Home Front

Lulu burst into tears. “Daddy, she’s not coming home yet…”

“Hey, Jo,” Michael said a second later, sounding as tired as she suddenly felt.

“Lulu didn’t say good-bye or ‘I love you. ’”

“She’s upset, Jo. She’ll be fine. How are you?”

Jolene had been on the phone eleven minutes. The soldiers behind her were starting to get restless. “Is she having nightmares again? Because if she is, she needs her yellow blanket and her pink ribbon. ”

“Come on, Jo. Did you think the girls would say good-bye to their mother, watch her march off to war, and be fine?”

Behind her someone yelled out, “Come on, ma’am. We all have families. ”

There was so much she wanted to say and no time to say it. Michael’s silence gnawed at her nerves. “I’ll write Betsy an e-mail tonight. Can you make sure she reads it before school?”

“Sure. So, your time’s up now?”

“It is. ”

“Great talk, Jo,” he said in a voice she could barely hear.

She whispered “Good-bye,” and hung up the phone. Another soldier moved in next to her, picked up the receiver.

Jolene backed away; she felt Tami coming up beside her. They began the walk back to their barracks.

“Betsy spent ten minutes telling me about her day and asking if I’d call her teacher to get her out of detention,” Jolene said.

Tami laughed quietly. “So we go off to war and motherhood pretty much stays the same. And Michael?”

“He asked me why I thought the girls would be fine after I went off to war. ”

“We’re not even at war. ”

Jolene sighed. “How’s Seth?”

“He loves me and misses me and he’s proud of me. At least that’s what he says. According to Carl, he isn’t sleeping and he unplugged his Xbox and won’t play video games anymore—he doesn’t want to see cartoon people getting blown up. And when I think of how many times I told him to get off that idiot box…”

“How are we going to get through this?” Jolene asked quietly.

Tami had no answer for that. At their barracks, they grabbed their dopp kits and headed for the showers. Afterward, they walked over to the dining facilities—DFAC—and sat down with several of the members of Charlie Company, including Jamie and Smitty. They were surrounded by the smell of gravy that had been on a burner too long and sweet corn cooked down to mush. The drone of soldiers’ voices was like a jet engine.

Smitty was shoveling creamed corn into his mouth at an alarming rate, talking at the same time about the rifle range. Jamie stared down at his food, poking the meatloaf with his fork. He seemed far away from all of them, and Jolene understood his distance.

“We need to get our heads in the game, Jo,” Tami said. “We’re soldiers first now. That’s the way it has to be or…”

“We’ll die,” Jolene said softly. She knew Tami was right; she’d thought the same thing several times. No doubt it was what occupied Jamie’s thoughts now, too. The point of war games was, ultimately, war. Jolene needed to put her feelings for her family in a compartment and hide it away. “I don’t know how to stop missing them. I feel guilty all the time. I keep thinking that if I can say just the right thing on the phone, we’ll all be okay. ”

“Carl and I talked about this before I left. He told me I had to stop being a part of him and start being a part of this. He said he knew I loved him and that my job was to think about me and the men and women around me. ” Tami looked at her. “Two weeks from now we’ll be in-country, Jo. You’ve got to cut yourself loose from Poulsbo. Trust Michael to keep everything together. ”

“Trust Michael,” she said dully.

“You have no choice. ”

Jolene knew Tami was right, but letting go was easier said than done. She knew how it felt to be abandoned in childhood, and although this was different, profoundly different, she wasn’t certain her children would really understand why she had left them. “How have men done it all these years, gone off to war and left their kids behind?”

“They had wives,” Tami said simply.

* * *