Chapter 12: See You at Breakfast

Ohio in April smelled like wet earth and cut grass, and Megan stood on her parents’ front porch for a long moment before she went inside, letting the ordinariness of it settle into her the way nothing at Landstuhl quite had — no orderly hallways, no hospital smell, just her mother’s garden coming up green along the walkway and a porch swing that still creaked the same way it had when she was seventeen.

Her mother was crying before the door was even fully open, and her father stood behind her with his hand pressed flat against his mouth, and for a moment none of them said anything at all, just held onto each other in the doorway while the neighbors’ dog barked somewhere down the street and the whole unremarkable Tuesday afternoon went on around them like nothing extraordinary was happening on this porch.

Later, in the kitchen, her mother made dinner while Megan sat at the table and watched her hands move — flour to the wrist, the radio playing something with too much fiddle in it — and understood, watching it, that the memory she’d held onto through sixteen days and three weeks of recovery hadn’t been an idealized invention. It had been real all along, waiting for her, exactly as she’d left it.

She attended Ruiz’s funeral two weeks later, standing beside his mother and his sister at a cemetery in New Mexico, and gave them the letter she’d finally found the words to write — eleven months, the gum passed without looking, the tacos, you don’t flinch — and his mother held her hands afterward and said, “He wrote to us about you. Said you were the best pilot he’d ever flown with. Said if he ever had to go down over there, he was glad it would be with you in the back seat.” Megan carried that sentence home with her like something fragile, and set it down carefully in the place where she kept the rest of what Ruiz had given her.