If You're Reading This

Home > Other > If You're Reading This > Page 26
If You're Reading This Page 26

by Trent Reedy


  He wiped his nose. “Your dad had told the whole Gentlemen’s Smoking Club about the letters. With Sergeant Ortiz gone, we all agreed that I should carry out his promise to your father, since I lived here in town and all. Over the years, I thought about coming clean on everything. But how could I tell you about any of this? First you were too young to know about it. Then as you got older and we worked together out here, I was afraid you’d hate me if you ever found out. I kept telling myself that I could maybe tell you later. Then your sixteenth birthday was coming and I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer. I had to send you the letters and videos so you’d read them in order. I wanted to send my own note with the letters, to at least tell you how many more to expect, but after you’d told me you wanted a note like that, slipping it in with the letters would have given me away. I’m so sorry.”

  Derek had been hiding this secret, agonizing over it, for seven years. What could I possibly say to this man to make things all right? I twisted Dad’s engineer ring, my ring, on my finger.

  “All these years, you’ve grown up without a father,” Derek said. He had begun to catch his breath again, regaining some control in his voice. “All my fault.”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” I said. “Blame the Taliban. Don’t let them ruin your life too. Dad died trying to save people’s lives.” I thought about what Dad had said about that painting. “He’d want you to move on, to live a life worthy of his sacrifice. He told me that in one of the videos he left me.”

  Derek nodded.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get a soda or something.”

  We went up to the house and sat at the kitchen table, where Derek poured us each a glass of Coke. “The thing about your dad — well, about him and Andrews really — near the end there, he really believed in the mission. I think he saw how rough it was for so many little Afghan kids, especially for the girls, and he knew we had to help. He was totally committed to the mission to help the Afghans rebuild their country, to all of us in his unit, and to his family back home. I never met anyone so selfless.” Derek stared at his untouched drink, the condensation gathering in little drops, running down the glass.

  “There’s one thing I still don’t understand,” I said. “Dad never mentioned you in his letters or videos. He called you MacDonald?”

  Derek actually smiled. “Right. MacDonald. I was a weird guy back then. When I was first switched over to your father’s squad, I kept talking about what I knew the best outside of the Army. Farming.”

  I frowned. “Then … MacDonald —”

  “ ‘Old MacDonald had a farm,’ ” Derek sang. “MacDonald was the nickname they gave me. A bunch of the guys had nicknames. That little guy, PFC Weebly, was really named Weebler. A fat soldier in a different squad was known as ‘Pork Chop.’ Everybody called Specialist Fredrickson ‘Fast Freddy.’ ”

  He went on to tell me how he’d joined the Guard shortly after 9/11 because he wanted to fight for freedom against the terrorists.

  “You really think this long war in Afghanistan has protected our freedom in America?” I asked.

  Derek shook his head. “Eventually I figured out that it was like your dad said one night over there. Maybe our job wasn’t to fight directly for American freedom, but to help the people of Afghanistan reclaim theirs.” He took a drink. “I know you’ve had trouble understanding the point of what we were doing over there, but if you could have seen those boys and girls going to school after being denied an education for so long, Afghan men and women finally getting the chance to vote, all the new construction going up, you’d know that what we did helped a lot of people. It was important. Your father believed that.”

  “I know he did,” I said.

  “It’s just …” Tears welled in his eyes all over again. “I’ve been home for seven years. Seven years, Mike. I still have nightmares sometimes. If I allow myself to think about it, to really focus on it and remember it … I can’t hold myself together. I don’t know. I feel like maybe I breathed in so much Afghan dust that the place stayed with me. All of it. The music, the little kids calling out for candy and soccer balls, and …” His voice shook. He swallowed. “… and the bad stuff too. How am I gonna … ever get past this?”

  I fidgeted with the ring on my finger, reading the Essayons inscription around the red stone. I drank the last of my soda and set the glass down. “I don’t know,” I said. “But we will. Somehow. We need to find a way to let go of the war, of what we’ve lost, and of the past. We need to stop trying to hide from the truth of all that so we can start living for today and tomorrow. We have to. All of us.”

  “You’re thinking of your mom,” he said. “I know she and your dad were having problems, but some of those problems were just the basic deployment stress we were all under. She took your father’s death unbelievably hard. It’s not going to be easy to get her to talk about this.”

  “I know,” I said. “But we have to start somewhere.”

  “That reminds me,” Derek said. “I have something else for you.” He left the room, and I petted Annie until he returned with a large manila envelope. “Your father wasn’t going to write letters for Mary. He said he didn’t know the first thing about what advice to give a daughter. Said your mother would take care of it. But Ortiz told him he had to write something, and after he got started, he found plenty to say.” Derek looked down. “It’s my responsibility to pass them along. I don’t know if he wanted them kept secret until she was almost sixteen or not, but …” He handed me the envelope. “I’ll leave that all up to you.” He sat down and sighed. “What are you going to do about your mom?”

  I stood up from the kitchen table. “There’s been enough silence. Enough lies. We need to get the truth out in the open so we can start to move forward. I have no idea what I’m going to do. But Dad was always talking about the Cowboy Way.”

  Derek nodded and smiled.

  “I’m going to saddle up and try,” I said.

  Coach had talked about Hard Work, Integrity, and Team. I had been working hard for years, but I hadn’t had integrity with the team of my own family. Every time Mom and I had to talk about anything that was in any way difficult, we’d somehow push it aside. Either she’d become too upset and I’d let the issue drop, or one of us would find a way to dodge the conversation entirely. In order to have integrity, I had to be honest with Mom about what I needed. About what we all needed.

  That night I paced the dining room, waiting for her to get home from work, thinking about what had gone wrong in my family. I figured Mom was a lot like Derek in the way she was so torn up over Dad’s death, except instead of being super generous like Derek, Mom was super protective. Maybe she was trying to keep our family exactly as it used to be because she felt guilty for having told Dad that she wanted a divorce. I couldn’t know for sure because we never talked about any of this. That was going to change, starting tonight.

  The loud, gravelly thunder that could only be the muffler on Mom’s ancient Ford Escort grew louder and louder. I looked out the window to see her pull into the driveway. I reminded myself to stay focused on getting Mom to talk about Dad and making some changes around here. Hamlet had said about confronting his own mother that he had to be “cruel only to be kind.” Bringing up this old, painful subject might seem cruel, but it was a lot more kind than letting us all go on like this.

  When Mom came in through the front door, she dropped her purse and keys on the dining room table and smiled at me. “Hey, Michael. How was your day?”

  “It was … fine,” I said. In a way, I almost wished she had come in grumpy and exhausted. It was a shame to have to ruin her good mood.

  “You okay? You don’t look so good. You’re not getting sick, are you?”

  “No, I’m not getting sick.” I said. “I was wondering if we could talk.”

  “Oh?”

  “I wanted to say that I’m sorry for having lied and gone behind your back to play football. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about a major purchas
e when I bought my truck.” I held the back of the chair tightly. “I should have been more open and honest with you.”

  She looked surprised. “Thank you, Michael. I appreciate that. But let’s just forget about it now. That’s all in the past.”

  Agreeing with her would be the easiest thing to do. That’s how we usually handled problems around here. We just forgot it in order to avoid talking about anything that might upset anyone.

  Time to take my chances. “Mom, I think we need to talk about Dad. And what he would have wanted. For all of us.”

  Mom’s eyes widened. “We’ll never know —”

  “I know.” I held up my hand to show Dad’s combat engineer ring. “Derek Harris has been fulfilling a sort of promise he made to Dad, mailing me letters and videos that Dad made for me. I know that Dad wanted more for all of us.”

  “What? Michael, please don’t start up about this right now.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I need to talk about —”

  “What?” Mom said. “What possible good can come from bringing all of this stuff up again? Derek shouldn’t have sent you those letters and things. You’re not old enough.”

  “Dad thought I was old enough.”

  “He was wrong.”

  Mary had left her chair in front of the TV and stood in the archway between the dining room and living room. “Please don’t start fighting again,” she said.

  I held up my hands. “I don’t want to fight at all. But Mom, I can’t go on living like this. I need more than just schoolwork and farmwork and helping out here at home. Dad wanted more than that for me. He told me so in his letters.”

  “Derek had letters from your father all these years, and he never told me? Why didn’t he say something? It’s not right for him to keep them secret. You shouldn’t have been reading them.” Tears ran down Mom’s cheeks. “You’re not ready.”

  “Mom, listen to me. I already read the letters. I’m ready. We’re all ready. We’re all desperate for something new.”

  “New like going behind my back to play football?”

  “I’m sorry about that, Mom, but if I had asked you ahead of time, what would you have said?”

  “I would have told the truth, unlike you! I don’t want you playing football, Michael. There’s better things to be doing with your time. You need to focus on your studies.”

  “Mom,” I said calmly.

  “Then you rush out and buy that truck!”

  “What does the Falcon have to do with this?”

  “I know you don’t understand now, but as your mother, it’s my job to protect you.”

  It was happening again, just like always, the dodging of the issue, talking around the truth. “What about what Dad wanted for us?”

  Mom threw her hands up. “All of a sudden, it’s all about your dad? I’m not good enough for you?” Tears welled up in her eyes. “Don’t I work hard enough? Don’t I slave away at two jobs every day? And you want to ambush me with all this?”

  “Mom, no, it’s not like that.”

  “You’re great, Mom,” Mary said.

  “You’ve worked so hard for us,” I said. “I know it’s been tough, and I want to thank you for all you’ve done.”

  “This is how you thank me?” Mom shouted. “By yelling at me?”

  “I’m not yelling.”

  “Just give him a chance to talk, Mom,” said Mary.

  I tried again. “You’ve helped us so much. You’ve sacrificed a lot. Dad talked about helping others, about how a real hero —”

  “Oh, here it comes again!” Mom said. “All that hero stuff. Seven years I’ve been hearing that, how my husband was a hero when he died.”

  “I know it’s painful to talk about him,” I said. I put my hand on her arm. “You were crushed. Sad. Anybody would be.”

  “No!” She yanked her arm away from me. “I was angry! I was mad at him, all right! I’m a terrible person! It was my duty to be the sad widow of the fallen soldier, and I was sad, yeah, but I was also mad!” She flicked her finger against the ring on my hand. “You got his ring? His precious letters! Probably a bunch of advice from the big war hero?” She slapped the table so hard that a stack of papers fell off the end. “What did I get? A folded flag and a couple thousand dollars that barely paid for a funeral.” She glared at me. “You don’t think you’re getting the chance to live your life? What about my life? I work as hard as I can in two jobs that I hate, and in this economy I’m lucky to have the jobs, and they’re still not enough to pay the bills!” She stepped around the table toward me. “You think I don’t know that my own son spends his money helping to fix the furnace or my junk car’s stupid fuel pump?” She hit the wall. “I’m not stupid! I wanted to go to college! I could have done something with my life!”

  “You still can, Mama,” Mary cried.

  She looked at Mary in anguish. “Baby, we don’t have the money. We have a measly ten thousand in the bank from your dad’s life insurance that he made me promise I’d save for your educations. How am I going to afford college when I can barely afford basics around the house?”

  “Somehow, Mom,” I said. “I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers, but we have to do something. If you want to go to college, we can find a way to use Dad’s G.I. Bill, and maybe the ten thousand. I can borrow the money when my time comes, and then we’ll figure out what to do about Mary.”

  Mom pulled a tissue from her purse and blew her nose. She lowered her hand but didn’t face us. “I’ve messed up everything in my life, but I’ve kept telling myself that the one thing I’ve done right is made sure you two would have it better.” She stepped away from me. “When you were little and in junior high, Mike, I saw you playing football, and that’s all your dad ever seemed to care about. I hear about you in the same wood shop classes that he used to take. You were with that, that girl” — she noticed Mary and I scowling — “who happens to be Muslim, and near the end he was so wrapped up in helping those people. You are so much like him, Michael, and I wanted … I still want so much more for you.”

  I put my hand on her back. “You’ve done that, Mom. Mary and I are going to make it just fine. But we can’t be so focused on the future, or on the past, that we ignore our lives in the present.”

  Mom hugged me, resting her cheek on my shoulder so that I could feel the wetness on her face. “I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I’m so sorry.” Mary took a few timid steps closer to us, tears on her cheeks as well. Mom and I both reached out to her until she joined our circle.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” I said. “I’m sorry too. For a lot of things. But we need to let go of what’s gone wrong, and start working on making things right.”

  * * *

  Mom, Mary, and I stayed up talking late into the night. The conversation became tense or sad at times, but we actually had an honest and respectful discussion about everything from finances to curfews, and from dating to household responsibilities. We even started talking about long-term future plans. Mom agreed to at least check into the costs for programs for registered nursing.

  It hadn’t been easy for any of us, but by the time I went to bed that night, I felt like I’d accomplished the mission Dad had given me to do something good for Mom and Mary. And it felt good to me too.

  Tuesday morning came ridiculously early. I drove the Falcon to school with Mary, who was dressed in a leopard-print shirt with a cat-eared headband and whiskers drawn on her face. Today’s Homecoming Week theme was “Zoo Day,” and everyone was supposed to come to school dressed as their favorite animal.

  She frowned when she saw me looking over at her. “What are you looking at?” She tried to sound annoyed, but she wasn’t very convincing. Mom had laid down heavier restrictions for her than for me the night before, such as an earlier curfew and more frequent check-ins when she went out with friends. At first she tried to argue about this, but I think she finally figured out that if this deal opened things up for me a little at sixteen, life could only get better fo
r her.

  “Mike?” she said. “You know how you’re always telling me what Dad would have said about stuff?”

  “Yeah.” I sighed. “I’m sorry if I was overbearing and —”

  “Do you think he wrote any letters for me?” She looked out the window. “I’d like to read them.”

  Maybe my little sister wasn’t completely terrible. I’d only read the very beginning of Dad’s first letter to Mary, enough to know he had the same plan for her letters as he’d had for mine. “He wanted you to have his letters when you were a little older.” I could tell she was about to complain, so I hurried to continue. “But I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Mike?” Mary laughed. “You’re still a dork.”

  * * *

  Coach Carter was in a teacher meeting all morning, so the first chance I had to talk to him was in seventh-hour American History II. I didn’t even put my books down at my desk but went straight to his. Coach let me stand there while he finished checking a test. Finally, he looked up. “Yes, Wilson?”

  I unfolded the football permission slip and handed it over, with my mother’s signature — her real signature — in big swooping letters on the blank near the bottom. Coach examined the paper for a moment and then looked up at me. “Integrity.” He waved the signed permission slip. “Can you deliver Hard Work?”

  “Yes, Coach.”

  “Then welcome back to the team.”

  I couldn’t hide my grin. “Thank you, Coach.”

  Carter said nothing, but I could swear that the slightest smile began to crack through his usual tough expression.

  I went back to my desk, catching nods and encouraging waves from Ethan and Gabe. “Hey,” I said quietly as I passed Isma’s desk. She stared straight ahead as if I didn’t exist.

  I still didn’t have a date to the homecoming dance, though I would go alone if I had to. Laura had apparently forgotten about me as soon as I was off the football team last week. She was going to the dance with the guitar man, Hunter Thorson.

 

‹ Prev