“Especially for you,” I said, and reached out my hand.
She took it and smiled. “This is enough.”
I smiled and said, “It is, isn’t it?”
“All I could want.”
I focused on that. Not on the memories of how sick poor Chorey had gotten before I could get him admitted into the detox unit. How he’d refused to wear the hearing device or read my words after a while, retreating from the world and what it had done to him in the surest way he knew how.
“Dinner!” Nana Mama called.
Bree squeezed my hand, and we went inside. My ninety-something grandmother was making magic at the stove when we entered the kitchen.
“Whatever it is, it smells great,” I said, thinking there was curry involved.
“It always smells great when Nana Mama’s manning the stove,” said Jannie, my sixteen-year-old daughter, as she carried covered dishes from the counter to the table.
“Smells weird to me,” said Ali, my almost nine-year-old, who was already sitting at the table, studying an iPad. “Is it tofu? I hate tofu.”
“As you’ve told me every day since the last time we had it,” my grandmother said.
“Is it?”
“Not even close,” she said, pushing her glasses up her nose on the way to the table. “No electronic devices at the dinner table, young man.”
Ali groaned. “It’s not a game, Nana. It’s homework.”
“And this is dinnertime,” I said.
He sighed, closed the cover, and put the tablet on a shelf behind him.
“Good,” Nana Mama said, smiling. “A little drumroll, please?”
Jannie started tapping her fingers against the tabletop. I joined in, and so did Bree and Ali.
“Top Chef judges,” my grandmother said. “I give you fresh Alaskan halibut in a sauce of sweet onions, elephant garlic, Belgian blond beer, and dashes of cumin, cilantro, and curry.”
She popped off the lid. Sumptuous odors steamed out and swept my mind off my day. As we scooped jasmine rice and ladled the halibut onto our plates, I could tell Bree had managed to put her day aside as well.
The halibut was delicious, and Nana Mama’s delicate sauce made it all the better. I had seconds. So did everyone else.
The fuller I got, however, the more my thoughts drifted back to Chorey. Those thoughts must have shown on my face. My grandmother said, “Something not right with your meal, Alex?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I’d order that dish in a fancy restaurant.”
“Then what? Your trial?”
I refused to give that a second thought. I said, “No, there was this veteran Bree and I dealt with today. He suffered a head injury and lost most of his hearing in an explosion in Afghanistan. He lives in shelters and on the streets now.”
Ali said, “Dad, why does America treat its combat veterans so poorly?”
“We do not,” Jannie said.
“Yes, we do,” Ali said. “I read it on the Internet.”
“Don’t take everything on the Internet as gospel truth,” Nana Mama said.
“No,” he insisted. “There’s like a really high suicide rate when they come home.”
“That’s true,” Bree said.
Ali said, “And a lot of them live through getting blown up but they’re never right again. And their families have to take care of them, and they don’t know how.”
“I’ve heard that, too,” my grandmother said.
“There’s help for them, but not enough, given what they’ve been through,” I said. “We brought the guy today to the VA hospital. Took a while, but they got him in detox to get clean. The problem is what’s going to happen when he’s discharged.”
“He’ll probably be homeless again,” Ali said.
“Unless I can figure out a way to help him.”
My grandmother made a tsk noise. “Don’t you have enough on your plate already? Helping your attorneys prepare your defense? Seeing patients? Being a husband and father?”
Her tone surprised me. “Nana, you always taught us to help others in need.”
“Long as you see to your own needs first. You can’t do real good in the world if you don’t take care of yourself.”
“She’s right,” Bree said later in our bathroom, after we’d cleaned the kitchen and seen the rest of the family to bed. “You can’t be everything to everyone, Alex.”
“I know that,” I said. “I just…”
“What?”
“There’s something about Chorey, how lost he is, how abandoned he’s been, hearing nothing, seeing little. It just got to me, makes me want to do something.”
“My hopeless idealist,” Bree said, hugging me. “I love you for it.”
I hugged her back, kissed her and said, “You’re everything to me, you know.”
Chapter 10
At the mental health clinic of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in northeast DC, in an outpatient room drenched in morning sun, a shaggy and shabbily dressed man in his early forties chortled bitterly.
“Thank you,” he sneered, in a falsetto voice. “Thank you for your service.”
He shifted in his wheelchair and relaxed into a deeper, natural drawl that sounded like west Texas. “I freaking hate that more than anything, you know? Can you hear me folks? Can I get an aye?”
Around the circle, several of the other men and women, sitting in metal folding chairs, nodded, with a chorus of Aye.
The group facilitator adjusted his glasses. “Why would you hate someone showing you gratitude for your military service, Thomas?”
Thomas threw up his arms. His left hand and half the forearm were gone. Both of his legs were amputated above the knees.
“Gratitude for what, Jones?” Thomas said. “How do they know what I did before I lost two drumsticks and a wing? That’s the hypocrisy. Most of the ones who wanna run up and tell you how much they appreciate your service? They never served.”
“And that makes you angry?” Jones said.
“Hell, yeah, it does. Many countries in the freaking world have some kind of mandatory public service. People who don’t serve their country got no skin in the game far as I’m concerned. They don’t give a damn enough about our nation to defend it, or to improve it, or to lose limbs for it. They try to bury their guilt about their free ride in life by shaking my good hand, and thanking me for my service.”
He looked like he wanted to spit, but didn’t.
“Why did you enlist?” Jones asked. “Patriotism?”
Thomas threw back his head to laugh. “Oh, God. Hell, no.”
Some of the others in the group looked at him stonily. The rest smiled or laughed with him.
“So why?” Jones said.
Thomas hardened. He said, “I figured the Army was a way out of East Jesus. A chance to get training, get the GI Bill, go to college. Instead I get shipped to pissed-off towelhead town. I mean, would anyone volunteer to go to the Middle East with a gun if the government offered college to someone who worked in schools, sweeping floors instead of getting shot? I think not. No freaking way.”
“Damn straight,” said Griffith, a big black man with a prosthetic leg. “You’re willing to whack ’em and stack ’em, they’ll pay for a PhD. You wanna do good, they pay jack shit. You tell ’em, Thomas. Tell ’em like it is.”