Home Front(32)
To my beloved Elizabeth Andrea, writing this letter is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Not because I don’t know what to say (although I don’t, not really), but because I cannot stand the idea that you will read it, that I will be gone, that you will know how it feels to be a motherless girl …
She wrote and wrote and wrote, through her tears, until she couldn’t find a single additional word to say. And still it wasn’t enough. When she finished, her hands were trembling. Lulu’s letter was no easier; with every word written, Jolene thought about a child who would forget her mother almost completely …
Michael, she wrote at last in this third letter, pausing, her pen held above the paper, her tears dripping now, hitting the paper in small gray bursts. I loved you, beginning to end. Take care of our babies … teach them to remember me.
She folded the letters, slipped each one into its own envelope, and put them in the metal box along with her wallet and her driver’s license.
After she put the lockbox away and closed the drawer, she sat there, staring out at the night, feeling empty. She got to her feet—she was unsteady now, weak in the knees—and went to her closet, where she found her big green army-issued duffle bag. Throwing it onto the bed, she began to pack.
She was so intent on finding the things she had put on her list and folding her uniforms in precise thirds that she didn’t hear a knock at the door, but suddenly Betsy was beside her, staring down at the gaping duffle bag, unzipped and full of desert camo ACUs and sand-colored boots and army-green tee shirts.
“Hey, Bets,” Jolene said.
Betsy walked woodenly toward the bed, her gaze fastened on the small silver tangle of dog tags that lay beside the duffle bag. She picked them up, looked down at the rectangular bit of steel that recorded the facts of Jolene’s service.
“Sierra said you were going to kill people,” she said softly, her voice catching. “And then Todd laughed and said, ‘No she won’t, women can’t shoot—everyone knows that.’”
“Betsy—”
“I saw a movie once, where a soldier was identified by dog tags. Is that what they’re for? To identify you?” Her eyes filled with tears.
“Nothing’s going to happen to me, Betsy.”
“You shouldn’t be going.”
Jolene swallowed hard. She wanted to pull Betsy into her arms and hold her tightly and vow to stay home. “I wish I weren’t.”
“Swear you’ll come home okay.”
“Oh, Betsy…” Jolene tried to find the right words, the way to make an unkeepable promise to a girl who would never forget what was said right now. “I love you so much…”
Betsy looked stricken. She made a strangled sound and burst into tears and said, “That’s not a promise!” Then she threw the dog tags to the floor and ran out of the room and slammed the door shut behind her.
Jolene bent slowly to retrieve her dog tags. Putting them around her neck, she sighed tiredly. She would finish packing and then go to Betsy, and try—again—to make her daughter understand.
*
Tonight was their last night together. Jolene had spent the day with her daughters. She’d let Betsy skip school. The three of them had seen a movie, gone ice-skating, and had lunch at Red Robin.
Now the sun was beginning to set.
Jolene had a plan for this last evening together. She wanted to go to the Crab Pot for dinner. They needed—she needed—one last perfect memory to carry forward like an amulet into the separation that was coming.
For years, the Crab Pot had been “their” restaurant. In the hot, lazy days of a Northwest summer, they’d walked there, strolled along the beach at low tide, often having contests along the way. There were prizes awarded, usually a two-scoop ice cream cone, for the first one to find an agate, a sand dollar, a perfect white rock.
In years past, Michael had come with them. He’d carried brightly colored buckets, plastic shovels, armloads of towels, and bags of sunscreen. But in the months since his father’s death, he’d changed. Maybe if he could go back in time for just a second, just long enough to remember, he could give Jolene the one thing she needed most tonight: her family together before she left. She needed to know that Michael would do a good job with the girls, and that he would be waiting for her return, that she still had a husband to come home to.
“Come on, you guys,” Jolene said again. “Let’s go to the Crab Pot for dinner.”
Only Lulu cheered.
“It’s too cold,” Betsy said, thumbing through the songs on her iPod, adjusting her earbuds. “No one goes to the Pot until summer. Only old people will be there.”
Michael pointed the remote at the TV, flipping through channels. In the silence, he shrugged.
That was enough agreement for Jolene. “Perfect. We’re going, then. Get your coats, guys. It might be cold out.” She spent the next ten minutes herding her family through the checklist—coats, boots, and blankets. She threw four beach chairs in the back of her car, just in case, and ten minutes later they were driving down the winding road that followed the shoreline.
The Crab Pot diner was a local institution. Built fifty years ago by a Norwegian fisherman, it was a small, shingled building positioned on a perfect lip of land between the road and the sand. A weathered gray deck fanned out all around it, decorated with picnic tables and surrounded by fencing draped in fishing nets and strung with Christmas lights. In the summer, red and white plastic tablecloths covered the tables, but in the off-season, when only the locals stopped by, the tables were bare.