It had just rained and was July-hot. There was no baby. You could smell that the box hedges outside her apartment had just been clipped. I had not reacclimated to southern humidity and a constellation of zits had erupted on my face. I asked if she wanted to go to the zoo or something. I cannot remember if we went. I really have no idea.
I am positive, however, that the next time I saw her it was twelve years later, far from Alabama. We ran into each other at the edge of the frozen fish section at Costco Wholesale, in Chicago, Illinois. Another George Bush was President, and a new war in the same desert was cracking wide open. And there she was.
Only, I wasn’t nineteen. I was a grown man. One of thousands who’d been slowly drawn away. Away from fathers who fought in better wars, from male friends whose only interest was whether or not these men had killed anyone. From churches in small southern towns where they were made to stand on Veterans Day. Instead of the VFW or the VA, this crybaby diaspora sought out spaces both alien and familiar: exurb, highway, divorce court, Costco. These were grown men who shopped for discount liquor in bulk. Grown men whose doctors could not explain the sensation of fire beneath the skin. Men who could not pin their failed relationships on anything quantifiable, who obsessed over the inability to recover the lives they saw on TV. A grown man in a beige suede jacket that had lost its nap, and who had spent the many previous days on the floor of his efficiency apartment, watching a new invasion unfold on a small television. Missile strikes at remove, rabbit ears adjusted, a rerun that somehow eclipsed the original. He showered and sobbed and masturbated.
Nobody ever asks about the grown women.
Charlotte was still pretty and soft-spoken, though now with a master’s and a career, and the confidence to look squarely at the past. We stood under the fluorescence, smiling past each other, eyeballing bulk packages of cod, scrod, halibut. I wondered if she had made or kept that list, the one detailing who I was before the war.
She got my phone number before I could ask for hers, and she said we should get a cup of coffee.
Of course, she never called.
“Why on earth would we ever go back?” was the last I ever heard.
Acknowledgments
To Dana Lee and Virginia Philomena, with everything I’ve got. To my wonderful family, Lindsey and Whiting and DeMasi and DeLoca. To Bill Clegg. To Jill Bialosky. To Liz Birch and Brendan McGrath, Allan B. “Preacher” Hunt, Kyle Beachy, Chris Bower, Thomas D’Angelo and Caitlan Mackinnon-Patterson, Werllayne Nunes and Molly Dondero, Lee Eastman II, Alice Randall, David Metcalf and Erin Moody, Margaret Patton Chapman and Tony Strimple, Richard Holland, Ken MacLeish and Rachael Pomerantz, Andrew Mullins, Justin McGuirk, Maggie Tate, Robert Rea, Cale Nicholson. . To Robert Olen Butler, Chris Clemans, Maria Rogers, Michael Strong. To Lynelle Keil, Scott Gray, and the Pals who visit Willow Street in Austin. To John and Angela Young, Rob Harrington, Carter Little, and My Extended Nashville Comrades. To Ted Ownby, Ann Abadie, Jimmy Thomas, and the staff at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi. To Sara Levine and everyone at the MFA in Writing, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. To the Tennessee Arts Commission, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt. To Square Books. To the Iowa Review, and the Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award for Veterans. To all y’all, with a thanks that feels broken, because a word like thanks doesn’t even come close.