Bob stops.
Things clarify for him.
He has come to pay his respects to a dead man. A father of a Bob. The other Bob. Bob the Vietnam buddy of the father he’s been following through the woods.
Keep it straight.
Bob tucks his Glock back inside his inner coat pocket.
But the door is opening.
And while Bob has been making his way through the woods to this place behind a particularly large-trunked laurel oak: Peggy and Robert emerge from the buffet and cross the room to wait for Kevin and his wife and his son and his daughter to finish their shoulder-to-shoulder encounter with the corpse of William Quinlan, which they soon do. Kevin and Grace draw their children closer in an embrace and they turn to find Peggy and Robert. They all huddle in condolence. Beyond them the visitation room is beginning to gather visitors, arriving from a flow of cars into the parking lot, including, mostly recently, a minivan from Longleaf Village. The minivan prompts Jimmy and Heather to look at each other and nod and emerge from their car, though unhurriedly, as they want all these recent arrivals to have a chance to populate the room. Jimmy flexes at his qualms as if they were morning-stiff muscles.
Inside, Peggy abruptly declares to Kevin and his family, “You’re straight from the airport. You must be famished. I’ve got just the thing.” She steps between Kevin and Grace and arranges herself shoulder to shoulder with them, hooking their arms and conveying them toward the buffet room.
“Come on, kids,” she says over her shoulder.
Molly says, “I’m famished,” and follows.
Jake glances to Robert, who nods at his grandson and waits for the diners to make some progress toward the partition door. Then Robert says, “Let’s go.” He leads Jake across the visitation room, looking first toward the exit into the foyer. But people are coming in, some of whom he knows, and he looks away to the back wall and the doors there. No one has gathered near them. “This way,” he says.
Jake follows.
They say nothing to each other as they cross the room and enter the back hallway. It’s lit brightly with torchiere floor lamps. Double doors directly before them lead outside.
“Inside or out?” Robert says.
“Out,” Jake says.
“Good man,” Robert says.
Bob has already stopped in the trees across from the back doors of the funeral home. Things have already become clear to him. He has already tucked his Glock away inside his coat.
The door is opening, and he hangs back, fades into the darkness like the ghost of his father that he’s been chasing through these woods. No doubt also like his father’s ghost, he keeps a careful watch.
Robert and Jake step into the chill air, stop beneath the porte cochere roof, turn to each other, and Jake says at once, “I’ve been intending for a while to do this the next time I saw you.” He extends his hand.
Robert accepts Jake’s hand and they shake. His grandson’s grasp is firm, ardently so but not strained.
Jake says, “Thank you for your service.”
The puzzlement that Robert felt but did not show when Jake offered his hand must be flickering now in his face because Jake quickly adds, “For our country. In Vietnam.”
Their hands are still clasped and Jake renews the shake with this.
Robert nods, trying to block out the voice of the corpse just inside the doors, trying to quash the same impulse he’d felt with the old man’s donut buddies. He manages: “That’s good of you to say.”
The handshake ends.
Jake says, “We’ve never talked about any of that.”
“I tend not to.”
“I respect that,” Jake says. “But if it’s not an absolute thing. ‘Tend,’ right? I mean, I’ve never asked. But I’d like to. I’m older now. I’d like to sit down and talk about war with you. I mean, you’re my grandfather and you’ve been through that and it’s crazy I shouldn’t find out what you know.”
His grandson’s intention, especially now, should rattle Robert. But upon this rush of words, Jake the boy frisks into him, Jake from the few years he lived close by, the three-year-old out with his granddad for a walk but the boy never walking anywhere, always taking off and running ahead.
Not that Robert ever wants to discuss Vietnam, but for now he says, “Maybe not tonight.”
“No no,” Jake says. “I understand. We’ll make another time.”
“Of course.”
“Soon.”
“Sure.”
The two of them are standing here growing a little chilly now up the sleeves and down the collar and beneath the tie because of Jake and his interest in their talking together. So when his grandson pauses, Robert simply waits, glad he’s put off Vietnam. For some years the two households have had ongoing good intentions to get together more often and soon, but it never seems to happen. Robert regrets that but hopes the phenomenon will at least save him from ever having this particular grandfather-and-grandson conversation.
Robert assumes that asking for this was the purpose of tonight’s private talk. He expects Jake to take them back inside.
But he doesn’t. Jake is working up to something else. He looks away, toward the trees, where Bob is watching closely.
He’s spotted me. But Bob doesn’t react abruptly, as much as his hand wants to duck inside his coat. Just in case it’s okay. Just in case the darkness that Bob is standing in is sufficient, he simply moves backward, deeper into the shadows, but without seeming to move, in minute measures, steadily, his hand ready to leap if necessary. The boy’s head turns back to Cal’s buddy.
Jake says to Robert, “There’s one other thing. Maybe we can talk now just a bit? They’re okay inside without us for a couple more minutes, aren’t they?”
Robert hears a different sort of rush in Jake’s voice, an urgency, a pressing private need. “Whatever you need, Jake.”
“I just need to say it. I’m joining the Marines.”
Robert steels himself instantly to show no reaction. Though he’s staggered.
Jake rolls on. “Dad is freaked. But I’ve made up my mind. He sees me as a child. Always will, probably. At least till I’m forty or something. I’m smart, Granddad. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, you know? The war you fought — we can talk about all that another time — but that one was fucked up. Sorry for the language. That’s a thing too with Pop. But Jesus. It’s just a fucking word. In the Vietnam War we got mixed up with another country that was trying to decide for itself who they were, and they had no intention to make anybody else think the same way. Much less kill you if you disagreed. You know? They weren’t about to send the Viet Cong over here to hijack an American Airlines jet and fly it into a New York skyscraper. Hell, how did the dreaded communist Vietnam end up? They’re filling clothes racks at Walmart and Target. But this war now is different. The jihadists of the world are cutting off the heads of anyone who disagrees with them. Not just Christians. Even other Muslims. Over what? Over a fourteen-century-old beef about who should carry on Muhammad’s work, a cousin or a caliph. And they’re coming for us. They say so. They mean it. If they had the technology and a modern country and the governing chops of Adolf Hitler, they’d out-Hitler Hitler. This is a real cause to fight for. If we don’t become the new Greatest Generation, then the jihadists will turn us into the Beheaded Generation.”