“Mrs. Mint,” Casper interrupted. Now he was the one staring out the window, though Zig didn’t know it. “If you wait, the pastor will be back in a—”
“My neighbor offered to come sit with me,” she said, not hearing a word. “But the thought of doing this in my house, with the kids . . .” Her voice trailed off, her eyes locked on the first photo, showing Mint’s metal transfer case with his ID tags on top. “So is this . . . ? They took these right when he arrived, huh?” she asked, flipping to the next photo, of her husband’s gray face peeking through the open body bag.
“Ma’am, you don’t have to do this now,” Zig said.
But she did.
In the past twenty-four hours, Tessa had seen the body, hosted the funeral, and held her shaking kids as the casket was lowered into the ground. But like so many military families, it’s not until she examined the raw photos, with their mundane, dreamlike images of his lifeless head and bloodied wounds, that it finally hit her—that her husband was never coming home.
For two minutes, Tessa sat there silently, flipping through the photos like an old record collection, her perfect posture just starting to crack. Grief at a funeral is communal. Here, it felt like just her and Archie. She was gutted. Undone.
“Y’know, I met him in the Army,” she said, flipping to a new photo. “At Fort Drum. I thought I wanted to be a combat medic. Archie was so pushy, he signed up for a new shift, to drive a bus on one of the routes I took every day. That kinda guy,” Tessa said as Zig stepped closer, putting a hand on her shoulder.
“Didja know they tell everyone not to touch us?” she asked, Zig not sure whether he should keep his hand there or pull away. “It’s part of the training—for the team that comes to tell you that your spouse is dead: no hugging, no touching . . . just deliver the news and leave.”
Casper shot a look at Zig—they shouldn’t be here; this wasn’t their job—but Zig wasn’t leaving her.
“When we got married, Archie stayed in the Army—he wanted to deploy—but I left. Figured dental school was safer.” She laughed, flipping to a new photo, a close-up of Mint in profile, the small black bullet hole in his cheek. “As a military spouse, you don’t want to imagine the worst, but you do—especially when a friend told me to count how many people they send. If one person shows up at your door, your loved one is wounded. If two show up, he’s dead.”
“Mrs. Mint—”
“I know it sounds bananas, but for all those years he was deployed, that’s how I thought it’d happen. I’d come home and see two soldiers in my driveway, and I’d just know. But instead”—she flipped to the next photo, the close-up of the exit wound in Mint’s neck—“my phone lit up with a text. That’s it. I’m sitting at Violet’s nightly baseball game, yelling Good job for every kid who strikes out, and this text pops up from Jerri, my neighbor. You need to get home. By the time I did, there were sirens up and down the block,” Tessa said, flipping faster through the pics, barely looking at them, until—
She stopped at one of the last ones. It wasn’t of Mint. It was a photo of his open wallet.
“Personal effects,” Zig explained, though it was clear that Tessa knew what she was looking at.
She flipped to the next photo, also of Mint’s wallet, though here it was empty, all the money, every dollar—three singles, two fives, and four twenties—spread out on a wooden table, close enough that you could read the serial numbers.
When a fallen soldier returned home, these bills became totems, final gifts passed down from parent to child. As a result, Dover was me ticulous in making sure that each and every dollar, even the stray coins found in a victim’s pocket, were the exact same ones they arrived with.
“God, look at him here—he’s a child,” Tessa said, flipping to the next photo, which showed Mint’s driver’s license, military ID, and the rest of his credit cards.