Home Front(41)

When the phone was free, Tami stepped forward and made her call. As Jolene listened to the singsong sound of her friend’s voice, she tapped her foot impatiently, flicked her fingers against the rough fabric of her pants, and then, finally, it was her turn. Tami hung up, and Jolene lurched forward, picked up the old-fashioned receiver, hot from so many hands, and called home.

Betsy answered, said “Hello?” and then yelled, “It’s Mom.”

Jolene leaned against the sun-warmed side of the building, trying to ignore the line of soldiers behind her, but it was impossible. She could hear them moving around, talking, laughing. “Hey, Bets. How’s your week been? I’m sorry I couldn’t call yesterday. They had us busy all day and night.”

Betsy launched into a breathless story about a trauma at school. Apparently Betsy had been chosen last for volleyball teams in PE. Sierra and Zoe had been behind the humiliation, had pointed and laughed until Betsy screamed at them to shut up and then received detention for her outburst. “Me! I got detention and it was all their fault. Can you call my PE teacher and get me out of it?”

Jolene had ten minutes on the phone, and Betsy had already used up six of those minutes telling her story. “Oh, honey, I can’t do that, but if you—”

“I get it. You’re too busy. Don’t worry about it, Mom. Lulu! Your turn!”

“Don’t be that way, Betsy,” Jolene said, her guilt surfacing again. “We get so little time to talk.”

“Obviously.”

“I’ll write you an e-mail as soon as I can, okay?”

“Like I said, Mom, don’t worry about it. I don’t need you. Here’s Lulu.”

“Betsy. I love you.”

There was only breathing on the other end; then Lulu was on the phone, sounding like a mouse on helium. At the end of a story about something she made for Jolene out of macaroni and string, Lulu said, “I want you to read me a story tonight.”

“I can’t, baby.”

Lulu burst into tears. “Daddy, she’s not coming home yet…”

“Hey, Jo,” Michael said a second later, sounding as tired as she suddenly felt.

“Lulu didn’t say good-bye or ‘I love you.’”

“She’s upset, Jo. She’ll be fine. How are you?”

Jolene had been on the phone eleven minutes. The soldiers behind her were starting to get restless. “Is she having nightmares again? Because if she is, she needs her yellow blanket and her pink ribbon.”

“Come on, Jo. Did you think the girls would say good-bye to their mother, watch her march off to war, and be fine?”

Behind her someone yelled out, “Come on, ma’am. We all have families.”

There was so much she wanted to say and no time to say it. Michael’s silence gnawed at her nerves. “I’ll write Betsy an e-mail tonight. Can you make sure she reads it before school?”

“Sure. So, your time’s up now?”

“It is.”

“Great talk, Jo,” he said in a voice she could barely hear.

She whispered “Good-bye,” and hung up the phone. Another soldier moved in next to her, picked up the receiver.

Jolene backed away; she felt Tami coming up beside her. They began the walk back to their barracks.

“Betsy spent ten minutes telling me about her day and asking if I’d call her teacher to get her out of detention,” Jolene said.

Tami laughed quietly. “So we go off to war and motherhood pretty much stays the same. And Michael?”

“He asked me why I thought the girls would be fine after I went off to war.”

“We’re not even at war.”

Jolene sighed. “How’s Seth?”

“He loves me and misses me and he’s proud of me. At least that’s what he says. According to Carl, he isn’t sleeping and he unplugged his Xbox and won’t play video games anymore—he doesn’t want to see cartoon people getting blown up. And when I think of how many times I told him to get off that idiot box…”

“How are we going to get through this?” Jolene asked quietly.

Tami had no answer for that. At their barracks, they grabbed their dopp kits and headed for the showers. Afterward, they walked over to the dining facilities—DFAC—and sat down with several of the members of Charlie Company, including Jamie and Smitty. They were surrounded by the smell of gravy that had been on a burner too long and sweet corn cooked down to mush. The drone of soldiers’ voices was like a jet engine.

Smitty was shoveling creamed corn into his mouth at an alarming rate, talking at the same time about the rifle range. Jamie stared down at his food, poking the meatloaf with his fork. He seemed far away from all of them, and Jolene understood his distance.

“We need to get our heads in the game, Jo,” Tami said. “We’re soldiers first now. That’s the way it has to be or…”

“We’ll die,” Jolene said softly. She knew Tami was right; she’d thought the same thing several times. No doubt it was what occupied Jamie’s thoughts now, too. The point of war games was, ultimately, war. Jolene needed to put her feelings for her family in a compartment and hide it away. “I don’t know how to stop missing them. I feel guilty all the time. I keep thinking that if I can say just the right thing on the phone, we’ll all be okay.”