“Is your mother or father at home?” one of them says, looking straight ahead at a spot somewhere above Roger’s head.
Both men are tall and lean and clean-shaven. Their hats sit low on their foreheads and their jackets have all sorts of medals and stripes and patches, not unlike Davy’s Boy Scout uniform.
“Um,” Roger says, “my mother’s busy.” His father is never home anymore. He is on the road, selling copy machines.
“Please get your mother, son,” the same man says.
Roger hesitates. She is going to be mad at him for sure. When she says she doesn’t feel like talking or seeing people, she means it. Ever since Davy left for Vietnam, his mother avoided everybody. Iris from next door, who always brought tomatoes or zinnias or whatever was in her garden—Just tell her to leave it on the table, she’d instruct Roger; the milkman, who showed up whistling every Saturday morning with two bottles of regular milk, one bottle of chocolate milk, and a small bottle of cream—Just give him the order for next week, Roger; the paperboy, Bobby Anderson, who came around suppertime on Tuesday nights to collect payment—Roger, get the money out of my purse and make sure to give him an extra dollar. She didn’t want to be bothered and Roger’s job was to make sure she wasn’t.
“I can’t,” he tells the Army men. “She’s super-busy.”
The same one kneels down so that he is eye to eye with Roger. “The United States of America requires your mother to come here, son.” His breath smells like the Black Jack gum that Mama Jo chews.
Roger swallows hard. “Like the president?”
“Right,” the man says.
Slowly, Roger follows the sound of the vacuum. At school they did a drill. Let’s say the Russians have dropped the atom bomb, his teacher Miss Sullivan would say. What are you going to do? Duck and cover! the class shouted, and they all hid under their desks. Is that why the Army men are here?
“Mom?” he says.
She is pushing the vacuum across the mauve wall-to-wall carpeting on her bedroom floor.
She doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t turn off the vacuum.
“I think the Russians,” Roger says, and then he begins to cry. “I think they dropped the atom bomb in Connecticut.”
“Uh-huh,” she says.
He watches how hard she pushes the hose, like she is at battle with dust bunnies.
“I think we have to evacuate.” Crying makes his throat hurt more, but he can’t help it.
“And why do you think this?”
Her back is bent over the Electrolux. She has on orange pants and a flowered top that doesn’t quite match. It must be laundry day.
“Because the Army is here and President Johnson said so.”
Without turning off the vacuum, his mother slowly swivels around to face him. There is a look on her face that he’s never seen on anyone before.
“Tell them I’m busy,” she says.
Roger shakes his head. “They said—”
His mother opens her mouth and screams, “Tell them I’m busy!”
The way she sounds scares him and he runs out of the room, all the way back to the door where the two men still wait, standing at attention, staring at something Roger can not see. From behind him, he hears his mother wailing. For an instant, one of the Army men’s jaw tightens and he swallows in a way that makes his Adam’s apple bob up and down, like someone trying not to cry.
EVERY SUMMER MAMA JO goes to Vermont to visit Auntie Chiara, the nun. Her nun name is Sister Sebastian. Roger believes that she doesn’t have any hair—just a high, smooth forehead that ends in her stiff, white wimple. The wimple is topped by a long black veil that makes a sound like someone saying shush when she moves. This summer, Mama Jo is taking Roger to Vermont with her so that his mother can recover. She is mourning Davy and as far as Roger can tell, mourning is a full-time job. Ever since the Army men came to tell them that Davy was MIA and presumed dead, Roger has not been able to look his mother in the eye. He had wished his brother dead, and now he was.
His father packs the medium-sized piece of American Tourister luggage for him, keeping up a cheerful banter the whole while.
“Covered bridges, Roger,” his father says. “And little candy shaped like maple leaves. And good cheese. Boy, are you in for a treat.”
When his father sold Royal typewriters, Vermont was part of his territory. He knows these things.
“What are the bridges covered with?” Roger asks him.
His father frowns. “Wood,” he says.
“Oh,” Roger says, disappointed.
“THAT THING NOT COMING,” Mama Jo says, pointing to Mike Nesmith. Then she says something in Italian.
“She thinks he’s sacrilegious,” Mama G says.