The Impossible Knife of Memory(19)

The Big Date must have already started. I started to text Gracie to ask if she knew who Finn was going out with, but I deleted the message. The information wasn’t worth alerting her Early Warning System. It was probably a girl from another school, anyway. He was a big flirt with an inflated opinion of himself. In fairness, he was sort of funny. And not entirely unattractive. My thoughts drifted to what he must look like in a Speedo, but I yanked them firmly back. The heat was causing my brain to short-circuit.

I stepped off the bus, wiped the sweat off my face, and started walking. Maybe I’d skip the game. I’d find a way to borrow the team statistics and eavesdrop by the jock table Monday morning to pick up a few quotes. That would work. Totally work.

The closer I got to home, the better I felt. I’d treat myself to a reading marathon all weekend. All the ice cream I could eat, all the pages I could read. Heaven.

The mood lasted until I saw the trucks crowded in our driveway: two shiny pickups, a battered SUV, and a Jeep Wrangler with no roof or doors, along with three motorcycles. They were stuffed full of camping equipment, fishing poles, coolers, and covered with military bumper stickers.

The windows of the house were open, shattered, maybe, by the deafening volume of the music being played in the living room. The song stopped and a loud chorus of voices, men’s voices, burst into laughter, name-calling, and cursing.

I opened the door. The living room and dining room beyond it were crowded with a dozen guys all older than me and younger than Dad, with military-short hair, black ink on jacked-up arms. They wore Tshirts stretched tight, silver dog-tag chains slipping under the collar. Despite the heat, they all wore long pants, jeans, or camo. A couple had knives hanging off their belts and sat with knees bouncing, eyes restless, darting on involuntary perimeter checks. Soldiers, for sure. Active duty infantry, on leave.

Dad sat in the middle of the couch, pale and tired compared to them, but looking more like himself than he had in months. He raised a can of soda high.

“Hayley Rose! Just in time!”





_*_ 27 _*_

The guys all shook my hand, polite and respectful as Dad introduced me around. The sight of them, the smell of so many soldiers in a room on a hot day, brought back a vague memory of living on base when I was little. I shook my head to clear it away.

“Is there going to be a quiz to see if I can remember your names?” I asked.

“No, ma’am,” said several of the guys at once.

“Wait till you see the backyard,” Dad said.

As we walked through the house, he explained that they all served with an old friend of his, Roy Pinkney, and were on leave and headed north to Roy’s camp near Saranac Lake.

We stepped out of the back door and my mouth dropped open.

“Roy took one look at the backyard, hollered ‘Potential!’ and sent some of his boys into town to rent a mower,” Dad explained with a grin. “It only took an hour or so before they had the whole place squared away.”

For the first time in weeks, the backyard had been mowed. Mowed and neatly raked. A fire pit had been dug in the middle, circled with stones and piled with wood, ready to be lit. A soldier stripped to the waist was chopping wood with a splitting maul. Chairs and upended logs waited around the fire pit. Four small tents had been set up, too, poles straight and strings taut.

A tall, bald man walked up to us. “Do not tell me this is your little girl, Andy. No way.”

“Hayley Rose,” Dad said. “You won’t remember him, but this is Roy.”

I put out my hand to shake, but the man gathered me into a big hug and kissed the top of my head.

“Not possible,” he said, releasing me and smiling. “It is just not possible for you to have grown up this much.” He stepped back and looked at me. “I hope you thank God every night that you take after your mom instead of this ugly cuss.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Do you remember the first time you handed this angel to me, Andy?” Roy asked.

“When we were living next to the PX?” Dad asked.

Roy nodded. “You must have been about, what, five months old?”

“I don’t remember, sir,” I said.

“Three months, I think,” Dad said. “Rebecca was still alive.”

My mouth dropped open for the second time because Dad never, and I mean never, said my mother’s name out loud.

“You’re right,” Roy said. “I can remember her laughing at me. You see, Hayley, your father handed you to me just as you were starting to do your duty in your diaper. And it was July, as I recall, so all you were wearing was that diaper. I’d just come from, I don’t know where, but it was something that required me to be in my finest dress uniform and I looked good.”

Dad snorted but Roy ignored him.

“So I sit down in your folk’s apartment and your sweet mother leaves to pour me some iced tea and your face goes all red and you start grunting—”

(I said a quick prayer of thanks that the shirtless guy chopping wood could not hear this.)

“—and Andy hands you to me, and I knew nothing about babies so I laid you on my lap. And then your diaper exploded.”

Dad and Roy both cracked up and I waited for the earth to swallow me. Roy gave me another hug, and then Dad did, too, and finally I laughed and I realized that there was no way in hell I was going to the stupid football game.