As he swallowed the last of his beer, he pivoted, tossing the bottle with a practiced ease into the waste can in the far corner. “We can. I know the pass code. Alice gave it to me.”
“You’re kidding,” she exclaimed, beaming. “Let’s go, then.”
“Wait.” He caught her hand as she moved to leap from the bed. “It’s still daylight out. There are soldiers all over the place. We need to wait until it’s dark, when everyone’s gone back to the barracks and Moore’s working in there alone. Otherwise we’ll get caught.”
“Oh.” She nodded, and with a dejected sigh, sat again. “Shit.”
“It’s not that bad,” he said with a laugh. “I’ve got plenty of beer. And a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.”
She groaned.
“Or we could talk about your kids.”
At this, she smiled again. “Deal.”
Dani returned to her room long enough to grab a small photo album. She and Andrew sat against the headboard of his bed, their knees drawn to their chests, sipping beer while she gave him the photographic grand tour.
“This is Eme in her Cinderella dress,” she said, pointing.
“Did you make that?” he asked, leaning forward to peer more closely.
“God, no. I can’t even sew a button on straight. They sell them fancy like that now. She’s got one like Cinderella’s, one like Sleeping Beauty’s.”
“You must miss them a lot,” he remarked.
Her eyes grew sad and somewhat forlorn. “Yeah. It’s not as bad as when I was sent over to Baghdad, but…” Her voice faded as her eyes grew glossy and, blinking, she turned her face away.
Andrew said nothing, feeling awkward and intrusive, until he saw her shoulders relax as she regained that momentarily lost composure. “You were in Iraq?” he asked and she glanced at him, nodding.
“I was in maintenance, so it’s not like I’d see any kind of action. Just what was left of the Humvees and Strykers after an IED attack. I was stationed at Camp Liberty north of Baghdad.”
“How long were you over there?”
“A year and a half. I haven’t been back very long. Not even six months.”
“How did you wind up in the National Guard anyway?” he asked.
She laughed without little humor. “The usual way, I guess. I enlisted. Me and Tonio, we used to live in this crowded little apartment in the Bronx. We talked about moving out, getting our own place, a real house, but we couldn’t afford it. I’d quit my job with the city after Max was born, and all we had was Tonio’s paycheck coming in. So every Wednesday, my mom would come over and sit with the kids while I’d haul all our clothes over to this 86aundromat on foot. I’d come home, have lunch with them, help Mom get Max and Eme down for their naps, then walk back over to pick everything up.”
Her expression had grown distant, pensive. “One day, I walked past a Guard recruiting office up the block from the laundry. I must’ve passed it a thousand times, but I’d never really noticed it before. They had a big sign in their window. ‘Twenty-thousand dollar sign-on bonus. ’ That was all it took.” With a smile, she glanced at Andrew. “I could think of a lot of things we could do with that.”
“I bet.”
“I took what’s called an off-peak quick ship,” she said. “That means I agreed to leave for basic training right away, putting me in the service before the first part of November. In exchange for that, they gave me the money upfront. We used half of it as a down payment and bought a little townhouse over in the East Bronx, a neighborhood called Castle Hill. Two bedrooms, two baths, its own little yard.”
“Sounds nice.”
She shrugged. “Anyway, I don’t know why I did it, other than I guess I had dollar bills flashing in my eyes. You know, like they do in the cartoons? I didn’t ask anyone, didn’t tell anyone what I was going to do. I just did it.”
He blinked at her, surprised. “What did your husband say?”
“He was upset, of course. Wouldn’t you be?” Another glance. “Tonio and I never fight. I think that’s the closest I’ve ever seen him come to losing his temper with me. And mi madre.” She rolled her eyes.
“Your mom?” Andrew asked, having wracked his brain back to high school conversational Spanish.
Dani nodded. “She’s always hated that I was into cars and engine work, that I wasn’t this picture-perfect daughter like my sisters, who used to make tostones or albondigón or pastales with her and now have babies and husbands and white picket fences, all that bullshit. She thought marriage would change that, change me. And I guess she was right, for awhile anyway. She was pretty pissed when I enlisted. And it was hard to make Max and Eme understand. They don’t get things like money. All they knew was that Mommy would be going away.” Her voice grew choked. “At Christmas time, no less.”
Her eyes dropped to her beer bottle again, and she toyed with an upturned corner of the damp label. “You want to know the worst thing? A part of me didn’t even care, not at first. I mean, of course I missed them. They’re mis niños, my kids. But by that point, I’d been a stay-at-home mom for almost five years. Tonio was never home, always picking up swing shifts and late nights and then he said he could get paid double time on the holidays. It was like I couldn’t escape.”
Her voice faded for a moment. “I felt like I had disappeared. Like there was nothing left of me, the person I’d been before Tonio, before the kids. And I missed that, you know? Having something that was my own, a life that was mine. I wanted that back. Not for always, not instead of my kids, but just a little bit of it.”
She cut him a glance. “When I got sent to Iraq, I realized just how big a mistake I’d made,” she said. “I missed Max and Eme so bad, it hurt inside. I’d look at their pictures or think of their little faces or hear their voices over the phone, then lay in my bunk and just cry and cry. I must’ve cried myself to sleep every night I was there. And then, being called up again to come here. They weren’t supposed to, not for active duty again, not this soon.”
Her eyes were glossy again, swimming with tears. “You must think I’m a horrible person.”
He shook his head. “No. Not at all. Of course not.”
Again, she turned her face away, her lips pressed together as she proudly tried to compose herself. After a moment, she turned to him again, swatting once at her cheek with her fingertips and managing a shaky life. “Enough boring you with my life’s story. Tell me yours.”
He laughed. “I’m not bored.”
She folded her arms, cocked her brow expectantly and he laughed again. “Alright, alright.”
For the next twenty minutes, he talked, until the sun sank low in the sky, dipping behind the tree-covered mountains, sending shadows spreading in thick, fast-moving fingers through the room.
“I’m sorry they hurt you,” Dani said after he’d told her about the incident at the Pagoda Chinese restaurant. “What a shitty thing your dad did.”
He managed a smile. “My mom told me everything happens for a reason. Even when it hurts, even if we don’t understand, it all happens for a reason.”
He fished his wallet out of his pocket so he could show her the letter from his father. “He left my mom for Lila. I haven’t seen or spoken to them since that night at the restaurant.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Seven years. He still tries to call me, send me letters, gifts at Christmas. I never listen to his messages, and send his shit back marked ‘return to sender. ’ Maybe one day he’ll take the hint.”
“Why do you carry that letter with you?” she asked.