The funeral had been held up all that time — there were reasons, classified reasons, the kind of reasons my family had spent a decade being annoyed they weren’t allowed to know — and it had finally happened yesterday.
Yesterday.
And here was my father, this morning, informing me that four months and one day was the outer limit of his patience for my sorrow, that I had been granted a reasonable mourning period and had now exceeded it, and that the decent thing, the considerate thing, would be to take my sadness somewhere it wouldn’t lower the mood over the sweet potatoes.
I looked at him.
I didn’t say anything.
I was thinking about the flag, folded into its hard triangle, and the young sergeant who had pressed it into my hands and held my eyes for one extra second, soldier to soldier, though my family had no idea that was what it was.
Chapter 4 — The House He Built
They were acting, all of them, as though the house were theirs to reassign, and the strange thing — the thing that would have been funny if it were happening to anyone else — was that it was not their house at all.
It was mine.
It was Niko’s and mine, and every board in it had been paid for with his service.
He’d bought it eight years back, with money saved deployment by deployment, the hazard pay and the separation pay and the raises that came with rank he wasn’t allowed to tell anyone he held.
It had been a wreck when he got it, cheap because it was falling down, and he had loved that about it.
Between rotations — those strange compressed weeks home, when he’d arrive lean and quiet and slowly come back to himself — he rebuilt it with his own hands.
He tore out the ruined kitchen and put in a new one, cabinets he hung level with a patience I never had, counters he sealed on his knees at midnight because he couldn’t sleep on that first jet-lagged night home and might as well be useful.
He patched the drywall.
He rewired the back rooms.
He’d stand in the half-finished kitchen with sawdust in his hair and tell me where the crib would go, which room got the morning light, how he wanted a garden out back for the kids to wreck. The kids. He always said it in the plural, hopeful, like a man laying track toward a future he intended to arrive at.
He made every mortgage payment from wherever in the world he was, wired in on time, without fail, a man building a home for a family he was mostly too far away to live in.
I think about those weeks home more than anything else now.
They had a strange doubled quality, those leaves — he’d come back thinned out and wary, moving quiet through the house for the first few days, sleeping badly, flinching at the wrong sounds, and then slowly, the way ice goes off a pond, he’d thaw back into himself, into the man who sang badly while he sanded cabinet doors and made terrible jokes about the crown molding.
We did not have a normal marriage.
