Morning was the hardest part of the day.
Deidre rolled over in bed, her thin arm falling across the wide, cold space beside her. With Adam gone, she felt like an unfinished painting, splatters of color against a stark, empty canvas. She reached over from time to time, hoping that the universe had gone against itself, reversed the past, and offered her a second chance. She saw no harm in foolish hope. But hoping, like dreaming, was the hammer that shaped ideals, and those crumbled with time; fallen, rendered into unorganized heaps of reality.
Her tired eyes, bordered in gray, glared at the harsh red numbers of her bedside alarm clock. Five-thirty in the morning and damn if she didn’t want to go right back to sleep. Most mornings, a strange metal taste haunted her tongue. She reached over and took a sip of the water on the nightstand. She had no idea how long it had been there. Finding it equally as metallic as her mouth, she frowned and rose from the bed. The cold, wooden floor stabbed her feet like a thousand icy knives.
Staggering, legs cramped with cold, she went to the kitchen and dumped the last of the coffee grounds into the spotty silver percolator. Fluorescent lights above the sink flickered and buzzed. She cursed herself. She had left them on all night. Money was tight, and she wondered just how much that would set her back; insignificant to most, but a cardinal sin to a single mother on a tight income. Every cent she wasted meant something the boys would have to do without.
Sensing an unspoken cue, or perhaps just awakened by the noise of knocking pipes, one of the boys cried out from the small bedroom on the other side of the house.
Jason stood in his crib, shaking the rails of his wooden prison. Miles was still asleep, his blanket bunched up under his chin. Deidre hefted Jason from his crib and walked him over to the window. He placed his hands against the glass, pointed at some birdies on the yellowing front lawn, then laid his head down against his mother’s shoulder. She cooed and hummed until he fell back to sleep. Babies were easy when they were tired, and the boys … well, they were plain worn out. Two weeks of a back-and-forth stomach virus, a broken water heater, and an electrical malfunction that took away the lights at will, had made life nearly unbearable. There was no one to help, either. Deidre had no family of her own, and Adam’s parents were blissfully ambivalent. She wondered if they knew about Adam. Had messengers been sent to Portland, as well, to deliver the news, or were her in-laws still lost in their post-Woodstock fog, still ignorant of their son’s fate?
Walking back into the kitchen, she ran her finger along the chair rail that was a feature in every room. Deidre hated the damn thing. All she saw when she looked at it was another thing to clean, another little groove to collect filth. She stared down at her finger, coated in gray dust, and stuck out her tongue treating it like some relentless bully she could only taunt from a distance. She wasn’t a poor housekeeper; neither lazy nor ignorant. She was exhausted. From the top to bottom she was spread thin, worn to a shroud.
Her earlier life of nights dancing and savoring cocktails paid for by expectant men seemed not only far away but like borrowed memories. Adam had been a brief feature of her party scene, but only long enough to win her over and help her plot her escape. As little orphan party girl, she was troubled, heading for a life of glamour drugs, promiscuity, and jail time. As Adam Patterson’s wife, a future filled with happiness no longer stood as an elusive ideal; it was her reality.
In the living room, she sat cross-legged on the floor amidst a battlefield of building blocks. Deidre had intended to pick them up once the kids were down, but fatigue had stolen her ambition, and the bed proved much more welcoming. Sleep, however, was not calm and refreshing, like it used to be in the days of out until four, in the sack by five, just enough time to sleep away the sunrise. Now she was in bed by nine, every dream a bad one, turning and tossing in anticipation of escape, awake before the sun.
She tossed the blocks into a heavy plastic bag with a zipper-top and dragged them over to the former coat closet, now a hideaway for an unstable mountain of toys. She knew she might have been spoiling them, but she wanted them to have the things she never did - fun and education, love and belonging, toys and books. Of course, she failed in some areas, especially education. Sesame Street provided the ABCs and 123s. She had always wanted to be the one teaching the boys about shapes and numbers, but between work at the VA hospital, and weekend shifts at the bistro, she could never find the time. Sesame Street was fine.
Tossing aside couch cushions, she located the remote and aimed it at the television. She hesitated before turning it on. Truthfully, it was the hardest part of the day, flipping on the news, knowing full well what she would hear. She pushed the button despite the looming devastation spread across the airwaves.
“Seven soldiers killed in a roadside bombing this morning,” Tom Jackson said.
Jackson wasn’t just a reporter. He was her reporter. He was a sharp-dressed black man, and the only commentator she could stomach. There was nothing indifferent about his demeanor when he announced the casualties. He was always appropriately solemn, constantly aware that these were not just soldiers; these were children, husbands, wives, mothers, and fathers, someone to somebody. How many people felt the same emptiness, the same hollow ache, that Deidre felt every second of every day? Daily, the numbers climbed, grew, expanded. More and more fallen were being loaded onto planes like so much cargo, meat in a metal box. On the day Adam was confirmed dead, two men had come to her door wearing Army formals. One wore the cross and collar of a chaplain. She knew when she saw him that Adam had been killed.
“Among the dead was nineteen-year-old PFC. Anton Morena,” Tom Jackson continued. “Morena was a graduate of Keller High School in Ft. Worth, Texas. Married on December 14th of this year, he is survived by his wife and their four-month-old child. The names of the remaining six have not been released at this time. We’ll keep you posted.”
Deidre nearly choked. Jason had only been four months old when the chaplain arrived at her door. The boys were too young to know what a terrible loss they had endured. On the mantle above the fireplace was an oak display box, and inside was a folded flag, clean and crisp behind a pane of dusty glass. Was this the thanks of a grateful nation? Was this the cost of a man’s life? When she presented these questions to the men on the hill, no one answered. Most of her letters were returned unread, and she had even received a mildly threatening phone call from a military button pusher. What had they been doing over there, all those boys? What great cause had taken them from their homes and the people they loved? Was it just a death march to fill the pockets of power, more blood to the government coffers? She would never forgive them for taking her husband away.
Reluctantly, she went back into the nursery. After such horrible news, it was hard to look at them, hard to be in the presence of innocence when the world had gone so damn crazy. Miles had one eye open, looking at her through an opening in his bunched-up blanket. They were so much like Adam, in all the little gestures they made, the crooked way they smiled, the loud, deep belly laughter, and the way they loved her without being asked. She scooped Miles into her arms and walked him around the room, humming the song that Adam used to sing, the song that spoke of nothing more than “loving you forever” and “never saying goodbye”, the song she was afraid she would ruin with her hollow voice. The boys would know their father, his songs, his stories, the depth of his heroism, how he died, and how he lived. Whether they hated or loved the country that sent him to die, she would leave up to them. She knew where she stood on the matter.
Morning was the hardest part of the day.
