Thank You for Your Service (5 page)

Sally is the one who gets to hear this. She listens to Amanda with the endless patience of someone who spent a few years teaching emotionally disturbed children, three of whom left bite marks in the fleshy part of her right hand, and one with a mother whose tooth fell out in the midst of a parent-teacher conference. “Do you have any Super Glue?” the embarrassed woman asked, holding the tooth, and so Sally understands that life has its complications and sadnesses, including in Kansas. She is also a cheerful person, which Amanda needs, and someone who likes to hum as she goes about her day, which Amanda doesn’t mind at all, not from Sally, except for the time she was absentmindedly humming “Taps,” giving it a peppy bounce.

Humming away now, she and Amanda are packing up the master bathroom when she suddenly falls silent. She is looking at the contents of a drawer she pulled out. Men’s deodorant. Men’s shaving cream. A half-empty tube of toothpaste. A toothbrush with hardened bristles, unused for years.

“I’ll move that drawer, Sally,” Amanda says.

“What?” Sally says, still looking.

“I’ll move that drawer,” Amanda says.

Sally never met James, who had already deployed by the time she and Amanda became close. She knew him only from what Amanda described: twelve years older than her, the love of her life, her rescuer. Now Sally is the rescuer, and has been since she stood with Amanda as Amanda faced her children to tell them what had happened. Grace, who looks so much like her father, was three, and Kathryn was six, old enough to always be haunted by what her mother was about to say. Don’t use euphemisms, Amanda had been advised. Don’t say, Daddy went to sleep. Don’t say, Daddy went away. Be truthful. Be direct. “Daddy got hurt,” she began, and the next sound in the room came from Kathryn, a sharp intake of breath.

“Here’s his nail file,” Amanda says now, standing next to Sally,
cleaning out the drawer. She picks up his nail file and then a blue plastic case with a dental mold in it.

“What’s that for?” Sally asks. “His sleep apnea?”

“No. Grinding his teeth,” Amanda says, and for a moment, he is alive and grinding his teeth and she can hear it.

In those first hours after James died, the doorbell kept ringing as word spread. In came the casualty assistance officer. In came a pastor. In came neighbors with Swedish meatballs. In came a friend with her little boy, who fell down some stairs and cried and cried. More neighbors came, and more kids, and now into the commotion came Saskia Schumann, who had been called by one of those neighbors saying that James had been hurt.

“Is he going to be okay?” she asked Amanda, not knowing, and as Amanda began crying, she did, too, because she was certain that Adam was dead as well.

She and Amanda had met for the first time just a week before, but they had been e-mailing for a month, since James, at his own request, had transferred out of a desk job he hated at the brigade level and taken over Adam’s platoon. All of his new soldiers had been leery at first, especially Adam. Doster had never been in combat. Before his desk job, he had spent ten years as a recruiter. But he was so clearly happy to be among this group of soldiers that his enthusiasm rubbed off on them, and before long Adam and James were hanging out and Adam was thinking he might survive this war after all. As for what James thought: “They’re the most amazing group,” he told Amanda, sounding so happy that she got teary. “There’s one guy in particular,” he went on. “His name is Schumann, and he impressed me as soon as I met him.”

So Amanda called the wife of the impressive Schumann, asking to get together. She told James how excited she was, and nervous, too, like butterflies before a date. Saskia wanted to meet her as well, because of how much better Adam was sounding. “Not at all what I pictured her to be,” she would say after she and Amanda met at a restaurant. “We were the same age, and she looked to be thirty-five.” But Amanda would say,
“We just clicked. We just talked about everything,” and that’s what she told James when he called in the early hours of September 29.

In Kansas, it was still September 28, late in the afternoon. Amanda was in the minivan with Kathryn and Grace when her cell phone rang, and she parked and stayed there for the next hour as the sun set on the last full day of her marriage. At one point, Grace climbed onto her lap as she was telling James that if the doorbell ever rang, she wouldn’t answer it. It wasn’t a premonition that caused her to say this, it was just the way conversations between a person in a war and a person in a minivan tended to go. Of course you would answer it, James said, all serious. They were supposed to talk again later in the day, this time through a video linkup that soldiers could sign up for from time to time. September 29 was to be James’s turn. But he was going to be home on leave in a few weeks, he told Amanda, and talking by video would mean staying on base and missing a mission, so he had given his slot to Schumann, who seemed in need of it.

“Talk to you later,” he said.

And that was how Adam, who always found the hidden bombs, stayed behind on September 29. Instead of going out, he talked by video to Saskia and remained on the base afterward while James went out and got blown into pieces by a bomb that no one saw. “None of this shit would have happened if you were there,” Adam got to hear soon after from a soldier who had watched James dying, and meanwhile Saskia was at Amanda’s, hugging her and thinking the same thought over and over: Adam was with James. Adam is dead, too. “Come home,” she begged him the next time they spoke, and a month later he did.

“Can you tell me what happened?” Amanda said at the airport.

“How did it happen?”

“Did he suffer?”

“Were you there?”

“It took Adam so long to put that together,” she says now to Sally, looking out at an elaborate wooden play set in the backyard. “On the instructions, it said it would take two moderately skilled adults sixty hours,”
she says, and remembers how Adam did it by himself while she and Saskia drank mojitos and margaritas.

So much for those days: for whatever reason, she and the Schumanns drifted apart, the play set has been sold to some neighbors who would be coming over soon with a truck, and everything else is being boxed. “Fifteen thousand pounds,” the foreman guesses at how much it will all weigh, which, if he’s right, would be almost double the poundage they had been expecting. “Maybe sixteen thousand.”

Maybe so. The gun safe alone is six hundred pounds, the new bedroom furniture is solid wood, the entertainment center is so big and heavy that it will take four movers to get it off the ground, and then there are all of the other things that Amanda is sorting through.

There is the box labeled “James had on him when he died,” and inside the box are the things found in the uniform that was stripped from him so the doctors and nurses could better pound on his chest: three photographs of the girls, his USAA credit card, a card with Arabic phrases, his knife, and a lighter.

There is the gray T-shirt he was wearing his last night home, which reminds her of the beginning of their marriage, when she was eighteen years old and he told her that he liked his T-shirts folded a certain way, and she would practice whenever he left the house.

There is a piece of wood with four hooks in it: “He built that. Gotta take that. I painted it. He was pissed off. I over-sprayed, and it got on the sidewalk. I didn’t account for the wind,” she says.

There’s a bag with cheap tin dog tags that someone sent to her along with a note that said “Please accept these identification tags on behalf of a grateful nation,” which infuriated her then and makes her wonder now why she has saved them. There are the three handmade wooden boxes sent by someone from Canada who read of James in the paper, each made of walnut because he read that James liked walnut. Why would an article in Canada mention that a dead American soldier liked walnut, she wonders, but the boxes are beautiful and she’ll be taking those.

There’s his Purple Heart, his Bronze Star certificate, the condolence letter from President Bush that says “We will forever honor his memory,” the flag she was flying outside the house when he died, the flag
that was flown in his honor over the Arkansas capitol, and the condolence book in which his first wife, who couldn’t have known that his dying words were “I’m hit,” wrote “I’m sure his last thoughts were of his family.”

There’s the autopsy report that begins, “The body is that of a well-developed, well-nourished male,” and goes into detail about what happened to that body for six pages, and a copy of the initial army investigation into his death, with the sworn statement of a soldier who wrote, “myself and Golembe started cutting off all his gear and trying to talk to SFC Doster, he was still breathing but was unconscious.”

Into his tool room now. The rider mower will go to the new house, she tells the movers. The four hammers. The three saws. The old boom box up on that shelf. The two chainsaws. The workbenches. The steel wool. The rusty nails. All of it, actually, every bit of it, even an old peanut butter jar filled with sawdust.

On to the bookshelves. Yes to the brochure titled “101 Reasons to Own a Chainsaw,” yes to
The Complete Book of Composting
, yes to
Military Widow: A Survival Guide
, yes to
Single Parenting That Works
, yes to the rest.

Into her kitchen, where the boxes of aluminum foil and plastic wrap have been lined up in a drawer so that the lettering faces the same way, and more than anything else in the house, the precise arrangement of these boxes explains why Amanda had to turn off the oven and make a list before she could hear that her husband was dead. If they’re not lined up that way, she feels off balance. It’s the same with her spice jars, and with her shoes, which are categorized by color, subcategorized by material, and sub-subcategorized by style. She is the daughter of a man she describes as an ill-tempered drinker who married and divorced her mother five times, and the daughter of a woman who five times married that man. She had an older brother who left home when he was fourteen and died in a car crash, and then when she was adrift and in need of order in her life, she met James, who was all about order and self-sufficiency. After the military, he wanted a life off the grid, as he put it, just him and Amanda and whatever children they had. They would grow their own food, dig their own well, be powered by solar. But he was also willing to compromise when Amanda said she wanted to be near a hospital for
those children, and the compromise was three acres on a street called Liberty Circle and a house where at least the aluminum foil is under control.

Outside now. She’ll need to move the flag, but will she need to take the bracket? She won’t be able to sleep in the new house if there’s not a flag flying, but does the new house have a bracket?

Back inside, where James is propped up in one of the chairs. The movers are trained for these situations. Under contract to the army, they have their own perspective on the consequences of war. Just recently, they moved a soldier from Kansas to a rehab hospital in Texas, and as the soldier watched them pack his things, he kept crying because he had lost his legs in the war and was unable to help. That was bad enough, but they’ve come to learn that war widows are the hardest by far. Ask nothing about the dead, they are instructed, and so they don’t ask what happened to James or why he is in a chair. Instead, one of them asks, “Ma’am, do you want us to pack your mops?”

Yes to the mops. No to the firewood. No to the jacket that James hung on a hook when he came in from splitting the firewood and has been on that hook as long as that dental mold has been in that drawer. She’ll move the jacket, and not that they’re asking, but she’ll move him.

They bought this house for $280,000. She sold it for $375,000. The new one cost $555,000, but money wasn’t really an issue because of life insurance policies and the army’s tax-free payment of $100,000, which it calls a “death gratuity.”

“Blood money,” she calls it on her bad days.

“Oops money,” she calls it on her better days.

Whatever it’s called, it is allowing her to make this giant leap to a new life in a new house that is 2.8 miles away.

To get there takes all of six minutes. After one last night on Liberty Circle that James spends in the living room, she drives along some dirt roads, turns onto a path that seems to be leading into the woods, and arrives at a brand-new house that dazzles even the well-trained movers.

“Sweet, sweet, sweet,” one says.

“House has like twelve bedrooms,” another says.

It has six, actually, plus an exercise room that in a pinch could be a seventh. “This is my kind of kitchen, if I ever become a chef,” another says, all dreamy for a moment as he sees the marble counters and two dishwashers, and then he and the others return to their regular lives of unloading what turned out to be just under sixteen thousand pounds.

“Ma’am, where do you want this?” one asks, carrying in a fan from the first of the trucks.

“Exercise room,” she says.

“Ma’am, this room here. This is what you’re calling the dining room?” another one asks, and when Amanda looks at him quizzically, he says, “I got confused because it’s so big.”

“Ma’am, which one was the storage room again?”

“It’s … it’s … I’ll just go down and show you.”

“Ma’am, where do you want your doghouse?”

“Ma’am, where do you want your camcorder?”

“Ma’am, where are the girls’ rooms at?”

“Okay,” she says, leading him upstairs.

“Ma’am, where’s the safe go?”

“The safe goes … in the safe room,” she says, and after going back downstairs and showing him the safe room, she ducks into one of the bedrooms and says, “Ma’am, ma’am, ma’am, ma’am. I don’t like being a ma’am. At twenty-eight, you should be a miss. Or a Mrs.” She closes her eyes. She takes deep breaths. She stands in the soft carpet. She is teary. She wishes Sally were here, but Sally had to go home to be with her husband and kids. She wants so much to remain in control. There’s a knock at the door.

“Ma’am, can I use your restroom?”

She shows him to one of the four bathrooms and then says to no one in particular, “I don’t know what to do.”