My father, who was getting out of the truck on the passenger side and pretending not to be listening, made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. He came around the front of the truck. Sixty-three, lean as a board, dressed Saturday-morning casual, the way he’d dressed on Saturday mornings my whole life. The small smile he wore around the shop these days — the one that hadn’t lived on his face for the years I was gone — was on him in the morning light.
I got the keys out. Walked the path to the porch with my father a step behind, the boys coming after him with the kitchen table and the couch and what I was pretty sure was my coffee pot riding loose on top of a tower of three boxes the man at the back was carrying with the dead-eyed efficiency of a man who’d promised himself he wouldn’t take two trips.
“Take two trips,” I called over my shoulder.
“Bite me, Dog.”
I keyed the lock. Pushed the door open. Held it.
Five Harleys in my driveway, my father at my shoulder, six boxes coming up my path on the shoulders of men I’d grown up calling my brothers and would die calling my brothers. A house that three weeks ago I hadn’t even been looking to buy.
I had no idea why I’d written the check. Maybe it was because I’d heard about the house before it even hit the market from a friend of my father’s, or because it was forty thousand dollars under comparable two stories in tows. But really, I’d bought theplace because I’d been telling myself for two years I was saving for something I’d recognize when I saw it, and on the Tuesday I walked the place, I had. I couldn’t have told a man why. You didn’t, in my line of work, argue with that kind of read.
Twenty minutes into the unload, with three of them stacking boxes in the kitchen and Tuck doing the running commentary, I came out for the last load and was alone on the porch for the first time since the bikes had pulled in.
One of the bikes had been dieseling on the kickstand for the better part of the morning. I knew what was coming before the screen door across the south property line opened.
He came down his own porch in a flannel two sizes too big for him and slippers he’d had since the second Bush. White hair, wiry build, the set face of a man who’d been rehearsing on his couch for thirty minutes. He drew up at the line where my drive met his side yard.
“What in the damn hell is that noise."
I didn't turn, didn’t brace, didn’t put the tape down. I had heard him coming and made no move to meet him at the line.
He stopped.
A man doesn't spend decades in uniform without learning to read another one.
His eyes went over me once, and with that look his anger came off him.
"How long you in?" he asked.
Different voice now.
“Thirteen years.”
“How long have you been out?”
“Three years.”
He lifted his hand to chest height and let it down again. Then he stepped across the line onto my drive and held out the same hand.
“Master Sergeant Frank Murphy. Army. Retired. Three tours, starting in ’71.”
I came across the yard and took it. His grip was a Master Sergeant’s grip — twenty-some years’ worth of younger men’s hands shaken into shape.
“Caleb Maddox.”
“You’re at the shop down on Route 9. Hank’s boy.”
“Yes.”
“Navy?”
“Yes sir”
He looked at me a long beat. “Which teams?”
“Two. Then six.”
