Part 5

PART 3: The Glove Box My father didn't say a word. He looked at that photograph on the television for a long time. Then he turned around, walked down the hall to his study, and shut the door behind him. Nobody in the den knew what to do. Rex cleared his throat and said something about the late hour. Within ten minutes, the guests were finding their coats and murmuring happy birthday to a closed door. The caterers started stacking plates. Rachel sat down on the bottom step of the staircase and cried. Her mascara ran down both cheeks, and she didn't wipe it. "I should have gone with you," she said. "Every time you drove up there. I should have gone." "You sent the presents," I said. "She loves the presents." "Presents aren't the same as showing up." She told me she had driven to Cotter Springs once, two years ago, on Lily's fourth birthday. She sat in her car across the street from Matt's little yellow house for forty-five minutes, watching the balloons tied to the mailbox. Then she drove home without ever getting out, because she was afraid of what Dad would say if he found out. I didn't argue with her. She was right, and she knew it. Before I went down that hallway, I walked out to my truck in the rain. I opened the glove box and took out something I had carried in there for eight years. Through three trucks. Through two deployments. Through every tornado and flood and ice storm this state has thrown at me. A plain white envelope. My father's first name on the front, in my mother's handwriting. The corners had gone soft and gray. There was a coffee ring on the back from some long-ago morning in a gas station parking lot. Vaughn. Then I went back inside and knocked on his study door once, and opened it without waiting. He was sitting behind his big desk with both hands flat on the wood. On the bookshelf behind him stood a long row of framed photographs. Rachel in her surgeon's white coat. Me in my dress uniform, back when I was still "real Army." Mom on the porch of the lake house. At the end of the row, there was a small rectangle where the dust was lighter. I knew whose picture used to stand there. The bourbon was gone. He looked older than I had ever seen him. For a long time, he didn't look up. Then he asked one quiet question. "Is she going to be all right?" Nine years. That was the first question my father had asked about my brother's family in nine years. "Her leg will heal," I said. "Kids heal fast. She's scared. And she's asking for you." He closed his eyes. "And Matt?" he said. "That blood. Is he..." "Twenty-two stitches in his arm. He'll be fine. He dug through concrete with his bare hands for five hours before we got there, Dad. He didn't stop until I knocked him down in the mud." My father made a small sound, like something had come loose inside his chest. "Why did you come here tonight?" he asked. "Covered in all that. You could have called." "Matt asked me to," I said. "He said, 'If Dad wants to come, he can come. If he doesn't, at least he'll know.' He didn't want you finding out from the television." I set the envelope on the desk in front of him. "And because of this." He stared at his name in my mother's handwriting. He didn't touch it. "Mom wrote this the week before she died," I said. "She sealed it and gave it to me. She made me promise something. 'Give this to your father,' she said, 'on the night he finally asks about Matt.' Not before. I've kept it in my glove box for eight years, waiting." "I didn't ask about Matt," my father said. "You just did, Dad. You asked if he was hurt." He looked at the envelope for a long time. Then he reached for it. His hands were shaking so badly that he couldn't get his finger under the flap. He pushed it back across the desk to me. "You read it," he said. "Out loud. I can't." So I opened my mother's last letter, standing in my father's study, still wearing my brother's blood on my sleeve. I read the first line out loud. And my father, the colonel, the man who never once cried at a funeral, not even hers, put his face in his hands.