Home Front(24)

Jolene flinched. “I’m going to do you a favor and forget you said that.”

“You are not going to war, Jo. Come on. You’re forty-one years old—”

“Now you remember.”

“People are dying over there.”

“I’m aware of that, Michael.”

“Tell them you’re a mother. They can’t expect you to leave your children.”

“Men leave their children to go off to war every day.”

“I know that,” he snapped. “But you’re a mother.”

“I was a soldier first.”

“This is not a damn game, Jo. You are not going to war. Tell them thanks but no thanks.”

She looked at him in disbelief. “I would be court-martialed for that. I’d go to jail. You don’t say no.”

“Quit then.”

He didn’t know her at all if he could say that to her. Honor was just a word to him, and lawyers made a game of playing with words. He had no real idea what a dishonorable discharge meant. “I gave my word, Michael.”

“And what was ‘I do’?” he snapped back.

“You son of a bitch,” she yelled at him. “For all these years, I’ve loved you. Adored you. And last night you tell me you don’t love me anymore, that maybe you want a divorce. And then, because you’re a selfish prick who doesn’t know me at all, you tell me to quit the Guard.”

“What kind of mother could leave her children?”

She drew in a sharp breath. It would have hurt less to be smacked across the face. “How dare you say that to me? You, who are the least reliable person in this family. It breaks my heart to leave them, but I have to.” Her voice broke. “I have to.”

“So you’re going to war,” he said.

“You make it sound like a choice, Michael. There’s no choice here. Either I go to war or I go to jail. How can you not understand this? I’m being deployed.”

“And you’re surprised I’m pissed off. I never wanted you in the stupid military in the first place.”

“Thanks so much for minimizing what I do.”

“War—and this war in particular—is a waste, and I might not be Colin Powell, but I know that helicopters are big targets in the sky that get shot at. What am I supposed to say? ‘Good for you, Jolene. You go off to Iraq and be careful. We’ll be waiting for you.’”

“Yeah,” she said quietly. The fight drained out of her. “That would have been really nice.”

“Well, you married the wrong man then.”

“Obviously. Look on the bright side, Michael. You wanted time apart.”

“Fuck you, Jo.”

“No. Fuck you, Michael.” On that, she turned on her heel and walked out of the room. She didn’t run, although she wanted to. She kept her chin up and her shoulders squared as she walked up the stairs and into her bedroom.

Downstairs, a door slammed. She was reminded of her childhood and all the fights she’d heard from a distance. She’d never imagined she would grow up to be a wife listening to her own husband leave. But even with the pain of that sad and pathetic echo, she thought Go, Michael, run.

She should have known better anyway. She knew better than to count on anyone to stand beside her, to stay. And yet even knowing that, knowing that she was alone again and that she was strong enough to take it, she felt herself breaking inside. She sat down on her bed, unable to stand any longer.

Sometime later, the floor outside her bedroom door creaked, and the door opened. Michael stood there, looking both angry and defeated. His hair was a mess, as if he’d run his hands through it repeatedly, which he probably had. It was a nervous habit. A half-full drink—scotch, no doubt—hung from one hand. She found herself looking at that hand for a moment; his fingers were long, almost elegant. She’d often said he had pianist’s hands, painter’s hands. She’d loved what those hands could do to her body.

But they were uncalloused, those hands, unused to manual labor. A thinking man’s hands, unlike her own. Maybe it all came down to that. Maybe she should have seen this scene unfolding the second she first held his hand.

“You’re going,” he said, and his voice was thin, tinged with the kind of banked anger she’d never heard from him before.

“I have to,” she said.

“Does it matter that we need you here?”

“Of course it matters.”

He finished his drink and came into the room. Putting the empty glass on the nightstand, he sat down on the bed beside her, but not close enough to touch. With a sigh, he slumped forward. The wavy mass of his hair spilled forward. Seeing him now, his sharp profile, his defeated shoulders, she was reminded of the week in which his father had lain dying. Michael had been unable to stand seeing Theo that way, gray and hollow and in pain, connected to life by machines. He’d tried to sit by the bed, but he could never do it for long. More often than not, Jolene had found him pacing in the hallways, beating himself up for his weakness. She had gone to him then, taken him in her arms and held him until he could breathe again. To her, it had been second nature, caring for him when he was hurting. But now she saw what she had never dared to see before: this love of hers was one-sided. She was the one who took care; he was the one who took.