Homefront (35 page)

Authors: Kristen Tsetsi

Tags: #alcohol, #army, #deployment, #emotions, #friendship, #homefront, #iraq, #iraq war, #kristen tsetsi, #love, #military girlfriend, #military spouse, #military wife, #morals, #pilot, #politics, #relationships, #semiautobiography, #soldier, #war, #war literature

“I thought it was a little
more interesting than ‘Oh’ when he asked.”

“Did you say
yes?”

“Of course,” she says.
“Actually, the entire conversation you and I just had—about me
moving, making a change—was contrived to lead to this shocking
surprise. Are you shockingly surprised?”

“Yes.”

“For crying out loud, Mia.”
She gets a cigarette from the hutch and tosses one at
me.

“I shouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

But I’m not ready. I light
it.

She points hers at me. “Why
aren’t at work today? You said you started again.”

“Day off,” I lie. I called
in sick. Shellie said she hoped I would feel better tomorrow and
that I should get plenty of rest and chew on some
garlic.

“I suppose I’ll have to get
a job, now,” Denise says. “Do you know how long it’s been since I
worked?” When I don’t answer, she says, “A long time.”

I put out my cigarette
half-smoked. “What
did
you say? To Brian.”

She turns away to check the
coffee’s progress, using it for avoidance the same way I do. No
wonder we love our coffee. “I told him to go home,” she says. The
pot’s filled a quarter of the way, so she pulls it out and fills
our cups, then slides it back onto the burner and sits across from
me. She rests her chin in her hand and says again, eyes filling, “I
told him to go home.” Her mouth quivers and she groans and uses a
rough hand to wipe at the tears on her cheek. “I am
sick to death
of crying. I
don’t know how you handle everything so well.”

It takes me a minute.
“Sorry?”

“Look at you.” She waves her
hand. “Nothing gets to you.”

“If you thought I was doing
so well,” I say, “why didn’t you tell me they had
email?”

She shakes her head. “I
don’t know. Jake made William make me promise. So I promised.” She
sniffs. “Jake couldn’t stand to think of what it would be like for
you if you didn’t get an email you were waiting for, or how much
you would worry if he went on an unexpected mission and couldn’t
write you for a week. I think he was wrong to do it. I think you
would have handled it just fine. You handled everything
else.”

“Well.” My hair has grown a
few inches in the past months and hangs in my face. I pull and hold
it back. “I haven’t really handled it all that well,
Denise.”

“So, you broke some
knickknacks. Big deal. If you didn’t have at least one day like
that I would kill myself.”

She uses the bottom of her
shirt to wipe her eyes and says, “Excuse me,” then gets up from the
table and follows the hallway to the bathroom. After she closes the
door I turn around in my chair to look at myself in the black
reflection of one of her artsy posters. I don’t know what she
sees.

She comes back with her face
washed, damp hairline-hair clinging to her cheeks. “Ignore me,” she
says. “Everything is okay. Everything is fine. Things happened they
way they were supposed to happen, and they could have been worse.
Right?”

I shake my head. I don’t
know.

“Right. Right, right,
right,” she says. “I know you didn’t do it on purpose, but I’m glad
you lost William’s lighter. If I’d had it, I would have given it to
his father, like I told you. But now when you find it, I can keep
it. His father doesn’t have to know. I need it, and it’s my right
as his wife. Do you think it’s still somewhere in your
apartment?”

“I’m sure of it.”

She closes her eyes.
“Good.”

I look out the window. There
isn’t much to see. A square lawn with no trees, a wire fence
separating it from undeveloped land overrun by tangled grass and
weeds. Three mourning doves peck around in a clearing a few yards
out. “You know,” I say, “I don’t mean to beat this to death, but I
can’t let you just think I’m handling everything the way you think
I am. I haven’t done well at all.”

“You just don’t think you
have.”

I let it go. Maybe she needs
me to have handled things.

I ask her, if the movers are
coming on Friday, when she’ll be leaving.

“Saturday,” she says.
“Bright and early. Or, as William would say, ‘at the ass-crack of
dawn.’” She looks out the window again. I wonder if she is thinking
it’s also something Brian would say. They all say it.

I tell her she should stop
by before then, and she assures me she will. “Friday,” she
says.

Before I leave she reminds
me to take the case of wine (five bottles are left, and I do the
math—she’s been drinking as much as I have), and then to be sure I
don’t leave it with her, she carries it to my trunk.

“What’s this?” She uses her
chin to point at a gift-wrapped box tucked between the jack and a
jug of wiper fluid.

“Co-worker’s birthday
tomorrow.”

________

I don’t go straight to
Donny’s. Instead, I drive the opposite direction on route
seventy-nine past my apartment and follow the road out to nothing.
I’ve been this way a few times to pick up fares, but haven’t really
explored the highway on my own. Small houses with slanted porches
line one side, and on the other, acres of trees are interrupted now
and then by patches of red clay where roots have been torn up for a
future gas station or strip mall.

The wind feels good on my
face, thick and hot as it is, and I don’t turn on the air. I pass
cows that don’t look up from their grass, horses tall and still in
the shade, a stand-alone pizza place with a full parking
lot.

Jake is
away—
It’ll be a few days again, M. Mission.
Miss you. Hope to have an email from you when I get back to a
computer. – Jake—
and I wonder where. I send
a quick safety wish and turn up the radio and think instead about
Denise and that she’ll be gone in a few days, not even halfway
through the deployment, and that I’ve grown to like her, for
whatever reason. She was also the only woman I had. Jake would tell
me to contact someone in the Family Readiness Group for
companionship, and he would remind me that he already told me
before he left that they’re great for information and support. “The
last thing I want to do is sit around with a bunch of women
and
talk
about
everything,” I told him.
You’re doing it to
yourself,
he would say to any admission of
being lonely without Denise.
Don’t complain
about being by yourself if you’re not going to do anything to
change it.

The trees end, and I spot a
brown sign announcing the entrance to Fort Donelson. I pull in and
drive around until I find the parking lot, then get out of the car
and grab a bottle of wine from the trunk and start down the
hill.

History, taught as an
annoying series of dates to memorize—1492: Columbus. 1773: Boston
Tea Party. 1963: Kennedy—always bored me in school. But here, this,
a history I can smell, and touch, and…and why I should care about
walking the very same trail as a Civil War soldier, I don’t know.
(If one of them could read my thoughts, he might say the trail I
walk is not their trail at all, not by a long shot.) But here they
stood, here they ate and walked and died and laughed and complained
about superior officers. Here they
lived
.

A minivan passes, its
occupants pressing faces to the windows while studying a
map.
This happened here, that happened
there.
How can they hope to feel it from
their air-conditioned pod?

Sweat dampens the pits of my
tank top and my hand is slippery around the bottle’s neck. I stuff
the wine in a deep overall pocket and pass by a family having a
picnic on a trench, blood from the past carnage hidden deep in the
soil under their checkered blanket, the scuffle a fifty-word
narrative on a pole-mounted marker. I read it, then climb to the
top of a different trench, separated from the family by a curve in
the path, and stand beside a cannon and close my eyes. I imagine it
is February of 1862, cold and bare, trenches active with cannon and
gun fire, orders echoing in thin winter air. The men I’d paid
little attention to when reading about them in high school
stood
here
,
fighting in freezing snow. Union losses numbered two thousand,
eight hundred thirty-two, said the marker. Confederates: over
sixteen thousand. This piece of land seems too small and too quiet
and too green to have seen over nineteen thousand injuries and
deaths, all those bodies turning blue in the cold.

I pull a clump of grass from
the trench and put it in my pocket.

The next clearing is circled
by a path and some benches, and a monument stands alone on a
shallow mound. Before climbing up to it, I read the marker
positioned at the base of the hill:

BECAUSE THEY HAD FOUGHT
AGAINST THE UNITED STATES, CONFEDERATE DEAD WERE NOT REBURIED IN
THE NATIONAL CEMETERY. THIS MONUMENT, ERECTED BY THE UNITED
DAUGHTERS OF THE CONFEDERACY IS A MEMORIAL FOR THOSE MEN. IT WAS
ERECTED IN 1933.

I notice and ignore the
missing comma. So many years later, and still.
Still.
No wonder Donny is convinced he
never came home. These battles don’t end.

I take the stairs to the
monument and sit on a bench in the sun. Heat warms my shoulders, my
face, my arms, and the worn denim of my overalls cling to my
thighs. I stay for a while, at first trying not to mind the heat,
but then welcoming the little bit of suffering. Running to my car
for the air would be rude, in this place. This park.

A car door slams and jolts
me awake. I get up and move on to find a place in the shade where I
can open my bottle.

Down the path is an old log
cabin, and at the bottom of the slope behind it, a cluster of
trees. A good enough place to sit, but to get there I have to go up
another hill, this one identified by a marker as a place where more
Confederates lie, “Exact grave locations unknown.” The hill is
standard for the park: longish faded grass, a shallow incline, and
like a trench, but wider, and ending at a line of trees. I stop
halfway up when I realize I’m stepping on, essentially, graves, but
something at the edge of the trees and sitting part in the shadows
and part in the sun gets me curious. “Sorry,” I say, tiptoeing.
“Sorry, sorry.”

A flower. Just a purple
flower, growing alone on the trench.

I reach out to pick it, then
rub the petals, press them gently between my thumb and
finger.

Better to leave it. It
belongs here, the way they do.

The way they did.

I head to the trees behind
the cabin and toss the bottle behind a tree. “Bottoms up.” I don’t
have a corkscrew, anyway. I lie on my back and look up at the trees
and imagine I hear their voices, smell the campfire and the breath
of their horses.

When I wake up an hour
later, I take the long walk back to the car and get on the road to
Donny’s, stopping at a grocery store bakery on the way.

________

Turquoise paint chipping off
of the motel’s façade reveals the original pink. I pull into the
spot in front of his room. Next door, shades open, and then they
close.

“Donny,” I yell, standing
outside his door.

“Who is it?”

“Mia.”

“I don’t want to talk to
you.”

“I have something for you.”
My hands are full, so my knock is a kick. I kick three times,
hard.

“Go away,” he
says.

“Didn’t you hear me? I have
something for you.”

“I don’t care what you got.
You’re dead to me.”

“Then why are you talking to
me?”

“When I call someone my
friend, I mean it. You—you betrayed me.” He’s shouting now. “You
was s’posed to be different!”

“From what?”

“Don’t be a goddamn smart
ass.”