Chapter 27

The kids came to the door, all three of them, around 5:00 to invite me and Lana to dinner. I didn’t answer the door.

The woman had taken my truck. I wondered where it was. I wondered if I get it back or if she’d actually stolen it. That one I couldn’t believe. She’d find a way to get it back to me. I just didn’t know when or how—yet.

I guessed that not opening the door cued the man. He was knocking on it at 5:31.

“Sam, what’s going on? I just got home and saw your truck parked around the corner,” said Owen.

“She went shopping,” I said, quietly said.

“Huh?” he said.

I nodded toward the note she’d left me. It was on the table.

He picked it up and read it.

“Sam, this is not the end for you. Just another blip on the radar. Trust me on that,” said Owen.

I didn’t answer him with words. I just looked at him and sighed.

“Sam?” he said.

“I’ll be okay. I kinda expected it. I’ll be okay,” I said.

“Sam come up to the house. I know you’re probably not hungry. But, maybe a bite to eat, and a little conversation. Please, okay?” He said.

“Sure, not much else to do, I said.

He seemed surprised that I wasn’t breaking down in front of him. I guess when one got right down to it, I was surprised too. But I’d told him the straight of it. Even if my face had been fixed, and boy had I hoped against hope that it would be, I figured with her sight fixed that she’d get real tired of living with a paraplegic soon enough. No, I wasn’t surprised, sad, but not surprised.

Lana was still young enough to have a real life with a whole man. She would never have had that with me. That was just the reality. So be angry with her? No. A little upset that all I got was a short note, but again, maybe that was better than some long melodramatic and ultimately meaningless narrative.

We went into the house. I could smell something good cooking.

“Beef stew,” called out Abigail, she’d heard us come in even from the kitchen. Well, and she clearly didn’t know the big news, not yet.

I turned to the big man. “Owen, please, don’t make a big deal out of this. I don’t want to be talking about it endlessly. Please,” I said.

“Okay, but we’ve got to clue Abby, okay,” he said. This one we do together, you and me.” I looked him askance but shook my head.

“Please, just you tell her and let it go at that,” I said. He nodded.

I watched him go into the kitchen. “What!” Well, he’d told her that was clear.

It was a couple of more minutes before they came out. She came to me. Put her hand on my shoulder, looked into my eyes, and shook her head slightly. I nodded.

That we’d be talking sooner or later I was certain. But just not today.

Dinner had been good. Nothing was said about my latest personal disaster. And then it was time for me to go back to my crib, the guest house. It would be kind of lonely in there now. The bed we’d done the deed in the night before still smelled of her, of woman. Man I needed that woman. She’d been enough for me. Now I didn’t have her. I wonder if she was thinking of me. I had to think she was, but who knew.

Abigail decided to walk me back to my place. Strange, I thought of the house, the guest house as my place. A year earlier I wouldn’t even have considered such a thing, but I did now, and not in a bad way. I guess I was getting over my anger about Abby’s betrayal of me. The two of them had done so much to help me. I was in the throes of not only forgiving, but also forgetting all of the bad. Well hope springs eternal as the saying goes.

“I’m not going to ask you if you’re all right, Sam, because I know you’re not. How could you be. But, I am so sorry that this has happened to you. So much has happened to you: you were seriously wounded in the war, Owen and I screwed you over, now Lana dumps you because of your injuries. Sam, you deserve better. Let Owen and me do what we can to help you. Don’t go back to how things were before. Please,” she said.

“I won’t,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, but my days of bitterness are pretty much behind me. Pretty much.”

“Okay Sam, I understand. Sam you do deserve a better life. Like I say, let us help you. And really, I am glad some of the bitterness you’ve had to deal with is behind you. My God I am,” she said.

“Okay, thank you for that. I’ll be okay. I need to think about things. Maybe see about making a few friends if I can, like when I was in Tucson. Anyway, I will be thinking about things,” I said. She nodded.

“Okay, I hope you can. And anything we can do, Sam, consider it done. I mean it,” said Abigail.

I had to think it was the two of them because I was almost overwhelmed with attention by the children. Even Ronald, who always seemed the least interested in being around me, was all of a sudden hanging out at the guest house. I actually taught him how to play fish. Well everybody had to learn at least one card game and fish was easy.

The twins were around a lot too over the next days. If there actually is an upside to everything I was getting to experience an example of that great truth for sure. The kids were great.

I decided to stay at their guest house until, well, until. I didn’t know when until would happen, but seemingly overnight it was five months later. Five months after having been abandoned by Lana Meacham. I’d never gotten another word from the woman after she’d left me. Better that way I supposed. Hearing from her would have just exacerbated the state of loneliness that I was beset with.

A side issue of being so close to the Cord family was that bits and pieces of my history became better known to the girls. I didn’t exactly say anything to them, but being intelligent—well they were my children—they began to put things together. They learned, or figured out might be a better way to phrase it, how I was dumped by their mother and why. They became somewhat knowledgeable of the Afghan war and how I got my ass involved in it.

Mia, at one point, actually pinned her momma for all but forcing me to join up. That particular set-to had ended in a sea of salt-water tears on the part of both of them. Learning of it, their battle, the next day, I put an end to it forthwith. I made damn sure that my daughters, both of them, realized, that I was always my own man and that although their mother wanted me to join up for financial reasons; it had in the end been my decision not hers. I got a couple of extra tacos that night for my defense of her, Abigail.

And then serendipity made its fortuitous presence felt. I got a visit.

For the first time in a few days I had been left alone. That was both a good and a not so good thing. I liked it better when the children were around, but them leaving me alone for a bit was giving me a chance to kind of relax and catch my figurative breath, as the saying might have gone.

It was Saturday. I could hear the kids involved with something out on the sward—that’s what I was calling the expansive front grassy area in front of the house. It sounded more appropriate than yard when dealing with a castle like the Cord residence.

I was out on my porch, the guest house porch, smoking a pipe. I’d taken up pipe smoking as kind of an alternative to drinking my second twenty-five cups of coffee a day. A car, a new car, a Nissan pulled up into the driveway that led to the garage in which my truck was parked. Two people got out and came toward me, two people I knew and loved: Lieutenant Claire Cunningham and Sergeant Jeffrey Michaels, 4th brigade, 3rd division, USA. They’d, the both of them, been there the day the shit had hit the fan.

“Corporal,” said Claire, approaching and smiling broadly.

“Sergeant to you lady; I was promoted,” I said, also smiling broadly.

“Well, excuse the hell outta me,” she said, laughing full out now.

“Hey, Sam,” said Jeff, coming up behind Claire. “Thought we’d come by. Been a while. But now you’ve moved up here, well...”

“Come in, come in,” I said. I turned and wheeled myself into the front room of the house. They trailed in behind me.

Apart from holidays, I hadn’t seen much of Jeff for quite a while, or anyone else from the old unit either if it came to that. I was very glad to see them. Jeff I knew had had a few dates with Harriet Bridger, Abigail’s childhood friend, though of necessity it was kind of a long range thing: him still living in Tucson and her in Phoenix. His liaison with Velma Reason and ended amicably some time before. I wondered how his new relationship was going or if it was going. I’d be finding out today, I supposed.

“And to what do I owe this very welcome visit to the backside of castle Cord?” I said.

“Hardly the backside of anything,” said Jeff.

“No hardly anything,” I said, “you’re right.”

“Well it sure is better than anything we had over there,” said Claire, referring to the Hindu Kush.

We’d no more than greeted each other and settled in when there was a knock on the door. I wheeled over to it to answer it.

“Mia. Sarah.” I said. “Come in.”