Tami and I are roommates in a little trailer. It’s kind of how I imagine college would be. So we need photos and posters to make it homey. Can you help us out? I’ll send pics when I can.
We had dinner at the DFAC tonight—the dining facilities. Lulu, they had your favorite—peach pie. It wasn’t as good as Yia Yia Mila’s, but it made me think of home.
We are what’s called backfill （an army word for substitutes, kind of） for the 131st. Everyone we’ve met is great. I’m sure we’ll make lots of friends.
Well, guys, I better get some sleep.
I’m thinking of you all the time and loving you to the moon and back.
XXXOOO
Mom
P.S.: Good luck on your math test, Bets. I know you’ll rock it. I’m proud of you!
“Read it again,” Lulu said. “My part. Daddy, make her read it again,” she whined.
“There, I read it. Big deal. It’s hot,” Betsy said. She turned to look at Michael. “Can I go back upstairs and call Sierra now?”
“Fine,” Michael said, barely listening. As she ran past him, he got up from the chair and went to stand in front of the computer.
He stared at the picture of two women in uniforms smiling for the camera.
“She looks happy,” Lulu said.
Michael thought about what he’d learned today and he couldn’t reconcile it with this photograph. He thought about the descriptions of the war he’d heard, about finding your friends’ body parts and roadside bombs and raining shrapnel.
Two women, best friends, smiling for the camera.
He understood suddenly what Cornflower had meant. She’s a mother. Her instinct is to protect.
This photograph was a lie, as was everything she’d told him about her deployment. There’s no front line over there, Cornflower had said. So there was no safe place.
Jolene—always the hero, always the mother—was sugarcoating her life to prove there was nothing for them to worry about. She’d planted the seeds early. They don’t let women in combat. I’ll be flying VIPs around, nothing dangerous.
He’d bought it because he wanted to. He’d looked away. He shouldn’t have, for God’s sake. He’d known it was a war. Maybe it was the political backlash about imaginary weapons of mass destruction, or the bait and switch with Saddam Hussein. He didn’t know why he’d imagined this to be a lesser war, maybe, one that would be over soon and with few American casualties.
He’d seen the photos on the news of soldiers walking with Iraqi children, handing out water, posing for pictures, and he’d read about suicide bombers, but somehow he’d imagined those two things as separate. He’d let himself believe Jolene when she told him that she would be far from combat.
What an idiot she must think him.
He’d been so busy thinking about himself, being pissed off about how her choice impacted his life, that he’d barely considered the truth of where she was and what she was doing.
How did she feel, lying in bed at night, alone and far from home, knowing any second a bomb could hit her trailer and she could be killed?
*
June slipped away from Michael; days fell like rain, disappearing in the ground at his feet. At home, he thought about work; at work, he thought about home. He was always rushing and almost invariably arriving late. I’m sorry was his new default sentence. He’d said it more in the last few weeks than in the last few years.
At the end of the school year, he’d had to recalibrate his schedule. His mom was still a huge help with the girls, but summer was her busy season at the Green Thumb, and she couldn’t be at his house as much as before. So he’d shortened his workweek to four days. Friday through Sunday he worked from home, struggling to juggle the demands of fatherhood with those of his job. When he wasn’t grocery shopping or cooking dinner or washing dishes, he was writing briefs and researching cases. He sent the girls to as many day camps as possible, and still he didn’t have time to get everything done. Driving them from one place to another—or finding someone else to drive them—took an inordinate amount of time. Last week, he’d finally admitted that he wasn’t getting as much work done as he needed to. He’d handed off most of his smaller cases to associates.
That gave him more time to work on the Keller defense.
Today, his plan was to work on the deposition questions for the policemen who’d arrested Keith, as well as the jailhouse snitch.
He woke early and went downstairs to make breakfast. At ten o’clock, he was going to drop the girls off at the Thumb, where they would “help” his mother until he picked them up at two o’clock. It wasn’t much time to work, but these days, he took what he could get.