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by Kristen Tsetsi

  “You know it,” she says. “The one they’re building just off the bypass.”

  I shake my head, no.

  “I came that way on purpose because I read they were going to build something for the boys—and girls—from this post who don’t make it back. It’s lovely. A beautiful thought. They deserve something like that, a testament to their honor, a show of belief in their cause. I know our Jakey will have thought it was worth it if he doesn’t come back.”

  “Yes.” I wish I had a cigarette. “A memorial. Well worth it.”

  “Yes. Well.” Olivia pushes her coffee aside and stretches and asks if there’s anything stronger, “Something with a bit of a bite, maybe?”

  She only sips at her wine on holidays, rarely finishing even half of what she gives herself. “I have—we have vodka. Left over, that is, from New Year’s Eve.”

  “That would be just fine.”

  I wash another glass and pour her drink, but she waves it off as too strong. I add orange juice.

  “Don’t you want a drink, dear?”

  “No, thanks…we really only keep that stuff around for special occasions.”

  We move into the living room. She pauses at the Christmas tree and I wait for her to say something, but she doesn’t. Too tired, maybe, or at a loss. What’s there to say? It’s just a tree, an old tree, and people forget to drag out their Christmas trees all the time. But then she touches a branch, and needles fall. She takes a sip of her drink and sighs, then sits and slips off her shoes and stretches out on the couch with her feet propped on the arm, her glass where she can reach it on the coffee table. I bring my coffee to the chair and wait for one of us to talk. She looks around the room.

  “You have nice pictures of him,” she says. “I’d like copies, if you can.”

  “I’ll send them to you this week.” But I doubt I will. Jake and I put all of our negatives together in a shoebox, unlabeled, unorganized. It would take time, and I need to find a job, clean the house, get rid of the tree. Take Chancey to the vet. A notice that came last week—or was it two weeks ago?—said he’s overdue.

  “The most recent picture I have of him is from high school,” she says. “He never sends me any of the pictures they take of them in their uniforms. ‘The man in those pictures is only part of me,’ he always says. I think he just doesn’t like the way they turn out. But, oh, how handsome he is in uniform, isn’t he?”

  He is. “Yes,” I say. “And no, he doesn’t really like them, the pictures.” Something about the way his mouth sets when he’s not smiling. He brought one home for me to see, said, “Get a good look,” then tore it in half and dropped it in the trash.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  In the bedroom is a years-old picture of Jake in his BDUs embracing his car when it was new, the first morning he took it to work. Chrome glints in flashes here and there and the roof reflects his face from the chin up. That was two years before I moved in, when he had the other girlfriend. I unfasten the back and peel out the picture and bring it to Olivia. She smiles and presses it in her palms.

  “He wasn’t my first, of course you know.”

  “Your first?”

  She sits up and drinks from her glass like it’s straight orange juice. “I was eighteen when I had her, and she died seven months later. Seven months. Shelbi.” She died in her sleep, Olivia says, and she knew right away, woke straight up from a dream. She’s buried in a cemetery in Granby, Colorado, plot 87. Just her name, Shelbi Lakeland, but no dates, Olivia says. “A soul is ageless, timeless, don’t you think? And to tell her age, well, that would just make people stop and think, ‘Oh, how young, how sad,’ but no one would remember her name.”

  I don’t remember ever having heard about a sister.

  Olivia’s husband is buried beside his daughter in a family plot with a Rocky Mountain view. Olivia and Jake will end up there, too, she says. When the time comes. I don’t tell her about his Arlington plan. She’ll be long gone by the time his turn comes around, and if it makes her happy to believe he’ll be buried in Granby, so be it.

  “Jake did tell you about Shelbi,” she says.

  “Of course, yes. Very sad.”

  “You looked surprised, is all.”

  “Oh, no. No, I just—it’s just a fresh feeling of sadness every time I hear it.”

  Olivia says I can’t imagine the pain of losing a child. I agree. She says I can’t imagine what it’s like to worry she’ll lose another. I nod. “Jake is all I have,” she says, both hands circling the glass. “Someday, hon, you’ll know. If he makes it back and you two have kids of your own.” She sighs. “Jake would make a wonderful father.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “You would have to see him with his young cousins to know, dear, but he really—well, you’ll learn, in time. What’s it been, just a couple of years?”

  “Three.”

  “And you want children, of course.”

  Not sure what to say, I smile at her.

  She waits, looking at me. “Well.” She rubs her hands on her pants. “If you’ll excuse me. Sometimes I think I’m nothing but a funnel!” She jostles the table when she stands and her drink splashes over the rim.

  “I’ll take care of it. You go ahead.”

  I wipe up the spill and avoid thinking about children, the one I don’t plan to have, the ones she’ll never get from Shelbi. When she returns she says “Yes, thank you” to a refill. She stirs it with the spoon I left in the glass. “Jake tells me he’s only received one of your letters,” she says. “Have you sent many?” She sets her spoon on a piece of paper towel left on the table.

  “Two or three.”

  “Oh?”

  “I think it takes a long time for mine to get to him.”

  “That could be.”

  “It would have to be.”

  “He’s received all of mine,” she says. “I think I’ve sent him…let me see, now.” She mouths the numbers while counting on her fingers. “Eight. I know it’s not many, but I’m so busy at work and taking care of things around the house, and…well,. I write when I can.”

  My coffee is cold, now, but I drink it anyway. The living room falls quiet minus ticking from the helicopter clock on the shelf. A gift from Olivia for Christmas, crystal and brass. Not Jake’s taste, and not an Apache. “It’s a Huey,” Jake said, looking at it with half a smile, “but to her, a helicopter is a helicopter.”

  “When did you say you mailed your last one?” she says.

  “Excuse me.” I get up. “I guess it’s contagious.”

  I lift the lid so that it taps the tank in case she’s listening from the living room and sit on the floor.

  The phone rings. I haven’t been in long enough to go back out there naturally, so I wait for the machine. It’s most likely Denise.

  If it is Jake, Olivia will pick up, and I’ll still get to talk to him.

  “Mia, hon, your phone is ringing.”

  “The machine will get it.” The bathtub presses hard on my back, but the throw rug is soft and I am alone, the bathroom a vault, a cave, a haven. I reach up to turn off the light and a low moon shines through the window.

  “What if it’s Jake?” she calls.

  “Please answer, if it is.”

  The phone stops ringing and the machine answers, plays my recording, beeps, and a voice says, “Mia,” and now it’s too late. To run out would look suspicious, especially now, so I wait it out and run through a list of explanations while he talks.

  “Hey…You there? You workin’?—Course you’re not. Charlie drove me this mornin’—hey, when did you leave? He said you quit…I’m goin’ to miss my mornin’ angel. You think I like lookin’ at that bearded bastard every day? Come over. You left your picture…Or don’t. Free TV Guide. Bye. Donny.”

  APRIL 20, SUNDAY

  The grocery store is, at six in the morning, empty and fluorescent-bright. Generic easy-listening tunes play soft through the overheads. No cashiers stand guard behind the only two
open registers; rather, they roam the aisles, re-shelving expensive items discarded at last minute and replacing products carried aisles over before becoming second-thought castoffs. Olivia walks in front of the cart with two fingers curled in the corner grating and pulls it behind her. I rest my hands on the guide bar and tap the plastic with the rhythm of the squeaking wheel.

  “He likes these,” she says, pulling a box of chocolate-covered wafers from the shelf.

  “I know,” I say, but I don’t remember having seen them in our cabinets.

  She slides the wafers between a can of soup and a box of dog-shaped crackers. She drops in a bag of candy. “He went just crazy for these when he was ten,” she says.

  She doesn’t look at me, hasn’t since last night when the argument about Donny ended without resolution. Afterward, Olivia stared out the window, the way Jake does when he’s angry, and then spent close to an hour in the bathroom. Sleep tempted while I waited, but coffee without sugar or cream, hot and pouring fast, kept me awake. When she came out, she stood by the door and wiped at her nose and said, “Good night,” and “I’ll be leaving tomorrow, in the morning. I’d like to get the shopping done early. If you’ll still be sending him a package, that is.”

  Olivia winds around an end-of-aisle sugar cone display and I follow. Her heels tap loud, and sharp waves of yesterday’s perfume, heavy on her skin, make me nauseous. I breathe in through my mouth, out through my nose, and pull a can of spreadable cheese from the shelf and drop it in the cart.

  “Oh, Jake doesn’t like that kind, hon.” She puts it back on the shelf and replaces it with a milder flavor.

  “He does,” I say. “He tried it and said he liked it more.”

  “But it’s so rich,” she says. “He doesn’t like rich foods.”

  “He likes that one.”

  She looks at the cheese on the shelf, the cheese in the cart, me.

  “Help you find something?” The stockboy is eighteen, maybe, and wears a red apron.

  “We’re fine,” she says. “Thank you.”

  Olivia watches his back until he is gone, then watches me exchange the cheeses. When I start to push the cart forward, she lays her fingers on the metal. “Was that your type?”

  “Pardon?”

  “That boy. Was he your type?”

  “Jake is my type.”

  “But you looked at him. He was attractive—even I could see that. Would you date someone who looked like that?”

  “I wouldn’t date anyone who looked like anyone but Jake. And I didn’t look at him. He asked us a question.”

  She moves the cheese to a different spot in the cart. “And six months from now? Will he still be attractive?”

  “Who? Jake?”

  “Jake. Or the boy—either one, I suppose.”

  “Jake will. I already forget what the…boy…looked like.”

  “Do you?”

  “Mostly.”

  “So, you did notice him,” she says.

  “He stood right there.”

  “You noticed him and you were attracted to him.”

  “No,” I say, “I was not.”

  “Jake could die,” she says. “He could die right this minute and you’re noticing a boy in a grocery store.” Wet mascara dots the skin under her eyebrows when she blinks.

  “I noticed no one. Please believe me.”

  “You’re staying at men’s houses, flirting with stockboys—”

  “For—! Olivia, I told you I didn’t stay at his house. And I didn’t flirt with the stockboy.”

  She wipes her face, pulling a streak of black from her eye to her temple. “Will you be faithful to my son?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Will you write him more often? One letter is simply not acceptable, and—”

  “Yes. I’ll write more.”

  “Send him more packages?”

  “I’ll send one every day.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” She shakes her hair and sniffs. “You’ll grow tired of missing him, you know.”

  “I am already.”

  “You’re a woman. You’re human. You’ll eventually want companionship. And when you do, what will you do? He loves you so much,” she says. “He would die if you hurt him.”

  “I won’t hurt him.”

  “It could be an accident.”

  “Accidents do happen.”

  “What if you decide you want someone like that cute boy to keep you company?”

  “I didn’t even notice the boy.”

  His eyes were green, not like olives but like leaves, and there were two freckles on his cheek in a direct line from the corner of his mouth his earlobe. He wore a loose hemp bracelet that fell low on his hand and he was tall, taller than I am by at least six inches—shorter than Jake, but not by much—and if he were to have held me, my head would have fit comfortably into the curve of his neck, just under his chin.

  “Oh, hon, are you sure? Are you positive?”

  “I promise. Six months or six years, I’m waiting just for him.”

  “And that man, the one on the machine. Since you quit your job, I don’t suppose you’ll have any reason to stop by his house again.”

  “No. I don’t suppose I will.”

  “Good, that’s good.”

  She turns and continues down the aisle and I hang a few steps behind. “Olivia?”

  “Mm?”

  “Has Jake said anything to you about leave?”

  “About—what? Leave? What do you mean?”

  “A friend of mine said her husband said they might be getting leave. Midtour leave.”

  She bites her lip and picks up a can and reads it. “I’m sure, no. No, he hasn’t said anything like that, hon.” She sets the can in the cart and pulls it along, past the fruit cups, which he likes. Peach squares, the ones in the jellied sauce.

  ________

  With Olivia gone, the apartment is twice as quiet, twice as empty. Chancey scratches the litter box and I hear it through the walls, nails-on-chalkboard scraping, and it goes on and goes on until I scream his name and he runs past me, into the living room and under the coffee table, where he stays.

  Nine in the morning is too early to have already finished half a normal day’s activities, too early for it to feel like noon but without the benefit of those three hours having truly passed. I’d thought of asking Olivia to stay. Not for me and not for her, but because that’s what people do, they encourage visitors to stay. She stood in the doorway the same way she’d come in, hands clasped between her breasts, and—words stuck to my tongue—I opened my mouth to force out the words, but she said, “Well. I really should start heading back, because I have an appointment I’d forgotten about entirely.”

  I read, again, the card she wrote and sealed and asked me to include in the box. On the front is a picture of one polar bear beside the dotted-line tracing of another. The inside reads, in comic handwriting and signed with a cartoon pawprint, “Something’s missing. I think it’s you.” Olivia’s note is written below it:

  Dear Jake,

  I do miss you. It feels like you have been gone for so very long. I hope you are well, because everything here is fine. I am taking care of Mia as you asked, so please don’t worry. She is working hard and she loves and misses you very much, as I do. I hope you like the food, as Mia and I picked it out together. Take care of yourself, and please stay safe. I love you—Mom.

  I throw away the envelope and toss the card into the box and spend the next three hours packing and unpacking it, arranging and rearranging, stopping to watch the news, and then starting over from the beginning when one pack of cigarettes or one candy bar doesn’t fit, until every last thing is in, even if it’s smashed. Except for the sucker-dart gun. That stays.

  On the way back from the post office, I stop at the liquor store.

  ________

  Jakey,

  That’s what she calls you, and it makes me sick.

  I miss you. You can’t know how much, because
I can’t tell you. It’s like guilt, in a way. The way it just sits there.

  She told me about Shelby/Shelbi/Shelbey (however you spell it), your mother did. I never knew you had a sister.

  Why? Why didn’t I know about her? Jake, I’m getting so confused. First it was just one thing, and now I find out about your sister, and I feel so far away from you in so many ways. Maybe it's nothing to you, your baby sister dying. Maybe it was so long ago that it ended up being just some thing that happened, but how could you not have told me? What does that make me, to you?

  Olivia still thinks you want to be buried in that place in Colorado. Yes, she talked about that, too. I wish you would be, because then I could be buried beside you, unlike at Arlington where I’d have to pass the wife test to get in.

  I never told you I can’t stand her, did I? I never said anything because I know how much you love her, but I can’t not tell you now. You know how alcohol makes you honest? I’ve only had a couple of glasses—enough to be honest!—but not so much I can’t type. Unfortunately(?)

  Anyway. (I stole that segue from you.)

  Your mother is manipulative and depressing.

  There!

  I understand, now, why you try so hard to make her happy. Why you let her come to the hangar and why you’ve called her so often. I love you, you are my life, I’m crazy sick with worry and fear and have this…this rolling, moving pain—(last week when I was driving, I sped, Jake, so fast that I even scared myself, and I thought, just for a split second and in a not-real way, what if I pull the brake and turn hard? wouldn’t it be easier?)—and she is the one you called. Olivia. Your goddamn mother.

  She’ll tell you this eventually, but I’ll tell you first: I stayed the night with a man. The one I wrote you about, Donny (did I write you about him?). But I didn’t even stay, and that’s the thing! I was there a long time, and I think I fell asleep for about an hour before I woke up to call a cab. You can call Lionel the next time you’re near a phone. Don’t call me, call Lionel, and he’ll tell you I didn’t stay the night. Do you remember the number? 7465, if you don’t. Please call him. He’ll tell you.