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I blinked. The group had begun to walk off the field, but Autumn waited for me. A few steps beyond, Connor waited as well.
“Coming, man?” Connor asked.
“Yep.”
I caught up to them and we walked together, Connor and I, with Autumn in the middle.
At the family picnic, Sergeant Denroy morphed into a different guy. He took off his Drill Instructor personality and set it aside, like a tool he was finished using until his next company of new recruits arrived. He smiled wide and easily as he congratulated Connor and me in front of our families, as if he hadn’t spent the last ten weeks screaming that we were no better than dog shit on the bottom of his shoe.
Autumn’s hand looked welded to Connor’s, and every time I snuck a glance at her—which was often—she was gazing up at him.
I managed to peel him from our group, and we watched our people eat and drink and talk.
“Listen, Autumn might mention the letters.”
“What letters?”
“The ones I wrote to her. I mean, wrote for you. To her.”
He shrugged. “Okay.”
“I’m just saying, she’s probably going to bring them up.”
He frowned. “Okay,” he said again, drawing the word out. “How many did you write?”
“A few.”
“How many is a few? Like, once a week?”
“More or less.” I coughed. “Or more.”
Connor’s eyes widened. “Every day?”
“Not every day.”
“Well shit, Wes, what did you say? How did you have so much to say?”
“Calm down,” I said. “I wrote what you told me to write. News and weather. And… sometimes I got in the groove and kept going. I needed the outlet after all that damn PT.”
Connor scratched his chin. “What else? Anything in there I’ll need for reference?”
Only that her happiness is the ultimate measure of yours. No big deal.
“You care about her, right?”
“Of course I do,” he said. “She stood up for me at Thanksgiving. I stood up for me at Thanksgiving. And now here we are, made it through fucking Army Basic Training, man. My dad hugged me. We’re going to serve our country and I have a girl like Autumn, waiting for me at home.”
He inclined his head to Autumn, who sat at one end of a picnic table, speaking animatedly to Mr. and Mrs. Drake who listened with warmer interest than at Thanksgiving.
“For the first time, my parents are taking me seriously,” Connor said. “And goddammit, I’ve earned it.”
“Yep, you have,” I said. “And I’ve been right there with you to see it, and that’s what I wrote about. It’s all there, stretched out over a few letters.”
A metric shit-ton of letters.
“You’re sort of like my interpreter.” Connor slugged my shoulder. “And you’re the fucking best, Wes. For real.”
He pulled me in tight, and I hugged him back.
