Thank You for Your Service (17 page)

And?

“I remember she shook my hand.”

And:

He became Uncle Matt.

He’s over at the house a lot now, which he much prefers to another night in the barracks with the new, young soldiers who have come into his unit, all of them the stupid age he once was and eager to go to a place where they might get to dive for cover. He has told Amanda everything he has to tell about what happened, and for that alone she is glad to have him with her. He is her best link, the one person on earth who stuffed thirty-three rolls of Kerlix into the torn-open insides of her dying husband. He comes over and hangs out, and sometimes if it’s late he’ll sleep over, which has happened enough times for her to get used to seeing his uniform hanging in the closet where James’s ought to be. There’s never been anything romantic, just two people keeping each other company and a connection that at times seems too complicated to make sense.

She remembers picking him up at the airport one time. She rushed toward him and he rushed toward her and people started clapping as they embraced.

“I think we just got married!” she said.

“I know!” he said.

It’s weird. They realize this. Doesn’t matter. There’s happiness in being around each other.

Sometimes, though less often now, he wonders whether she blames him, and sometimes she wonders when he will stop blaming himself.

“I hate you,” she texts him one day, and he is pretty sure he knows what she is saying.

“You can’t leave it,” he says. He means the war. “You just end up carrying it.”

Night now. Thirteen hours to go.

“Mommy, can I watch the TV?” Grace asks.

“Bring me the remote,” Amanda says.

“Mommy, where’s the remote?” Grace asks.

“In the drawer,” Amanda says.

“Mommy …”

Ding-dong
.

“Sally!” Kathryn says, looking toward the door.

The new doorbell is like the old doorbell, but the tone is different, softer, a little higher on the scale, and that makes all the difference. Amanda doesn’t flinch.

In comes Sally. “How are you?” she says to everyone, putting her things on a table near the cupcakes that came from Washington, D.C. Fifty-five dollars Amanda paid for those cupcakes—twenty-nine for the cupcakes, twenty-six for shipping. Well, whatever. There’s a jewelry box, too, with a necklace inside, something else that Amanda got for herself for the anniversary. Sally opens the box. The necklace has three stones, a sapphire and two diamonds.

“Mommy’s going to wear that tomorrow,” Kathryn says, and runs off to watch TV with Grace. By now they are used to Sally, who is here so often that she has taken over one of the drawers in the bathroom. She was with them for anniversary number two and anniversary number one and would have been with them the day James died except she didn’t know. She and her husband, Brandon, were away in the little town they grew up in on the other side of the lake. It was a big day there, the annual fall festival, with a parade around the town square and past the grain silo that featured among other things a strutting girl in a red spangly top who could twirl three batons at once. There was a wedding that night, too, and what Sally remembers about that, other than missing the calls about James, is a woman with one eye who kept popping it in and out. So she wasn’t around for James’s dying, but she has been around since and is now the person Amanda leans on most of all, whose very life is Amanda’s wish, and not only because it includes a husband who is alive. The note that Amanda wrote mentioning sunflowers and pies—that was written while she was at Sally’s, about the life that Sally and Brandon get to have.

Crisp mornings.

Golden soybeans.

It’s more imagined than true, of course. There may be mums on Sally’s
porch and bluebirds in the big tree, but those bite marks in Sally’s hand are part of Kansas, too, and the soybeans that Amanda saw not even two weeks ago are already turning brittle and brown. In Sally’s life, a house costs $95,000, not $555,000, and when something goes wrong it is fixed by her and Brandon, not Larry down the street. In the kitchen, the boxes of aluminum foil are anything but lined up. In the bathroom, on top of a stack of diapers, is a credit card that one of their three children nearly flushed down the toilet. It’s a good house, loud and disorganized, especially now, at the end of September, when the harvest is beginning and Brandon will spend the next few weeks taking off from work and helping his parents with their hundreds of acres of soybeans. The work is dirty. The combine will break down at one point. They will all gather around a part that bent in the wrong direction as it scraped over the uneven ground and worry that they don’t have time for this, that the first frosts are coming and the beans have to get out of the pods and into the trucks and onto the scales while the going rate is still ten dollars a bushel. Their life of rhapsody is in truth a practical one, with only so much room for luxuries such as melancholy. The sorghum that Amanda noticed? If she were to walk into one particular field behind Brandon’s parents’ new house and dig down into the dirt, she would come across a nail. And then more nails. And then eventually pieces of shingle and some charred pieces of wood. Once, Brandon’s family home stood in that field. Then it was time for a new house for his aging parents, so a trench was dug, the old house was pushed into it without ceremony and set on fire, and now from a grave of memories that no one mourns over grows beautiful sorghum while the family gathers in a new prefab to pray for a safe and bountiful day. That’s who they are, Christians above all, get-it-done Christians, and when Amanda came into their lives with such grief and force they turned to their Bible for guidance. “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress,” it said in James. “Give proper recognition to those widows who are really in need,” it said in Timothy, and when it didn’t go on to make an exception for widows living in $555,000 houses on oops money, they had their answer.

“I think I was put in this place and this time to meet her and go
through this experience with her. I don’t think anything is random,” Sally explains one day, and so she will forever show up at Amanda’s house on James’s anniversary without Amanda even asking.

She settles onto a chair. She’ll stay the night. She starts humming some George Jones as she watches Amanda, a little frantic, clean up the kitchen, wipe down the stove that won’t ever get clean enough, rearrange the dishwasher that the kids once again loaded incorrectly, get frustrated that the new paper towels she bought won’t fit on her old holder.

“Can I just go to your room?” Grace asks at one point, and she heads off to Amanda’s bedroom, where she sleeps almost every night now, either because she will come in on her own or because if she doesn’t Amanda will go get her and carry her in. “So it’s not only her issue,” Amanda says about that.

Twelve hours now. Her phone chimes with a text message. Larry, she hopes, with news about the tree, even though she knows deep down that it’s already too late, but the message is from her mother.

“What are your plans for tomorrow?”

Amanda knows her plans down to the minute.

She will put up a new flag. She will take Sally and the girls out to breakfast and give the girls new necklaces. They will get their nails done and eat cupcakes. She will drop the girls off at school and go with Sally to a movie, and by the time the movie ends James will be dead and there will be nothing she can do about it except to start feeling better.

She also knows what she won’t do, which includes talking to her mother. Or her father. She won’t talk to James’s family, either. She will want to talk to Matt and Alex, and Sally of course, but that’s it. No one else.

“What’s tomorrow? Is tomorrow something important?” she writes back to her mother, and a few minutes later, when her phone chimes again, she sighs.

“The tree will be planted tomorrow morning.”

It’s from Larry.

Amanda bursts into tears. She hates crying in front of people. But she can’t stop herself.

Sally puts her arm around her and reminds her of the day when the
tree was first planted at the old house. It was in early November, two months after James died, and Sally got a call from someone saying that Amanda was having a hard time and it would be good if Sally could go to her right away. Sally hung up and ran out the door. She hadn’t showered. She was still in her pajamas. But a widow was in distress.

“And you didn’t have your bra on,” Amanda says, remembering, laughing really hard all of a sudden, and is there a better friend to have than Sally?

Bedtime now.

Sally takes one side of the bed, and Amanda takes the other. Sally falls asleep right away, and Amanda doesn’t. “It’s going to happen,” she lies awake thinking, and there are nine hours to go until she is on her way to writing the sentence, “This is what being a widow looks like.”

A few days later, Sally gone, Matt gone, Alex gone, the cupcakes gone, with one thing left to do, Amanda tells the girls to get their jackets.

“Which one?”

“The Columbia.”

“The light blue one?”

She grabs some flowers she has bought, and soon they are on the road in the SUV that Amanda got after James’s death, which gets such terrible mileage that she is glad sometimes that James doesn’t know. “I told you so,” she hears him say sometimes. “I told you to stay practical.”

“Mommy, try some of your pumpkin seeds,” Kathryn says.

“I am on a very winding road right now. I’ll try some when I get on the interstate,” she says a little too sharply, and when her next sentence comes out no better, she reaches into the console next to her seat and pulls out a Bible.

“Philippians. Chapter Four. Verse Six,” she says, handing it back to Kathryn to read to her. It’s the verse someone gave to her when James deployed. Pray and be thankful and everything will work out, it says, and how many times has she read it? And how many times has it helped? “Do not be anxious about anything,” she waits to hear Kathryn read, but what Kathryn says after a moment is, “Mommy, what’s this?”

She has discovered a folded-up piece of paper tucked behind the cover. “The Perfect Man,” it is titled, and it’s in Amanda’s handwriting.

The list covers both sides of the paper and goes up to number thirty-seven:
knows marriage is forever
.

Amanda says nothing. She wrote it one day as one of those exercises in hope and placed it in her Bible for whatever reasons a person would choose such a hiding place. She waits for Kathryn to read the Bible verse. Kathryn keeps looking at the list. A mile goes by. The car is quiet. Finally, Kathryn turns to the verse and reads it out loud and Amanda explains what it means. “God is in control,” she says anxiously. She turns on the radio and tunes it to a Christian station, and when Kathryn complains, Amanda says, “That’s one dollar.” Kathryn keeps complaining. “Two dollars.”

“But …”

“Three.”

“But …”

“Four.”

“I don’t have four,” Kathryn says.

“Five.”

“Six.”

“Seven.”

Kathryn begins to cry, and Amanda wonders about her own behavior. Why isn’t she feeling better yet? The anniversary is over, and except for the thirty paralyzed minutes she spent in the car outside of Bed Bath & Beyond not knowing where to go or what to do next, it went according to plan. And the plan included feeling better.

The miles go by.

“Are we almost there?” Kathryn asks.

“Yes, and we will be there when we get there, and if you’d like to whine about it I can start charging you again,” Amanda says.

What is
wrong
with me, she keeps thinking.

At last, after two hours, they drive through the entrance to Fort Leavenworth and toward the thousands of white tablet headstones in the cemetery.

“How did they get so many?” Kathryn asks, looking out the window. “How do they put them in the ground?” And then: “I see Daddy!”

They have come to a small section of the cemetery marked by a sign that says, “The markers in this memorial area honor veterans whose remains have not been recovered or identified, were buried at sea, donated to science, or cremated and their ashes scattered.”

Or are currently in a gun safe, it doesn’t say, but close enough.

This is the last thing to do: the yearly visit to a headstone with James’s name on it, the date of his birth, the date of his death, the name of his war, and, Amanda sees as she gets closer, some dried droppings from the birds perched overhead in an oak tree. She grabs a package of disposable baby wipes from the car and starts cleaning as Grace spreads her arms like airplane wings and takes off serpentining through the neighboring headstones. “Grace. Not appropriate,” she calls out, trying not to holler, which would be inappropriate, too. The hush of the place is like air pressure here, and that’s what Amanda was hoping for when she made her request for a headstone—a place for the girls and her to visit that would feel a little more formal and permanent than visiting a box of remains.

It’s a moody day, made more so by an iron sky and strong gusts of a chilly wind. Acorns are dropping and bouncing all over the cemetery. Kathryn, off by herself, kicks at a few of them, and now one must have conked Grace on the head because she is suddenly teary. Amanda goes to her, and as Grace latches on to her legs she realizes it is the sadness of this place at work, so she tries to distract her by pointing to the first thing she notices, an acorn that has just dropped next to James’s headstone. “Look. It’s a perfect acorn,” she says, and Grace apparently thinks so, too, because she takes it from Amanda and places it in her pocket. On the drive back, she keeps taking it out and looking at it every so often, and Amanda, noticing this, gets an idea.

Home now, she goes to her drawer of aluminum foil and plastic bags. She’ll also need sawdust, according to the instructions she has found on a website, and as she thinks about all of the things she moved from the old house, she remembers the jar down in the tool room. It’s a peanut butter jar that James cleaned out and filled with sawdust one day when he was building the doghouse. Or was it when he was building the rack to hold the firewood? Or the rack to hold the coats? Well, it makes no difference. The point is that before he died, he was thoughtful enough to save some sawdust, and now she scoops some of it into a plastic bag, dampens it, drops in the acorn, places it in the refrigerator, and begins to feel better at last.