“What about you, Tony?” Johnny asked from where heshared the picnic bench with Gina in the corner of the room,a touch of challenge in his voice. “Do you know anybodyon The Wall?”
Tony saw Gina’s surreptitious look and found himselfsmiling. Protective as ever. He hadn’t been able to take herwith him until his third trip, and even then he hadn’t donemuch talking.
“Yeah,” he said simply, his attention on the chicken he was sautéing. “I know somebody on The Wall.”
Fingers reaching out in hesitation, a single name standing out among the thousands. Reflections on the black granite of flags and flowers and small notes stuck in thecracks. People milling in silence behind him. The statue watching in the distance like an old memory. Waiting forhim to return.
One name. Ten names. Twenty. Tony had sought outthem all. He had touched each one of them with his hand,as if he could really reach behind him through the years andhave them back again. He’d donned his old fatigues and held his friends who had gained weight and lost hair andkept that distant, sad look in their eyes, and he’d finally wept for the ones left behind.
It had been the most difficult thing he’d ever done, because the minute he touched those names with his fingers,he’d been forced to admit that his friends had existed afterall. That they had saved him over there in that terrible place,and that he hadn’t been able to return the favor.
It was why he knew that Claire Henderson was lying.
Yeah, he thought. I know somebody.
“What did you do in Vietnam?” Jess asked, poised likea high-wire artist, mangling the plastic cup she was still carrying from the fast-food stop they’d made on the way home.
“He doesn’t want to talk about that,” Johnny protested.
Jess whirled on him. “Maybe he does,” she said. “MaybeI want to hear it.”
Tony left his chicken to simmer and turned his attentionto that quicksilver little girl who reminded him so much ofGina as she’d been teetering into the teen years. “What would you like to know?” he asked quietly.
On the other side of the kitchen island, Claire made ashow of getting out plates, her back turned to them both.
“Anything,” Jess admitted. “Where you served. What itwas like. How you... how that happened.”
“I was a Marine,” he told her. “First Division. I enlisted in 1968 and went to Vietnam in December. Ended up serving in with a Combined Action Group right around the areawhere your mother was in Chu Lai. The CAGs supplied individual villages with teams of about ten men to help withVietnamization. By the time I was wounded in November,we were about the only Marines left that far south in thecountry.”
“November?” Johnny echoed, finally interested. “Thatmeant you only had a couple of weeks before you were supposed to go home anyway.”
“I was so short I was invisible,” Tony acknowledged. “Almost a single-digit midget.”
It had been his first reaction. Two damn weeks and hewould have been on the Free Bird. Two weeks. He’d thoughtabout it all night when he wasn’t telling Smitty how stupidthey both were to end up in the water at midnight in a monsoon. When he wasn’t watching for muzzle flashes andstraining for the sound of movement beneath that pummeling rain.
“How were you hurt?” Jess asked.
He kept it simple. Recon patrol, ambush, a night in thelovely Paddy Suite at the An Diem Arms. A quick hop in thedust-off and Claire.
Jess never took her eyes off him as he spoke. Claire neverlooked over. It made Tony realize that her children hadnever heard about what she’d done over there. The bad or the good. They saw their mother as a mother like anybodyelse’s, maybe a little sadder, a little less open about her life. Normal. They didn’t really realize that she’d survived mortar raids during surgery and sappers and the crushing weightof all those wounded men.
Say something, Claire, he almost begged out loud. Tellthem that their mother is a heroine. That but for you, therewould have been no respite over there. There would havebeen no heaven in that hell.
Tell them so they know how lucky they are.
Tell them so you’ll remember how much you gave.
She was bent over the cutlery drawer counting knives andnever heard his plea.
“When your mother saw me,” he said anyway, knowinghe was treading on unsteady ground, “she hit me in the jaw.Smacked me silly.”
Jess’s eyes got very wide. “Shehityou?”
He nodded, his gaze still on Claire. “Hard. She said it wasto get my attention. It did.”
“But why did she hit you?” the girl demanded.
Over by the corner of the table where Gina and Johnnysat, the attention was on the far corner of the kitchen wherethe cutlery drawer was. It was on the clinking of metal, syncopated and slowing.
