George W. Bush
by Andrew Coburn
On a windy day in April, the sun brightening the bark of old trees, Babe Burnside and her husband Teddy drove to town hall, where lawyers awaited them. They were selling Teddy’s mother’s house, which had fallen into disrepair during her final years. Teddy, still grieving, anticipated the sale with no enthusiasm while Babe, looking to the future, viewed it with much. After months of dickering with brokers and potential buyers, she had gotten a good offer, though the net would be modest. The house was mortgaged. Before stepping out of the car, Babe inspected her face in a compact mirror and gave a touch to her dark hair. Forebears on her father’s side included a French-Canadian fur trader and an Indian maiden who had mingled their defiant blood and, working through the generations, gave Babe her beauty, which always dazzled Teddy, to the point of worship. Snapping shut her compact, she said, “I’m ready.”
“I’m not.” Teddy confessed.
“Take a deep breath.”
Their lawyer met them inside the century-old brick building and ushered them into a high-windowed room, where they seated themselves at a library table that smelled of varnish. The buyers were not present, just as well. Teddy did not want to come face to face with strangers taking over his childhood home. The buyers’ lawyer, sitting across from them, had a meager mustache, like fine print. Openly admiring Babe’s features, he said, “I congratulate you, Mrs. Burnside. You’re a hard bargainer.” He readjusted his horn-rims and added, “Especially for someone so young.”
Not all that young. She was approaching thirty, her face an oval of seeming indifference, her body a tombstone of love. No children. She watched their lawyer lay out documents for Teddy to sign, her signature unneeded. Teddy’s fingers froze on the pen. His mother had given him fair hair and baffling blue eyes that at the moment expressed nothing.
“Teddy.” Babe’s whisper was gossamer sheathing steel. “Either sign it or put the pen down.” (“Shit or get off the pot” is what her father would have said.)
In the room’s silence Teddy smiled through a tide of noise in his head not unlike the one concocted when his boyhood set of lead soldiers had fought enemies to the finish to preserve perimeters. He worked the pen lightly and produced the line of an ocean wave as in a child’s drawing. Swiftly a certified check was provided.
“Take it, Teddy.”
“You take it,” he said with the eyes of an orphan, his voice distant, not altogether his own.
The buyers’ lawyer, whose attention had never wavered, watched Babe fold the check and slip it into her bag. “I don’t know where you got your smarts, Mrs. Burnside, but you ought to get into real estate. You’d do well, guaranteed.”
Everybody rose at once, except Teddy, who had sunk deep in his chair and needed time. Babe handed him his jacket. When his left arm snagged in the sleeve, she helped him make it right. A thread trailed from the worn cuff. “Thank you,” he murmured.
Outside, the wind challenged them. Babe’s hair blew back and Teddy’s came apart as they hustled to their car, a Dodge in need of work. “I’ll drive,” Babe said, not always patient with his driving, which was cautious and tentative, though once it had been reckless. Inside the car, she reexamined the check, drawn on Kenwood Trust Company. “Money makes money.”
Teddy looked at her profile. “Is that what it’s all about?”
“I want things to be good for us.”
“I’m vulnerable,” he said.
“Everybody’s vulnerable.”
“Shouldn’t be that way.”
“Should or shouldn’t doesn’t enter into it.”
Trailing smoke, she drove up Front Street, past the Kenwood Inn, seven years ago the scene of their wedding reception, a happy time; past fine old houses that reluctantly gave way to lesser ones; and beyond to Kenwood High School, where Teddy no longer enjoyed teaching. Cell phones that should’ve been turned off disrupted his classes, girls with midriffs and trinkets in their navels distracted him, and colleagues kept their distance because they didn’t always know what to make of him.
“Let me have the check,” he said when she pulled up near the school’s side entrance.
She gave him a curious look and no argument. A few days ago he had suggested a scholarship in his mother’s name, not a pleasing idea, which her face had instantly shown. Abruptly he flipped the check over, endorsed it, and returned it. “Will this make things better?”
“It can’t hurt.”
He climbed out of the Dodge into the mean-spirited wind, poison in its bite, his hair pulling from its part. Holding the door open, he looked back in and forgot what he had intended to say, as if from elisions in his memory. He wanted more elisions. Full forgetfulness.
“What’s the matter?” Babe asked.
“I don’t know who I am.”
“Of course you do. You’re Teddy.”
#
Her appointment was at two-thirty. Without apology, he kept her waiting a half hour. His name was Jack O’Grady, and he was executive vice president of the venerable Kenwood Trust Company, though he contrasted sharply with the subdued décor. Portly in a fawn suit, he had a bluff ungovernably Irish face, a split chin, and a hard head of grizzled hair. She imagined him tugging a comb through it. His accent was South Boston, and his employment in Kenwood was an admission by the directors that the bank needed new blood, bigger ideas, and a more aggressive posture.
“Have a seat, Mrs. Burnside.”
The chair stationed her squarely before his impressive desk, as if she were being granted an audience with someone much weightier than a mere money man. His eyes appraised her in a way that appealed to her vanity, which she promptly dismissed. An eighth-grade teacher had once likened vanity to a mirror, the reflection always favorable and invariably false. The teacher told her that the day she wore a tight sweater to school. “Thank you for seeing me,” she said.
He had her husband’s check on his desk. Turning it over, he looked at the ocean line that passed for a signature. Then he flipped it back to the business side and reread an amount insignificant to him, not to her. In her childhood there had rarely been a time when money wasn’t an urgency.
“So,” he said, fluttering the check, “you want to play with this.”
Babe held her chin high. “I don’t play with money, Mr. O’Grady.”
“But I do.” His eyes flew at her over a smile that was pure Irish but only half blarney. “For me, money is a game, not a matter of life or death. If I go belly-up, I only play dead. Nobody’s looking, I’m back on my feet. Story of my life. I tell you this so you’ll know who you’re talking to. How old are you, Mrs. Burnside?”
She ignored the question, along with the self-aggrandizement, and glanced at her watch, a clear message that her age was irrelevant, her time was not. Challenged, he saturated her with a long look.
“Shouldn’t your husband be here?”
“No,” she said simply.
“Why me, Mrs. Burnside? Why’d you specifically ask to see me?”
“I’ve heard interesting things about you.”
“Good or bad?”
“Both.” O’Grady’s smile stood out at full strength. “Let me explain what I am, Mrs. Burnside, then draw your own conclusions. I’m an investment banker. I deal. I package. You’ve heard about the goose that lays the golden egg. I poke a finger into the goose and if I feel an egg coming I invest. That means a triple partnership--me, the bank, and the client. Still want to talk to me, Mrs. Burnside?” For a nanosecond she did not. “Is what you’re saying legal?”
“You tell me.”
He was baiting her, bullying her, amusing himself at her expense, which she felt was a small price if it meant a stake in the future. At the same time, less appealing, he reminded her of an uncle who had inappropriately displayed affection. Bad man, she later told her dolly.
Now it was O’Grady consulting his watch, an unsubtle reminder that time, especially his, was money. “All right, let’s hear what you’ve got in mind,” he said, and in a tone of unbridled confidence she described a stretch of property on Portsmouth Avenue, quiet farmland leading out of town toward the New Hampshire coast, in her estimation prime for development. His smile made her suspect she was telling him nothing he didn’t know. He said, “If I read you right, you want to play with the big boys.”
“Anything wrong with that?”
All business, he rose from his desk. On his feet he was not as tall as she’d expected, and she waited for him to add something to himself. The fawn suit made him more a bookie than a banker. “You got balls, Mrs. Burnside.”
The reference didn’t offend her. “What I have, Mr. O’Grady, is a brain.”
“Let’s go see the property.”
His car was a Lexus, top of the line. Anything less would have surprised her, though she was unprepared for the large fur dice dangling inside. A nick in the windshield reminded her that nothing in life is perfect. She buckled up, O’Grady didn’t. Downtown, he maneuvered around the bandstand and, tapping the horn, cut into traffic as if the street were his. Haley’s TV & Appliances announced a sale, and the Ioka was showing a Nicole Kidman movie. Babe, who’d taken accounting courses at the community college, did the books for both businesses.
“Bet you’d like to own this town, wouldn’t you, Mrs. Burnside?”
“A piece. I’m not greedy.”
“Greed is good. Some movie said so.”
The sky swooped down on them when they stepped from the Lexus to scan an expanse of tilled soil. Within sight was a farmhouse near which forsythia gushed into bloom and beyond that a barn with birds spurting off the roof. Babe pointed. “The property extends past that rise.”
“I know where it goes.”
She had sudden second thoughts. It was Teddy’s money she’d be risking. “I suppose there’s no rush.”
If the time’s right, Mrs. Burnside, you don’t wait. You act. You go into hock if you have to. That’s not something I really need to tell you, is it?” He was staring at her from the tail of his eye, viewing her in a way that had nothing to do with the matter at hand. “You got kids?” he asked suddenly.
“No.”
“I got two sons. One’s putting his life on the line in Iraq. The other’s studying quantum mechanics at MIT. Do you know what a neutrino is?”
“Do I need to?”
“It sounds like some kind of fruit. That’s how much I know.”
The wind shifted, and the smell of the tilled field turned powerful, like skunk. They returned to the Lexus and sat quietly as the electric windows sealed themselves with the smallest sound. Settled into the leather upholstery, O’Grady was much at home in the plush confines of a luxury automobile. “There was a time, Mrs. Burnside, I had money only for the vitals, nothing for the fancies. Now I crave the fancies.” He was staring at her, again from the far edge of his eye. “You’re a beautiful woman, you know that? A genuine doll.”
“That’s not who I am, Mr. O’Grady. The same as you’re not just a big thatch of hair and a dangling pair of dice. What about the property?”
“That check of yours is next to nothing.”
“We’ve been through that.”
“I know what the farmer’s asking. It’s too much.”
“Who’s going to beat him down?”
O’Grady switched on the ignition, and the engine spoke before he did. “You are.”
The Lexus carried them a short distance up the highway to the unpaved drive of the farmhouse, a two-story clapboard structure with a screened-in porch. A dog of no particular breed picked itself up from the front steps to bark as the Lexus purred to a stop. The forsythia glared. Before opening her door, Babe said, “Are you going to be both my banker and my partner?”
“Before I answer that, let’s see how you do.”
At first, not well. The farmer was foxier than he looked, but gradually, ensconced in a parlor decorated with samplers, O’Grady silently looking on, Babe brought the farmer down to a price that pleased her and didn’t entirely displease him. O’Grady’s demeanor divulged nothing.
#
At the breakfast table Teddy Burnside said, “Do we know what we’re doing?” “Trust me.”
He always had, he always would. “I just thought it might be fun to open a book store.”
“The chains would choke us. We’d be broke in a year.” Teddy added peanut butter to his toast. “What sort of man is O’Grady?”
“The sort who can make things happen.”
For a transparent moment, without knowing why, Teddy felt threatened. “He sounds interesting.”
Always attuned to nuances, Babe spoke quickly. “How interesting can he be? He’s a money man.” She trained her eyes on her husband to better study the situation. “How are you feeling, Teddy. Your head on straight? What time is your appointment?”
Automatically Teddy looked at his watch. “Not till ten.”
At ten, Teddy was locked in a leather chair that threatened to swallow him while Dr. Wall reigned from behind a mahogany desk. Each was taking note of the other, and each was a careful listener, as if everything said was in a code that needed to be cracked. Dr. Wall, his eyes embedded in his horn-rims, said, “How are you feeling today, Mr. Burnside? Your head on straight?”
“My wife asked me that.” Teddy was on the alert. Perhaps the doctor knew something he didn’t. He thought the unthinkable and was unable to unthink it. “My wife’s seeing another man.”
“Are you sure?”
“Not absolutely,” he conceded with a smile and wondered how the errant thought had entered his head in the first place. He stared at the doctor’s bowtie, a flourish of polka dots, obviously hand-tied, not clipped on. The doctor was real. He was not. He was sealed inside an inner world and groping with scenes that dissolved before fully developed.
“I’m sick,” he said.
“We must do something about that.”
He was coping with an image too garish to bleach from his mind. A bird pecked the cupped hand of a little girl lying roadside with an open skull and a broken cage of ribs. Her mother lay here and there.
“Staying on your meds, Mr. Burnside?”
Held too long, his smile began to hurt, and at once he imagined birds bursting into flight, himself one of them. Sky’s the limit. His head heard a gull’s cry or a woman’s scream, nothing to distinguish one from the other. The doctor’s bowtie quivered.
Dr. Wall spoke sharply. “Do me a favor, Mr. Burnside. Stop smiling.” “I can’t.”
#
Jack O’Grady was in love with her, which happened fast, but not so fast she didn’t see it coming. Over lunch at the Kenwood Inn, ostensibly to talk business, O’Grady tried to possess her with his eyes, but she’d have none of it. “At least tell me something about yourself,” he said.
What was there to tell? No need to bring up an uncle drawn to girls, twelve the perfect age. Then there was her father, reactionary, bellicose, unable to hold a job. Should she mention that, like her father, her husband bought used cars that backfired into extinction? A positive comparison lay between her and her grandmother and the pride they shared in their distant Indian blood. Way back when, Nana didn’t vote for Kennedy because, she said, a man with his finger on the nuclear button should be an atheist, someone who knows there’s no happy hunting ground.
“So did you vote for Nixon, Nana?”
“That son-of-a-bitch? I voted for no one.”
O’Grady said, “Why are you smiling?”
She didn’t know she was. “I thought we came here to talk business.”
“It’s a done deal. Don’t worry about it.”
She poked a fork into her garden salad while he jabbed at his. “Is what we’re doing legal?” she asked quietly.
“Everything concerning you is on the up-and-up. Anything silly falls on me. Feel better?” A cell phone chimed inside his suit. He carried two. “It’s my kid. The one in Iraq.” He excused himself and left the table to talk in private. Proud of both sons, he clearly was closest to the one in uniform. Ten minutes later he returned with a tear in his eye and feral pride in his voice. “It’s a war we have to win. No fucking choice. Excuse the language.”
Babe said nothing. Her nana, way back when, told her that war tainted everybody, molested women and children, and, leaving no lasting winners, shrank all victories. Nana told of the nightly news leading off with body bags and kill counts. Different war. Different time. Everything else the same.
“I feel so much for this kid of mine,” Grady said and resumed jabbing a salad that no longer looked appetizing. A cord stuck out on his neck when he pointed his fork at her. The tines looked lethal. “Doesn’t mean I’m not proud of my other boy, a smart little bastard, but what do I know about quarks and neutrinos? I mean, who does?”
Teddy had caused himself trouble with the school committee for defining war as the blind dropping bombs and the deaf yelling at each other. He had chalked on the blackboard what he told his class were the two most evil words in the English language. Haliburton and ExxonMobil. He wasn’t fired, but he was warned.
Their lunch arrived, but O’Grady no longer wanted his. He put his fork down and ordered a second martini. “Don’t mind, do you?” he said and took pleasure in his martini, though his face didn’t show it. The red bullet in his mouth was his tongue. “Please don’t tell me you’re a Bush basher, Mrs. Burnside. Tell me you’re not one of those leftwing fanatics.”
In a quiet moment Teddy had told her that war was no longer Bang Bang. It was Boom Boom. Wholesale. Indiscriminate. TV screens bulging with road kill. The world a septic tank sucking up horrors. She lifted her water glass. “My husband was in Iraq.”
O’Grady acted as if blindsided, betrayed. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“I didn’t want to get into a discussion.”
#
Teddy’s gaze locked onto the prettiest girl in the classroom, Jennifer, who sat slouched in low-slung jeans that exposed the sparkle in her navel, her glossy hair as long as Babe once wore hers, but Babe had allowed nothing in her navel except his tongue, his passion almost shameful. Tearing his eyes from Jennifer’s midriff, he opened his tattered copy of The Red Badge of Courage. All had been assigned to read it, but he suspected few had. “If Crane teaches us anything,” he said in his classroom voice, “it’s that the fittest don’t necessarily survive.” A cell phone rang. So did Teddy’s head. “Please turn that off.”
A boy deep in the back did, arm raised, hand dangling like bait. “You were in Iraq, isn’t that so, sir? Were you a hero?”
Teddy’s head continued to ring. As if something nearby had detonated. Memory of a fellow Guardsman who, sick of it all, activated a grenade, kept it in his hand, and smiled. Get rid of it! Get rid of it! Instead the grenade got rid of him. Jennifer raised her hand, from the elbow. Sweet luscious Jennifer. The fire on her mouth was lipstick. Babe at sixteen.
“You OK, Mr. Burnside?”
He spoke to her navel. “The dead wait for us to die so they won’t be bothered by our memories of them.”
Did that make sense? Apparently not, for the boy deep in the back, hand fluttering again, shouted, “What’s that got to do with anything, sir?”
Teddy strode to the blackboard and chalked, Bang. Bang. Boom. Boom. Then: Bush. Bush.
#
Jack O’Grady drove her to a harbor restaurant in Portsmouth, where they met with a developer of shopping malls, whose questions Babe answered confidently and succinctly. O’Grady, consuming lobster without a bib, was increasingly struck by her poise and presence. Worried he might get caught gazing at her like a dog with its tongue out, he studied a stain on his silk necktie.
“Try club soda,” the developer advised, interrupting himself. Like O’Grady, he wore a stars-&-stripes lapel pin.
“Better yet,” Babe said, “throw it away.”
At evening’s end, O’Grady laid out a credit card, one of many wedged into a wallet branded with his monogram. The developer, whose small expressionless eyes were monosyllables, spoke almost without moving his mouth to O’Grady rather than to Babe. “I’ll give you an answer after my accountant runs over the figures.” Babe stared at the developer’s face and disliked every bit of it. “We’d like the answer as soon as possible.”
On the drive back to Kenwood, the moon a light-second away, she stared at the Lexus’s dashboard as if it were the universe in miniature, messages beaming in from afar. “You’ve done business with that guy before,” she said.
O’Grady shrugged. “Once or twice.”
“A lot I don’t know, isn’t there?”
“And a lot I don’t know. What was your husband doing in Iraq? He’s no kid, is he?”
“He was when he joined the Guard. It gave him money for college. The money got better as he rose in rank, so he stayed in. And that’s how he got grabbed for Bush’s war.”
“So it wasn’t for God and country, only for the money.”
“It’s always for the money. You’re a banker, you should know that.”
Color cruised into O’Grady’s face. “Why are you so cynical, Mrs. Burnside? No, don’t answer that. None of my business. Just let me say, we got guys getting blown to bits in Baghdad and it ain’t for the fucking money.” He slanted the Lexus around the bandstand, proceeded up High Street, and slowed as they approached the Kenwood Inn. “Look, we shouldn’t argue. We’re partners. You game for a nightcap?” She wasn’t. Not surprised but keenly disappointed, he drove on with eyes not on the road but fastened on her. “It’s obvious how I feel about you. Goddam gorgeous is what you are.” The Lexus neared a turn. “Don’t worry, I have peripheral vision. Someone said you got Indian blood. True?”
“Not pertinent, Mr. O’Grady.”
“Everything about you is pertinent. You were mine, I’d give you the world.”
“Not yours to give.”
He made another turn, which led to a cul-de-sac of bungalows, hers the second on the left, streetlight revealing meager grass on its poorly sodded front lawn. No lights in the windows, no sign of anybody.
“Where’s your husband?” he asked, and she murmured, “School committee.” Without ever having met him, O’Grady considered Teddy Burnside generic, could be anybody’s husband, his sole cachet marriage to a beauty with squaw blood. “Can I come in for a minute? See if I can get the stain out of my necktie.”
“Your wife can do that.”
“We don’t see eye to eye.”
“Thank you for dinner, Mr. O’Grady.”
And she was gone, vanishing into the dark of the bungalow, into the maw of her private life. A light went on, a shade was pulled, her silhouette visible one moment and not the next. O’Grady drew pictures of her in his mind. His doll. His papoose. When he stepped from the Lexus, a stiff breeze slapped his face. The bungalow’s front step was loose, and the screen door had a tattered hole. He tried the inside door, which opened with ease, and lightly called her name. He heard something but wasn’t sure what. He trailed his fingers over the arm of a plush chair worn at the edges and let carpeting soften his footsteps as he followed his instincts toward a small light in an open room. Stopping short, he held his breath and savored the sight of flared hips, tapered thighs, and private hair running rampant.
“Hello,” he said.
She screamed.
#
The school committee talked to Teddy in closed session. The chairman, Dr. Tagget, said, “We are all aware that you served honorably in Iraq.”
“I served neither honorably nor dishonorably,” Teddy said in a voice meant for a classroom, not a small conference room. “I served, period.”
“Of course.”
“Of course what?”
With a swift glance, Dr. Tagget sought help from one of his colleagues, Mrs. Langevin, a widow in wonderful repair, her perfume imbuing the room. Teddy scrutinized the two of them. The hair on Dr. Tagget’s prominent head was slight, hardly worth the bother, while Mrs. Langevin’s hair, rigid with spray, was a bouquet. Teddy wondered whether the two had ever been intimate and ruled against it.
Mrs. Langevin said, “Would you like a sabbatical, Mr. Burnside? I’m sure it could be arranged.” “Why don’t we get to the crux of the matter?”
Teddy said. “Why am I here?” Dr. Tagget took charge again. “Simply put, you don’t have a right to foist your political views on your class. You’ve been told this before. Your job is to teach American literature, not partisan politics.” “Is that what I’m doing?” Teddy asked, but his words didn’t carry. He pressed the back of his fist against his mouth, hurting his teeth the way he had when crouching over the driver of a Humvee hit by rocket fire. The driver lay in the sand, a portion of him already vegetable, imminent death a mere formality.
Mrs. Langevin said, “Not to flatter you, Mr. Burnside, but you’re a handsome man. Females in your class must be distracting, especially the way they dress.”
“One in particular, your niece Jennifer, has an exquisite navel. Like my wife’s.”
Mrs. Langevin turned on him with a look of disgust and contempt. Dr. Tagget said, “We’ll arrange your sabbatical. Perhaps a permanent one.”
“I have tenure.”
After a knowing glance at Mrs. Langevin, Dr. Tagget said, “No, Mr. Burnside. Technically you don’t.”
#
Jack O’Grady was in the kitchen washing blood from his face. Goddamit, he had meant no harm, but without warning she had struck with her nails, a warrior of a woman. Wearing a robe cinched at the waist and pulled tight at the throat, she stood near the fridge with folded arms. Neither noticed Teddy in the doorway until he spoke.
“What happened? Who’s this man?”
Babe said without inflection, “The banker. He made a mistake--didn’t you, Mr. O’Grady? Mr. O’Grady has a son in Iraq.”
Teddy wasn’t buying anything. He stared at Babe, “Did he assault you?”
“You kidding me?” O’Grady said, ripping loose sheets of paper toweling. “She assaulted me! Look at my fucking face.”
Teddy despised vulgar language in front of his wife. Had he an automatic weapon in his hands and had he not sworn against killing of any kind, he’d have blasted O’Grady to kingdom come. In a heartbeat. As he and others in a panic or a rage had done to a family of four. Impossible to tell which. Who knew? Who knew anything?
Babe gave O’Grady a loose look. “We still have a deal?”
“Money’s money.”
Teddy said, “I can’t let this pass.”
“Of course you can,” Babe said and made a shooing motion to O’Grady, who ripped off more paper toweling and left without further word. Teddy took a seat at the dinette table and watched Babe load up Mr. Coffee and trigger it for the morning. She said, “We don’t need to talk about this now, do we?”
“No.” He brought his hands together and rested them on the table. “They don’t want me to teach anymore.”
“Big surprise.” The nerve fibers of his brain were doing him a disservice, letting numerous selves war inside him and mess with him in a manner that had led to his release from active duty and his discharge from the Guard. Home free!
“What is it, Teddy? Whatever it is, say it.”
“We never should’ve sold my mother’s house. That house was who I was.” Babe believed in tough love. “Now you’re someone else. Live with it.”
#
A few months passed before Teddy went back to see Dr. Wall, who was wearing a familiar bowtie. Teddy remembered the polka dots. Ensconced in the large leather chair and glancing at family pictures on Dr. Wall’s desk, Teddy felt comfortably at home. “I have questions for you, Doctor. I’ve been saving them up. Can truth stand the test of time?”
“That’s yet to be decided.” “But what do you think?”
“Truth, like God, is human architecture. But that’s merely an opinion.”
“People tend to die with their eyes open. Are they trying to grab a last look?” “I wouldn’t be surprised.” Dr Wall’s round face refused to be read and when viewed too long tended to turn simple.
Teddy said, “Bush is a boy playing with toy soldiers that bleed.”
“That’s not a question.” Teddy resorted to an old habit of vanishing inside himself, where no one, not even his conscious self, could follow. He never stayed there long. Too dark. Too dangerous. He gripped the plump arms on the leather chair and yanked himself forward in an effort to sit straight. “My wife has a bit of Native-American blood. It gives her authenticity others lack. You and I, Doctor, aren’t absolutely real, but she is. I like your tie.”
“Thank you. Are you staying on your meds?”
“More or less. I’m no longer a teacher, Doctor. My wife and I have become entrepreneurs. It’s the American way.”
#
A bubble burst in Jack O’Grady’s brain. Happened during business hours at the bank. Elbows on his desk, he placed both hands on his forehead and slumped forward without so much as a goodbye. “Dead as a doornail,” the emergency medical technician murmured to his assistant.
The elder son came home from Iraq in full-dress uniform to attend his father’s funeral. His brother picked him up at the airport in the Lexus and drove him to the family home, a flag pitched over the front door. Each brother raised a hand and snapped off a salute, an O’Grady tradition. The younger brother had tears in his eyes. The older one had none. He had seen too much. “We all go,” he said quietly. “Some sooner.”
“I loved him.”
“I didn’t,” the older brother said and snapped off a second salute that may have mocked the first. Hard to tell.