose to actually tell the truth for once. Well, here’s the truth. You will quit that football team tomorrow, or I will call the coach, call the school, call the state athletic association, whoever I have to talk to, to let them know you forged my signature. And that if they have my boy on the field ever again, I’ll sue them until they’re broke.”
“Mom, you can’t do that! Just listen to me for once!”
“I just did. I listened to your lies, and then I listened to the horrible truth. You’re off the team.” The smug confidence in her voice made me want to vomit. She looked at her watch. “My break’s over. I need to go back to work so I can make money to support my family. I don’t get to waste time playing games. Now go home.”
“Mom —”
“Go!” she yelled. “One more word out of you tonight, and I’ll take away your driver’s license too.”
I ran out of the nursing home and into the cold night.
“How’s the truck?” Derek asked that night at work.
“Oh, it’s great,” I said. “If I still get to drive it.”
“That doesn’t sound so great.” He frowned, looking at the Falcon. “Is there a problem with it?”
“What? No,” I said. “The truck is fine. Mom found out about football. Well, I told her about it.”
“It didn’t go well?”
“I told you she wouldn’t be able to handle it. She’s making me quit the team! It’s the only” — I threw a square hay bale from the flat wagon up into the hayloft, where Derek waited to stack it — “thing I get to do besides work and school.” I picked up the next bale and hurled it up. “I should have known better than to try to talk to her.”
“Whoa, easy there, buddy,” Derek said. “We’ll get this worked out somehow.”
“It’s not just that,” I said. “I mean, that’s enough. But also … It’s kind of complicated, but I’ve been thinking about my dad a lot lately.”
“Oh yeah?” He watched me silently for a moment. “I know you’re mad. I mean, about a lot of things.” I swung a bale up in front of my face, then, with a grunt, I heaved it straight up at him. “Nice toss.” He grabbed it. “But this anger, guilt … It kind of has a way of eating you up inside. Then, sometimes, the people you’re mad at … Well, you might not know the whole story.”
What was he talking about? I stared at him. He saw me waiting for him to explain.
“It’s got to be tough on your mom raising two kids by herself. It’s expensive. There’s a lot of responsibility. I just think she could use some help.”
“Help!? She just ruined my life! Why do you always take her side?”
“I’m not taking anyone’s side. Or maybe I’m taking everyone’s side.”
“She won’t let me grow up,” I said.
“All mothers are a little like that.”
“Are you serious?”
“Okay, maybe she’s a little overprotective, but can you blame her?”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s lost a lot, Mike.”
I sat down on some hay. “You mean my dad?”
He didn’t answer right away. He climbed down out of the hayloft to join me on the wagon. When he spoke again, he was quieter. “One day a chaplain shows up at her door, says, ‘We regret to inform you …’ ” He grabbed a bale and threw it up into the loft. “Because some idiot didn’t do his job.”
What did that mean? “You okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Worried about you. And I think I just hurt my back throwing that last bale.” He
winced and held a hand to his lower back. “You want to throw these and then stack them yourself?” He grunted as he slowly climbed down off the wagon. “Work as long as you want. Let me know how many hours.” I watched him walk into the dark.
“Yeah. Sure thing, man,” I said. I went back to work.
* * *
On the next morning’s drive to school, I came to the stop sign at the end of our block and turned on the radio, twisting the knob until I found classic rock on KRRP.
“Mike?” Mary said.
“I know. I know. My old music is lame.” I cranked up the volume a little. “My truck. My music. If you don’t like it, you can get out and —”
“No, no, I don’t care about the music,” she said. She added under her breath, “Though it is kind of loser stuff.” She spoke up louder. “I just want to ask you, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said. I hadn’t told her about Mom’s decree, partly because I didn’t see the need to tell my bratty sister anything, and partly because I desperately held out hope for some kind of miracle to keep me from having to quit football. I didn’t want to stir up more trouble.
“You and Mom have been arguing a lot lately. You never used to. Lately you just seem so mad all the time.”
“I have a lot on my mind,” I said. “And Mom and I have had arguments before.”
“You know what I mean.” She tossed a lock of hair back over her shoulder. “Not fights like this.” I didn’t answer. “And the lies.”
“I don’t need a lecture in honesty from you,” I said. “You were always the one saying I should get a life. For once, you and Dad are in total agreement.”
“Oh, don’t start in on the Dad stuff again.”
I slapped the steering wheel. “He may not be important to you, but —”
“You didn’t know him! We were babies when —”
“— he was our father and he has a lot of smart things —”