I wondered if TJ was looking at the moon right at that very minute, wherever he was. I wondered if he was imagining what it would feel like to rocket through space and land on the moon. To leave your footprints there. To cast a shadow across a crater.
It made me feel better to think he was.
Not much. But a little.
Private Hollister was sitting on the living-room couch when I got home. When he saw me, he stood up and said, “I heard about TJ being MIA. Byrd told me. Thought I ought to come see how you were doing.”
I shrugged. I didn’t even know how to answer that. “Okay, I guess.”
We stared at each other for a few minutes, the silence as awkward as a turtle on its back. Fortunately, my mother, an expert hostess, came in and offered Private Hollister some iced tea, which he accepted. Then he turned to me and said, “You want to play some cards?”
“Sure,” I answered, nodding, glad to have something to do besides stand there feeling stupid.
He looked to my mother. “Ma’am, would you like to play? It’ll take your mind off of things.”
To my surprise, my mother said yes. So when the Colonel walked in the front door about an hour later, there we were—me, my mother, and Private Hollister—eating peanuts and playing gin rummy.
“Colonel, this is Private Hollister from the rec center,” I said. “Only now he’s back at 1st Signal.”
Private Hollister jumped up and stood at attention. “Private Bucky Hollister, sir. Pleased to meet you, sir.” He saluted sharply.
The Colonel returned Private Hollister’s salute and said, “At ease, soldier.”
“What time is it?” my mother asked. “I haven’t done a thing about dinner.” She stood up and handed her cards to the Colonel. “Take my hand, sweetie. I’ve got a casserole that I’ve got to get in the oven if we’re going to eat by seven.”
The Colonel sat down in my mother’s chair, examined his hand, and shook his head. “God knows I love that woman, but she collects dead-wood worse than a tidal pool.”
Private Hollister laughed, then stopped abruptly, like maybe he thought laughing was disrespectful to my mother.
“It’s all right to laugh, son,” the Colonel said. “Mrs. Dexter’s tough. She’d have to be, to be married to me all these years.”
“Yes, sir. I mean, not ‘yes, sir, it’d be tough to be married to you,’” Private Hollister stammered. “I meant ‘yes, sir, I’ll go ahead and laugh then.’ Except I don’t want to be rude, sir.”
“You’re fine, son. Don’t worry about it.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Whose turn is it, anyway?” the Colonel asked. “Because I need to get rid of some of this wood.”
Private Hollister leaned forward. “No, I mean, thank you, sir. For what you did. I know it was because of you that I didn’t get sent to Vietnam.”
The Colonel raised an eyebrow. “How do you know that?”
“My CO told me you didn’t sign my orders. You signed everybody’s but mine. He figured it was because of my brother getting killed over there and everything.”
“If you want to know the truth, I didn’t sign your orders because my daughter asked me not to.”
“Well, thank you, sir.”
Then Private Hollister looked at me and grinned. “I sure am glad I let you win at cards.”
I kicked him under the table, but he acted like he didn’t notice. And then I looked at the Colonel, who nodded at me. And winked.
And that’s when I knew that I’d finally made a good impression on him.
Or maybe I’d been making a good impression on him all along.
I like to think that’s true.
We played cards all night, me, Private Hollister, my mother, and the Colonel, the moon rising behind us through the window, round and full. We played without keeping score, played just to hear the slap of the cards on the table, the riffle of the deck being shuffled. And though we didn’t know it yet, somewhere in Vietnam my brother, TJ, was waiting in a prisoner-of-war camp, where he would wait for two more years, without a camera, without a pen to write us a letter to let us know where he was or if he was safe.
And when he came home, when the war was over, he would look at all the pictures I took of the moon while he was gone, one for every day, even on new-moon days, when the moon hung invisible in the sky, and he would stare at them for almost an hour until he finally said, You got all the ones I missed.
But we didn’t know that yet.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frances O’Roark Dowell is the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of Dovey Coe, Where I’d Like to Be, The Secret Language of Girls, Chicken Boy, Phineas L. MacGuire … Erupts!, and Phineas L. MacGuire … Gets Slimed! A veteran Army brat, she spent her formative years moving hither and yonder and is a former resident of Fort Hood, Texas, just like Elvis Presley. She lives with her husband and two sons in Durham, North Carolina.
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