Other mornings-more than once: “Those shoes need a good buffing, soldier.”
And on the nights when Pete did join them for dinner: “Where’s your tie, boy?”
The Colonel wears a tie each night for dinner, tied in an elaborate knot. “A Full Windsor,” he told Keri when she asked. “Most men employ the Half-Windsor or the Four-in-Hand, but that’s too casual for me.”
“A little old school, don’t you think?” Pete said, when Keri asked him to try it one evening, just a single meal, just to humor the old man. “And that wasn’t part of the deal, now, was it?”
“Recruits these days,” the Colonel sometimes says, just under his breath. “A sorry lot, all of them.”
When Keri stands up to clear the table, the Colonel stands quickly as well to help. Even when she dismisses him-“No worries, I can do it” (he’s dropped plates before)-he hesitates before heading back toward the TV. He’s waiting for her, she knows.
“Just let me get this cleaned up,” she says, “and I’ll be right in, okay?”
“Roger that,” he says. “Rendezvous…” He glances at his watch. “Twenty hundred hours?”
“Roger,” Keri salutes, mock-serious. These days, she doesn’t have to count out the real time anymore. “I’ll meet you in the den.”
She stores the lasagna away in squares-leftovers for the week ahead-and sets aside a large slice for Pete, though she knows he’ll already have eaten dinner and probably gone out for drinks after class. Winding-down time after the intensity of the three-hour seminars, he’s explained.
The window above the kitchen sink has a wide view of the yard. The gravel driveway stretches off to the right between the trees, a hundred yards to the main road, a lonely stretch leading “off base.” Shadows play in the woods directly ahead, thick with oak and pine and beech, many of them now tied with red ribbons, marked for timber. Moonlight glistens on the lake off to the left, just barely in sight from this vantage, a rough shoreline that Keri and the Colonel have walked on more than one afternoon, counting Canada geese. A full moon tonight, Keri notes, as if that might explain the tension in the air.
Throughout dinner, the Colonel seemed restless, attentive. Now, as Keri scrubs at the casserole pan, she finds herself watchful, too. Is there “incoming”? She thinks about the people that she’s seen in and around the property sometimes. Fishermen bring small skiffs close to shore or actually trudge down the driveway in their waders, tossing a small wave toward the house as they pass. Hunters often wander through the woods, unsure whose property they’ve crossed into at any point. More than once, teenagers have pulled a car up the drive-couples, groups, looking for a place to hook up, get high, get into trouble. Then, beginning last week, came the onslaught of real estate agents and surveyors, the men from the tree service, the crew taking soil samples, the beginning of the end. Today’s surveyors had lingered until almost dusk, and she’d had the feeling of being trapped somehow, or watched at least, like she and the Colonel were on display, sad curiosities. A couple of times, she caught the men just standing there, smoking cigarettes, staring toward the house. Leering, she thought, no better than construction workers, ogling passersby.
She doesn’t know which is worse-the isolation she’d been feeling out here or these sudden intrusions, and the knowledge of what it means. Stuck somewhere between the two and spurred on by the Colonel’s own brewing vigilance tonight, her imagination leaps ahead again, playing tricks on her. Is that the red tip of a cigarette butt? No, just one of the ribbons flapping in the moonlight. Did that shadow move? No, just a branch swaying in the breeze.
“Full moon,” she says aloud, and then remembers her horoscope from earlier that day: Surprises abound. Follow where the evening takes you. All will become clear. Pete still makes fun of her for reading them each morning.
Behind her, the Colonel turns up the TV-hinting for her to join him. The announcer is talking about the Trojan War, the horse that made history, the importance of surprise. Keri shivers a little.
“Coming,” she calls to him.
The pan still isn’t clean. And she hasn’t even started on the knife, crusted with cheese. She leaves both to soak until later-even till tomorrow perhaps.
“He’s dotty,” Margaret, the former caretaker, had said, the second time they’d met-the passing on of the keys. She was an older woman: fifties, stout, frizzy-haired. “You’ll find out soon enough. And you’ve got your work cut out for you with him. With all of them.”
The first time they’d met was when Keri and Pete had been interviewed for the job. Margaret had brooded along the edges of the conversation as Claire, the youngest of the Colonel’s children, put a different spin on the situation: “The world has passed my father by,” she said. “We’ve striven to preserve his old glories, revere his achievements.” She swept an arm about the room. Medals and honors dominated one wall. Photographs with politicians and military leaders lined another, many of them long dead, Keri had since learned. Several framed boxes held guns, relics of a recent past, like museum pieces but brimming with menace. “Unfortunately, everything that my father trained for, everything that he lived for-none of it has much purpose here.”
Claire explained that it was just short-term. Margaret had been called to help her own father; plans were already afoot to sell the property, but might take some time; and they were finally looking into “more professional care” for the Colonel-a step they’d dreaded and delayed for too long. Claire herself had tended to him for several years after her mother died. “But I couldn’t manage any longer,” she explained. “Physically, yes, but emotionally… Well, watching someone you love so dearly deteriorate, become a shadow, sometimes you just feel yourself breaking down as well.” Keri and Pete were a stopgap. She was sure they understood.
The Colonel was napping while they talked. Margaret had shot a couple of looks at Keri throughout the conversation: envy, disbelief, warning glares? Keri hadn’t been sure. (Margaret told her later, on the sly, that Claire was a drinker. Claire, in turn, confided that Margaret was a thief-little things, but hardly negligible.)
It was after the Colonel went down for his nap another afternoon, only a week ago now, that Claire and her siblings-Beatrice and Dwight-had made their inventory. This was the first time that Keri had met the other two, since both lived just out of state, and Margaret’s comment about having her work cut out for her with “all of them” echoed throughout the day.
With Pete on campus again-early office hours, eternal office hours-Keri had played host alone. Claire asked her to make a salad for lunch, “something simple, no trouble,” and Keri had, laying it out on the table, not planning to join them until the Colonel insisted, asking his son to move down a seat, make room for the ladies.
Dwight had smirked at that. “Aye aye, sir,” he said, taking his salad with him as he slid down.
The Colonel had seemed to recognize them only dimly, but he nodded politely when Beatrice spoke about her children’s latest report cards and Dwight talked about the business finally turning a profit again last quarter-“despite what the president’s doing,” he insisted, which prompted Beatrice to complain bitterly about the state of political discourse in the country today. More smirks from Dwight at that, and cold looks from Claire.
The Colonel had watched all of them with interest but no reaction. Claire tried at each turn of the conversation to nudge her father to recall Beatrice’s children or the nature of Dwight’s business or just the name of that current president, but she had finally given up, simply watching the Colonel with a mixture of curiosity and distress. Keri had watched each of them and didn’t know exactly how she felt.