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“You were in a war, weren’t you, Uncle Gideon?” Noah gazed up at him with his innocent child’s eyes.
“Yes, I was. In Iraq, in the Middle East.”
“I know where that is,” Jorge said. “We had a really big map in our classroom last year when we were learning all about the continents and stuff.”
As Gideon continued to read aloud, the characters jumped from the magic tree house into the biting cold of a Pennsylvania December.
“Was it cold like that where you were?” Noah wanted to know.
“Nope. It was hot,” he said. “Really hot. And sandy. Dusty. The dirt seemed to get into everything.” He leaned close to say, “Even in your underpants.”
They giggled in unison.
“You get used to it.” He shrugged. “You can get used to anything.” In the end, he’d barely noticed the dust and the dirt. It was only when he came home, when he no longer had to wash the sand out of his clothes and his pores, that he noticed the difference again.
They got back to Annie and Jack in the story as the characters came upon a regiment of patriot soldiers in raggedy clothes, some even without boots on their feet, just rags.
“Did they give you boots, Gid, when you were over there?” Worry laced Jorge’s voice, as if he were afraid Gideon had been marching through hot sand in bare feet.
Gideon suppressed a smile. “Yeah, kiddo, we had boots. We had everything we needed to survive. You’d be amazed what you can fit in a pack. It was heavy, but your pack was your life preserver.” His gear had saved his life more than once.
“Can we see your pack?” Noah asked, excitement in his voice.
“I’d show it to you.” He shook his head. “But I don’t have it anymore.”
“Bummer,” they both said.
He moved them along in the story, to the troops on the banks of the Delaware.
“Did you have to push cannons like they did?” Jorge leaned back to look up at him.
Gideon laughed outright this time. “We had trucks to move artillery. And we had rifles instead of muskets. But we didn’t have to use them a whole lot. Mostly, we were on patrol or tower duty or helping out the villagers. And we had some good times back at base.”
It wasn’t until the words came out of his mouth that he realized what he’d said. Whenever he’d looked back, it had seemed as if every day had been a firefight, every day your life was on the line, every day another IED went off. But maybe his memory had played tricks. Because while he had always been on the edge, and his senses had been heightened—because, hell, everyone over there was armed—the reality was that a lot of the time, nothing had happened.
In fact, for the first time in a really long time, he remembered the pranks he and his buddy Zach had pulled on some of the other guys. He remembered card games and razzing his buddies in the little downtime they were actually given.
The boys and their questions made him think, for the first time in forever, about the good stuff, not just the bad.
He kissed the top of Noah’s head, then Jorge’s, then read about Jack and Annie getting stuck in George Washington’s boat about to cross the Delaware. At last, when their questions stopped, he realized the boys’ eyelids were drooping.
He helped Jorge back into his own bed, kissed him one last time, then leaned over to cover up Noah. It wasn’t until he put the book back on the bookshelf that he noticed Rosie standing in the doorway, a wineglass in each hand.
“You’re a very compelling reader,” she said softly. And then, “You can take these out to the living room while I bestow a few kisses of my own.”
He had to work hard to push away his desperate longing for her to bestow kisses on him as he took both glasses, his fingers grazing hers, their bodies close in the confines of the short hallway, her scent making his knees weak.
The soft murmur of their voices drifted out to the small living room as he set the glasses on the coffee table. He decided to buy the book for his Kindle so he and Noah could keep reading, and it would be available for sleepovers. The story had been good for the boys. And honestly, it had been good for him. He’d never talked about what the war had been like. But answering the boys’ questions had made him rethink his experiences. Maybe that wasn’t so bad.
This morning, before their museum outing, he’d gone straight into the backyard and hadn’t had a chance to see much of the cottage. Now, he noted that the living room walls were covered with Jorge’s drawings, some of them framed, some of them tacked to the plaster.
But Jorge’s paintings weren’t the only ones hanging. Rosie’s were here too.
From what he’d seen on her easel at the museum today, he knew she had artistic ability. But now he realized just how deep her talent truly ran.
She worked in paint, acrylics, oils, a few watercolors. She favored faces and landscapes. There was a series done at a harbor he thought might be near Santa Cruz. There were paintings of Jorge and Noah, Ari and Matt, and their friend Chi. Rosie had also pushed her imagination with renderings of Jorge as a young man and Ari
as an old woman. But it was a painting of a man watching a group of people laughing that really caught Gideon’s eye. Though the viewer couldn’t clearly see the man’s expression, he looked like a man on an island, one who had forgotten how to laugh, how to have fun.
