Hailey and Jake were losing it. Dad started laughing, too, and I noted that as number six. The sixth time I’d seen my dad laugh, it was Cassie. Before I thought about what I was doing, I leaned my head over and kissed her on the cheek.
She kept laughing, giving me a look without missing a beat.
As the sun set, I asked my dad if it would be all right if I took Cassie up to the attic. He nodded from where he had settled in his chair, watching football. Between Cassie and the cane, the stairs took only five minutes.
“Cut my time in half,” I noted.
“Don’t get cocky,” Cassie joked.
My father’s old tin trunk sat between a box of Christmas lights and a stack of photo albums. It had been in the back of my mind for weeks now, and when Jake invited us over, I knew I had to come up here and find it. I bent gingerly to brush off dust from the top.
“What is that?” Cassie asked.
I unhooked the latches. I remembered Batman pajamas, Jake gurgling in my mother’s arms, both of us fresh from the bath. The feel of the rough canvas of Dad’s uniform, Morrow inscribed on the breast pocket. And underneath, the wooden box. Dad’s Purple Heart.
I laughed to myself, holding it up for Cassie to see. She squinted from where she sat next to me on the floor, cross-legged.
“Oh, is that— Holy shit! I didn’t know your dad had a Purple Heart.”
Now I would have one, too. God, I couldn’t believe that. I had thought it made my dad the most important man in the world.
“What’d he get it for?”
“Shot twice in the side on the Mekong Delta.”
I couldn’t keep the memories at bay now. “I remember he lifted up his shirt to show me the scars, and I remember touching those little pink bumps and just, like, thinking he was a superhero. Not even that. Better than a superhero because he was my dad. He was like the invincible human.”
Cassie laughed.
“To survive bullets, you know? And here I was, a little baby boy, crying about a bruise, and my dad was like the cowboys on TV, getting hit and not blinking an eye. Just going about his business. I wanted to be like that.”
“You are like that,” Cassie said, touching my leg lightly.
“Of course, it’s not the same,” I said. I didn’t feel invincible. Most of the time I felt like my skin was turned inside out. Today was one of the first days in a while when I didn’t mind that it was.
“Of course not,” she agreed, smiling. “It’s always different when your parents do it.”
“When my mom died, that’s what we did. We pretended we were invincible,” I said, and hesitated.
I had never talked about my mom with Cassie, but I wanted her to know. I wanted her to know everything. “We just went about our business. Didn’t mourn, didn’t talk about it, and it wasn’t really fair.”
“To you?”
“No, to her. Just letting her disappear like she wasn’t also the most important person in the world.”
“How old were you?”
“Five. It was ovarian cancer. I barely remember her. A lady at the church had to tell me how she died. When I asked my dad, he said something like, ‘Don’t worry about it. Let her be in peace.’？”
“Damn.” Cassie fiddled with the collar on my uniform, then looked at me. “What is it with you and your dad, anyway?”
I sighed. “It’s a long story. He did the best he could.”
“He’s doing,” she corrected. “Doing the best he can.”
“You’re right.” I regarded her, realizing that even though I’d known her for only a few months, even though our relationship had been predicated on a lie, she’d seen me at my worst and she was still here. “Thank you,” I said, quickly—it felt urgent, up here among all these stories, before we had to go back downstairs to the real world. “For everything, in the past few months.”
She smiled, calm, unafraid. “You’re welcome. You know, if you talked this much all the time, our lives might be a little easier. I might understand you a little better.”
“Ha. Don’t get used to it.”
“I’d like to,” she said, then stood, fast, embarrassed.
I busied myself putting things back into the trunk. We didn’t have long before I was discharged. I knew that and she knew that, but we’d been playing married all day and there was permanence in the air. Little comments, like when she was playing with JJ, Hailey had asked if there would be a little Cassie or Luke in the future.