Anne Korkeakivi - Shining Sea

The other, older man has a silver cross on each lapel. It is not a hot day, but sweat glistens on his forehead.

She shakes her head.

“Ma’am, are you Mrs. Ronald McCloskey, mother of Private Luke Patrick Gannon?” the young man says.

Luke . “Luke!”

“May we go into the house?” he says.

She pushes past the men into the house. Sissy steps back, out of the way, clutching the top of her nightie.

He’s sick. Or missing in action. Or, no, he’s gone AWOL. That’s it. That’s it. Luke’s gone AWOL. Or sat down in the middle of the barracks and simply refused to move. That would be like Luke! He’ll be court-martialed now. Will he go to prison? Or just be given a dishonorable discharge?

But he’s safe! That’s the main thing. Safe.

She turns to the soldiers and points at the living room sofa. “Sit.”

The two men perch on the edge of the sofa, taking their hats off and clasping them between their hands. The younger one starts again, “Ma’am, the—”

She waves her hand. “Can I get you glasses of ginger ale?”

The sergeant major looks at the chaplain. The chaplain nods.

“Thank you, ma’am,” the sergeant major says.

She carries the bottles of ginger ale into the kitchen and sets them down on the counter. She leans over the kitchen sink and vomits.

“Mommy! Do you have my flu?”

She looks up. Sissy is standing in the doorway to the kitchen, watching her. Seeing her face now, Sissy lets out a cry.

She reaches for her daughter and pulls her in tight. Tight, tight, tight, so tight it is hard to breathe.

“I’ll tell them to go away,” Sissy says into her chest.

She lets go and lowers herself down until she’s eye to eye with her daughter. “Listen to me, Sissy. Your brother is with God. He is with God .”

Because she knows. She knows .

She ties on an apron, then rips it off. She fills two glasses with ice cubes.

Back in the living room, the soldiers sip once from their ginger ales, then set them down on the coffee table, carefully reaching for coasters to place them on. She sits stiffly on an armchair in the same room where she relaxed with Sissy last night. So careless. So thoughtless. When her son was somewhere dead, dying.

Luke.

Utopia.

“Ma’am, I have an important message to deliver from the secretary of the army,” the young soldier says. “The secretary of the army has asked me to express his deep regret that your son Luke died in Phu Yen Province in Vietnam on February eighth. Ma’am, Private Gannon was a grounds casualty.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t understand,” she says.

“He was killed by small-arms fire.”

“No.”

“It was at base camp, ma’am.”

Luke. Luke.

“He’s coming home now,” the chaplain says. “He’ll be arriving at the air force base tomorrow. We need…to discuss arrangements.”

“No,” she says, again.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry.”

“ No, he’s not coming home. He’s not coming home ever .”

“Ma’am,” the chaplain says.

“Are you Catholic? You’re not even Catholic, are you?”

“No, ma’am. I’m Presbyterian. But the army will provide you with…”

She stands up with such force that the armchair rocks backwards. “The army couldn’t even send a priest?”

Sissy claps her hands to her head. “Mommy!”

“Never mind. Never mind,” she says. “What does it matter? What could it possibly matter?”

The two men have stood. “Ma’am, should we call your husband?”

“I’m Luke’s only parent.”

“ I’ll call Ronnie,” Sissy says in a small, trembling voice.

Sissy leaves the room. She sits down again. The men take out their papers.

“Luke will go to Los Angeles,” she says.

The chaplain lays his hand down on hers. “Ma’am—”

She pulls her hand away.

“Yes,” she says. “Los Angeles. With his father. We already have a place there. Thanks to you, we already have a place there.”

PATTY ANN AND LEE are arguing in the living room. Again. She turns over the top card on the deck between her and Kenny. The pile underneath slides out over Kenny’s bed, and she tucks the stiff new cards back into a tower, tapping the sides to make them uniform. She and Kenny shouldn’t be sitting on the bed — this is where she’s sleeping while she’s visiting. But Patty Ann and Lee have made the living room and kitchen no-go territory. Kenny’s elementary school is closed for three days, since the janitor discovered a crack from last year’s quake. Or maybe from the one in ’71. Sean should have started at the same school, but apparently after the first day the teacher sent him home and told Patty Ann to wait another year.

Maybe that’s why Patty Ann asked her to come. For help while all three boys are home. Two active little boys can be quite a handful when there’s a new baby.

“War, Grandma!”

She snaps her cards down, counting loudly—“One, two, three, jack!”—to distract Kenny from the sound of his parents fighting.

“If you walk out that door, do not bother walking back in,” Patty Ann shouts.

“You’re so uptight, baby. When did you get so uptight? You weren’t like this in high school,” Lee shouts back.

“In high school I didn’t have three brats and a broken oven and a doofus husband saying he was going to dump his latest jack-squat job to drive down to San Diego and then across the desert and then back to Anaheim, Anaheim, in our car-with-the-bumper-tied-on-by-a-shoestring-but-the-only-one-we-have to go to some rock concerts. David Bowie!”

“I’m not ‘going to some rock concerts.’ I’m not going for Bowie . It’s work, man. And if the job’s jack-squat, why you raggin’ about my leaving it?”

“Cause it’s the only fucking one you have. You’re going to get fired again, Lee.”

“I can turn over some good bread like this. Things were crazy at his show here this past week, just like I said they’d be. It’s like a whole new level selling this stuff. This is my new job, babe. I’ll come home with…”

“Shut up. Shut up! I don’t even want to hear about it. That’s fucked up, Lee. That’s fucked up! Are you fucking crazy? My mother will hear.”

My mother will hear? What planet do they think she’s living on? Do they think she doesn’t already know what Lee’s up to? That she doesn’t see his red eyes, his tapping fingers? That she thinks the package wrapped in foil in the back of the fridge marked DON’T TOUCH is a roast chicken? And all the rest of it: the empty bottles under the sink in the kitchen. The filth. Where does Patty Ann get the idea that it is acceptable to live this way, especially with children in the house? There are ways to behave and ways not to behave. It is that simple. Women don’t get to give up. If they did the world would collapse.

Kennedy turns over his last card. “Queen! I win this war, Grandma!”

She hands him her lost cards. “So you did, Kenny.”

The yelling is getting louder.

“You’ll change your tune when I come back in a Cadillac,” Lee shouts.

“ A Cadillac? Like my mom’s husband drives? I thought you said they were only for the Man. I thought you said they were only for pimps or fat-ass honkies. So: which one are you?”

Kenny jumps up from the bed. She lassoes him with her arms before he can run out of the room. Grandma . Born when she was not quite forty-one, just a few years after Sissy, he could be her own son. The new baby is sleeping peacefully in a crib in one corner of the bedroom. The little brother, Sean, is playing in another corner with the G.I. Joe she handed him after she’d stepped out of her car, a little dazed from the long drive from Phoenix. Patty Ann appeared behind the screen door, her face a shadowy web, the baby a dark bundle in her arms, and pushed the door open: You’re here. You came. Then, spying the little plastic soldier and snatching it up from the stunned child, her face grew distant, a pale flat moon under the midday Southern California sun: We don’t let him play with stuff like that .