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by Kristen Tsetsi

  “I understand,” he says. “Don’t be sorry.”

  “I’m not.”

  “But I think you might want to take a minute to try to understand me, too. I’m not a deserter.”

  “You may as well be.”

  “And? What if I were? If you’re so in favor of the war, why aren’t you suiting up? What, because you’re a woman you’re exempt from duty to country? If you’re on the side of the war, surely you feel the responsibility to—”

  “I never said I was for it.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “And why?”

  “I’m just not.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question. Come on.” He points at the television. “You saw that as well as I did. The statue fell, the people rejoiced. Did you see? That was the word they used, I think. Rejoiced. How, after something like that, can you offer no support for your opinion one way or the other?”

  “Anything I say will sound stupid to you, because I don’t involve myself in politics, and I don’t—”

  “Ah.”

  “What do you mean, ‘ah’?”

  “I understand, now.”

  “What do you understand?”

  “You. It’s natural, of course, but it’s a shame that your involvement….or, rather, your interest…only exists because your boyfriend is there.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “There was no need.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Am I? In that case, I’d be interested to know your views.”

  “Leave it alone, will you? I watch the news. I know enough, but not enough to discuss it with you like someone who has all—or even one—of the answers. I don’t know. I don’t know anything about why it happened other than what they told us, but I know it feels wrong. That’s enough for me. I’m against it, and that’s all.”

  “Well, good,” he says. “That’s good. You understand me, then, and you see I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “Nothing wrong?”

  “No.”

  “You joined the Army and you’re avoiding the war—”

  “War? When did it become a war?”

  “The conflict, then. You avoid the conflict, and you see nothing wrong with that?”

  “I’ve done nothing illegal—”

  “Adultery. That’s illegal in the military, isn’t it?”

  He sighs. “Nothing illegal, and if they needed me, they would send me.”

  “They do need you. To replace William.”

  “It doesn’t work quite that way.”

  “Lucky for you.”

  “This is not a war I agree with,” he says. “I don’t even think it was a war William agreed with.”

  “Should you be talking about him?”

  He doesn’t answer. He folds the paper towel into a square and slides it in his loose cargo pocket.

  “How do you know what he thought, anyway?”

  “I am—correction: I was—a pretty close friend of a friend.” He doesn’t make eye contact. His free hand fiddles again in his pocket and coins scrape.

  “But he went,” I say.

  “He did go. Yes. And now? Where is he now?”

  He’s looking down at his cigar. Should have been smart, William, like me, I imagine him thinking. I was screwing her—did you know?—when you died.

  “You’re disgusting,” I say, and I swing at him again, wanting to draw blood this time and wishing I had the strength, a man’s strength, to leave him crumpled on the floor. He catches my arm—I should have expected it, but didn’t—and clenches it, his fingers pressing hard on bone. The pain feels good, like a fight I’ve been craving.

  He says, “If you’re trying to knock me across the ocean, you’ll have to hit a lot harder than that.”

  “Let go.”

  “Promise not to hit me again.”

  I twist my wrist.

  “Do you promise not to hit me again?”

  “No.”

  “Fair enough. Do you promise to try not to hit me again?”

  “Yes.”

  He releases me and neither of us looks at the other.

  “I’ll come back later,” he says. “I’ll write my number and…just call me when you find it.”

  “No,” I say, for some reason afraid to have him leave. “I’m—it has to be somewhere. I haven’t taken it out of the apartment.”

  Brian says yes to coffee.

  He sits at the kitchen table and fingers an orange pepper jutting straight from a branch of deep, smooth leaves. I saw the plant yesterday, last minute. It sat among paired gerbera daisies, faded ivy hanging from plastic pots. Red-striped dracaenas and African violets. I scooped it in my arm and took it—and my dinner, frozen in a box—to the cashier.

  Jake likes peppers if they’re not yellow.

  “Milk or sugar or anything?”

  “No, thanks.”

  I set down our mugs and sit across from him and he pushes the plant, tall between us, against the window and taps his fingers on the table. His hands look soft, his nails professionally manicured.

  “So.” Brian blinks and a long curl tugs his eyelash. He moves it aside with his thumb. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  His cigar smoke makes me nauseous. Not a real cigar, but a cheap, dollar cigar from the corner gas station. It smells like raspberry and he smokes it like a cigarette.

  I ask him why he joined the Army.

  “A few reasons,” he says, “and none of them too exciting.”

  “Security,” I say.

  “Mostly, yes. You were hoping for patriotism.”

  “I don’t care what your reasons are. How much time do you have left?”

  He tells me, one year.

  I tell him it’s probably a good thing.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather I come back later?” He looks at me with something like the start of a smile and says, “I get the feeling you don’t like me.”

  Two coffee grounds drift in a slow circle in my mug. The window is open wide, but the breeze blows in, dragging the smoke past us and into the hallway, the living room, my bedroom.

  I say, “She says she got rid of you.”

  “Yes,” he says. “She ‘got rid of’ me.”

  “And you want to see her again?”

  “Very much.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, you’re not. That’s all right. I don’t know you or like you well enough to care.” He smiles and takes a drink.

  “You must have been excited—well, or, you know—at first. Just like that, she was free, open, but then, just like that,” I hit the table, “his accident is what’s left you sitting here with me, just waiting for this little…thing…you can bring her. Like a ball. Or a dead mouse.”

  He puts out the cigar, barely smoked. “It was more than that, that did it,” he says. “I suppose it started months ago. Disagreements. Nothing too out of the ordinary, or too special, but special to us.”

  “William would be so relieved.”

  The way the sun—a wide patch broken only by the tree branches just outside the window—falls on his neck and upper chest, his dog tag chain glints against his skin and a thin shadow-line follows the linked balls over his collarbone, under his shirt.

  “Why are you wearing those?”

  Brian looks down, his neck wrinkling under his chin, and tugs at the chain. “These? Why?”

  “It’s just a question.”

  He laughs.

  “What?”

  “You’re incredibly unremarkable.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “How do you continue to find ways to take issue with me, bit by bit?”

  “What issue?”

  “Outstanding.” He laughs. “But, I’ll play. What else is there to do while I wait?”

  “Sorry. Really—it was just a question. Someone like you—”

  “Someone like me. Listen, now.” He leans forward and talks fast. “This—the Army—is my
job, the same as it’s John Smith’s job to take the elevator to the seventh floor every Monday through Friday. But, in a curious way, you’re so involved in what some of you—and by ‘you,’ I mean civilians, but more specifically, the respected wives and girlfriends (and, of course, all praise given is due and your job is the hardest job in the military, and all that, as they say)—call the ‘military way of life’ that you will sit there and question what I wear. For the record, there is no dog tag regulation. Did you know that?”

  No. “Yes.”

  “But, let me get back to your question. Why am I wearing my dog tags?” He taps his chin with his finger. “There’s no good reason. I forget to take them off, half the time. Now, what if I were to ask you why you’re wearing red underwear? You have no boyfriend here to wear them for. What must that mean?—Yes, I saw them. When you were bending over your desk. My point is, you’re very eager to enforce rules you don’t—as a civilian—have any obligation to live by, but I have a feeling it hasn’t occurred to you that it’s not any of your business.” He picks up his cigar, relights it, takes two short puffs and puts it back down. He looks at me through the smoke. “You get so engrained, some of you. And you’re not even married to the military, yet. How is that? How does it happen?”

  “I’m not engrained.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Just because I know things doesn’t mean anything,” I say. Much of my familiarization happened sporadically and by accident. Jake’s salute of a higher ranking officer outdoors came after a simple nod he’d given another higher ranking officer while we were inside, and I’d asked him why, when indoors, he only nodded.

  “Because we were inside,” he said.

  “So?”

  “So, you don’t salute inside.”

  “Why not?”

  “You just don’t.”

  “But why?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know, M. Tradition.”

  Some other time, some other day, on a trip to the commissary, Jake and I drove past a Humvee convoy.

  “Are they going to the field?” I said.

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “They’re wearing helmets.”

  “You have to wear your Kevlar any time you’re in a military vehicle.”

  “Even if you’re just driving from one building to another?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But—”

  “Mia. I don’t know.”

  And the language—some of it, at least, bits and pieces—came over time: K-pot, MOLLE, DONSA.

  Controlled flight into terrain.

  Involuntary loss of life.

  “It’s a culture,” I say. “There are customs. Traditions. You can’t help learning them.”

  “Obviously, to a point,” Brian says. “But people like you sometimes go too far, and you forget you have your own role in the universe. That his life is not your life.”

  “I know that.”

  Brian is right, of course, and Jake would be disappointed, would wonder who I’ve become, if he knew how much I think about him. His world, his day-to-day.

  “I’ll be right back,” I say. “I think I know where the lighter is.”

  In the bedroom, I sit on the bed next to yesterday’s underwear. I stuff them under the blanket and look outside, at the house across the street, the weeping willow in the front lawn.

  I close my eyes and take a breath and immerse myself in a cloud of nothing.

  No Jake.

  There is no Jake.

  Emptiness, this letting go, but at the same time, less hollow. Exciting, but scary—like waking up in a strange man’s bedroom in the blind hours after midnight.

  Brian calls, “Are these peppers edible?”

  A pepper, half white and half purple, floats into my nothingness. “Yeah, sure, have one.” The peppers, some are—

  “No, thanks,” he says. “Just curious.”

  —yellow, the pretty yellow that comes between early-phase white and end-phase red, and whether Jake likes yellow doesn’t matter, now.

  I like it. I like yellow.

  Brian’s chair slides, and alone with just him I am suddenly very aware that his attractiveness isn’t ordinary, at all.

  “Hellooo,” Brian says.

  My eyes open to the willow, swaying, and to the bedroom I’ve come to hate, and to his picture taped to the wall beside the bed. I touch his forehead.

  When I lean out of the doorway, I see Brian waiting in the living room with his hands in his pockets.

  “Tell me,” he says, “is there any chance I’ll be leaving with that lighter before evening?”

  “I just remembered where I put it.” I step back into the bedroom and pull the lighter from my pocket. William’s initials shine like scratches in the brushed silver. Expensive. Worn. Too precious for war? A gift from Denise, maybe. “What’s so special about it?” I look in the mirror, put on just enough lipstick to moisten, but not so much he’ll be likely to notice. “The lighter, I mean.”

  “His father gave it to him. That’s what Denise said, anyway,” he calls back. “Why?”

  I squeeze it, and then I hide it in a bowl of makeup—old lip gloss, old mascara, the lipstick I haven’t worn in full force since the party. As I enter the living room, he opens his mouth to say something and someone knocks on the door.

  “Just a minute,” I say, and, “Come in!”

  Safia swings open the door, but stays in the hallway with her black cat draped over an arm. Shoes scrape in the stairwell behind her and Safia takes a step inside when my floor neighbor, long red hair caught under the shoulder strap of an oversized bag, says, “S’cuse me,” and drags her feet to her door and struggles with her lock.

  Safia smiles over my shoulder at Brian. “Hello.” She uses her cat’s paw to wave, then invites me (“And you, too, if you would like to come,” she says to Brian, who declines) to a Friday dinner. Just a few friends, she says, and plenty of good food. I tell her I’m busy, and I’m sorry, but she insists I stop by when I’m done doing whatever it is I’m doing. “Please,” she says. “You made me lunch and I would like you to come.”

  “Lunch was to pay you back,” I say.

  “Yes! That is what I said, but it was too much for one cigarette. You must come, and we will be even.”

  I tell her I’ll try to make it.

  “Not you?” she looks at Brian

  “No, I don’t think so,” he says. “I’m…busy on the weekends.”

  “It will be fun! Mia, bring your friend.”

  “He’s not my friend.”

  “Ohhh,” she says, smiling, flipping the paw at me.

  “Really,” I say.

  “Maybe,” Brian says. “I’ll see if I can get out of—of my engagement.”

  “Good!” She claps her hands and her cat jiggles on her arm. “I will see you then, and if not you, then you.” She points at me. “You for certain.”

  “For sure.”

  She waves again, hand and cat paw both, this time, and pulls the door closed.

  “You’re not going with me,” I say.

  “It was just an answer she wanted to hear. I never say no to anyone.”

  “Clearly.”

  “Give it a rest.”

  He follows me into the kitchen and leans against the counter. “So, I’ll be happy to get out of your way whenever you want to give me that lighter.”

  “I thought I knew where it was, but—” I spot my mug on the counter behind him. I reach around his waist and he doesn’t move. His shirt smells like soap or aftershave or something fresh and light. He watches with little interest while I drink what’s left. “Don’t worry, though.” Coffee clings to my upper lip, so I wipe it off with the back of my hand. “I’ll keep looking, and when I find it, I’ll call Denise or run it over myself.”

  He rubs his forehead, like feeling a bruise. “You don’t think—maybe I could help you look for it?”

&nbs
p; “If I don’t know where it is, how could you?”

  “Right. You’re right, of course.”

  I tell him while I mix a drink that he should visit her anyway, if he needs to say goodbye, but he says he can’t show up without the lighter.

  “It’s not your fault you don’t have it. You should go, anyway. For closure, or…”

  He sighs. “That’s not what I want.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Her.”

  “After all that’s happened?”

  He tucks his hands in his pockets and fiddles with whatever is in there.

  “Her husband is dead,” I say.

  “I know. And—truly—it’s awful. You don’t want to question how I feel about that,” he says, and the way he says it, I don’t.

  More knocking on my door. When I open it, my red-headed next door neighbor looks inside, around me. “Have you seen my papers?”

  “Your what?”

  “My newspapers. I go out of town for a few days, and when I come back, there’s nothing.”

  “I don’t know.” I haven’t had a chance to taste my drink, yet, so I taste it, and it’s good enough. “No,” I say. “I haven’t seen your papers.”

  “Are you sure? Because they leave them right outside my door, right there on the mat.” She points at her mat.

  “I haven’t seen your papers,” I say. “But if I do, I’ll let you know.”

  “I was looking forward to them,” she says. “I do the crosswords every day.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “It’s only ten dollars to subscribe, you know,” she says before I close the door.

  Brian says, “Did you?”

  “What?”

  “Did you steal her papers?”

  “I don’t even know what she’s talking about.” And then I say, and I don’t know why, “Brian, she never loved you.” To hurt him, maybe. To keep him from going to her.

  “Yes, she did. She still does.” He takes his keys from his pocket and hooks a finger through the ring. “I know, because she’s hurting.”

  “It couldn’t be because her husband is dead.”

  “It’s different. Trust me. But, I don’t expect you to see it. Denise has said you’re a very black and white sort of person, so you’ll see what you see. And you won’t see what you can’t see. And I think there’s a very…obvious…reason for your inability to understand what’s happening between Denise and myself.”