I turn off Main and head east.
The houses shrink here, crowd closer together.
Chain-link fences gone rusty at the edges.
Pickup trucks in driveways, American flags on porches.
Working-class, my mom always said. Head high. Chin up. Like it was armor.
Maybe it was.
My parents' house sits at the end of Maple Street.
A two-story colonial that's seen better decades, better centuries.
Dad bought it before I was born, back when he was whole and the future was something to look forward to instead of surviving.
I pull into the driveway, kill the engine and sit there. The house looks better than I expected, and it sends ice water sliding down my spine.
New shingles on the roof. Darker than the weathered gray I remember, the gray that leaked every spring and made Mom put buckets in the hallway.
The porch railing used to wobble under my hand. Now it stands straight and solid.
Even the trim looks fresher, like someone touched it up in the last year.
Mom didn't mention any of this on our calls.
My stomach twists.
I grab my duffel and head for the door. It swings open before I can knock.
My mother stands in the frame, and the sight of her hits me like a fist to the chest.
She's smaller than I remember. Grayer.
The lines fanning out from her eyes have deepened into grooves, carved there by years of worry and exhaustion and waiting for a daughter who might come home in a box.
"Liberty."
She breathes my name like she's been holding it in her lungs for eight years.
Then her arms wrap around me, and she's stronger than she looks, fierce in a way that makes my eyes burn.
She smells like coffee and lavender, exactly the way she did when I was six and scared of thunderstorms, when she'd pull me into her lap and tell me nothing could hurt me while she was there.
I believed her then.
"Oh, baby." Her voice cracks. "You're home. You're really home."
I let myself sink into it. Let my forehead drop to her shoulder. Let myself remember, for two seconds, what it feels like to be someone's child instead of someone's soldier.
"Hey, Mom."
She pulls back, cups my face in her hands, studies me with the same green eyes I see in the mirror.
Her thumbs brush my cheekbones like she's checking I'm real. "You're too thin."
"Military food."
