Part 3

PART 2: One Pink Shoe Matt is our little brother. He's thirty-four. He went to West Point, just like Dad. He served five years as an officer, just like Dad wanted. Then, nine years ago, he resigned his commission, moved to a little town in the Ozark hills called Cotter Springs, and became a fourth-grade teacher. And he married Jess. A waitress at the diner where he ate breakfast every morning. My father called him at midnight the day Matt told him. I was in the kitchen and heard every word. "You threw away a West Point education to wipe noses and marry a waitress," Dad said. "You're no son of mine." The next morning, every picture of Matt in that house was gone. When people asked, Dad told them he had two children. Matt and Jess had a little girl six years ago. Her name is Lily. She has Matt's ears and Jess's laugh, and she has never once met her grandfather. Rachel sends her birthday presents every year. I drive up to Cotter Springs every couple of months. We never told Dad. In this family, you learn which subjects can get you thrown out of the house. On Friday at 3:41, Matt was holding his fourth graders down in the hallway when the tornado hit. The main building held. The gymnasium didn't. Lily was in that gym, at the after-school program, with twenty-three other kids. When my soldiers and I arrived that night, my brother was out on that pile of broken concrete and twisted steel, digging with his bare hands. A sheet of roof metal had sliced his forearm open almost to the bone. He didn't even know it. He just kept digging. I had to tackle him. My medic wrapped his arm while I held him down in the mud and he screamed his daughter's name. That's where the blood on my sleeve came from. We found Lily on Saturday night at 9:40, thirty hours after the tornado hit. She was in a little pocket of space under the folded-up bleachers, where the steel had fallen in a way that left just enough room for a six-year-old to lie still. Her leg was broken. She had lost one of her pink sneakers. I crawled in on my stomach to get her.