Chapter 12
Midland, South Dakota
Jerry’s dad, Leonard “Leo” Adam McBride, set a cup of coffee in front of him. Jerry smiled and said, “Appreciate it.”
“Course you do.” His dad sat across from him, his hazel eyes taking in everything. His once brown hair, still cut close in the military style, now salted with gray.
“How was your night?”
The weather had delayed his flight. He’d arrived just before midnight. “Fine. Been a long couple of weeks, though. Lots of snow and lots of flying.” He rubbed his eyes. “We got in on Christmas Day.”
“Didn’t realize you were even gone.” A wry smile curved his lips. “But when we didn’t hear from you Christmas morning, I assumed.”
“Yeah.” He took a sip of coffee and closed his eyes, appreciating his father’s special roast. “Man, that’s good coffee.”
“Life’s too short to drink bad coffee.”
“Well, when all you got is MRE coffee for a few weeks, you’ll take most anything else.” He raised his cup in a toast to his dad. “Business still good?”
His father sat back in his chair. “I used to get enough orders at Sturgis to see me through the year. Now, with all the social media stuff your cousin keeps doing, I have a three-month waiting list and work twenty-hour days just to fill orders at Sturgis. If you ever decide to get out, I can add an ‘& Son’ after the name, and we could make a killing.”
His father built custom windshields for any kind of vehicle that needed one, but motorcycles dominated his trade.
The work involved in customizing the windshields and forming them by hand went back to the days of old when blacksmiths crafted swords and shields on anvils from raw metal using hammers and pure human strength.
Jerry raised an eyebrow. “Get out?”
“Yeah.” His dad rubbed his smooth jaw. “It’s not the same Army I was in. Very different.”
True. A lot of things about the military had changed in the last decade, and some things had changed back.
“Granddad said the same thing about you. Didn’t he say, ‘Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis’?
Times change, and we change with them,” Jerry smiled when he said that.
It wasn’t intended to be an insult or a gotcha.
“Everything changes from one generation to the next, does is it not?”
“Renaming ships and tearing down memorials? When they renamed Bragg, that was kind of the final straw for me,” his dad said frankly.
“They named it back,” Jerry countered.
His dad shook his head. “One shot, one kill. No take backs.”
Jerry considered it. He understood why rewriting history and generations of tradition would have this effect on his father and other veterans of his generation, but Jerry had not emotionally invested himself in this particular argument.
Like his father, he thought the initial effort and the motivations for it were steeped in inexplicable ignorance.
However, on balance, he also thought most politicians were either deeply stupid, irreversibly corrupt, or both, allowing him to frame the issue from that perspective.
Jerry chuckled. “Sounds like you’re holding a grudge.”
“You got that right. Me and every other vet who ever served there, probably. And that new PT test? What a joke. Why not just sign everybody up for hot yoga? Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war.”
While he had no intention of arguing with his father on this point, Jerry felt his dad was mistaken.
The new annual Army Physical Fitness test may be many things, but it was certainly no joke.
He remembered how shredded his thighs had felt after his last test. He would much rather sign up for hot yoga.
“I hadn’t planned on getting out any time soon,” Jerry said.
His father prompted, “So you looking to go warrant? You’re a little long in the tooth for the team these days, Sergeant First Class.”
Jerry shook his head. “I’m promotable. Move up to Zulu. No reason I shouldn’t. Our team has had an overstrength slot for a while now, and Wade Chandler is getting close to either getting E-9 or calling it done.”
An 18Z is the Senior Sergeant on the team, typically a Master Sergeant of pay grade E-8. Jerry, as a Sergeant First Class, held the pay grade of E-7. “If that doesn’t work out for some reason, then I’ll go warrant. My plan is to go warrant after I get done with the Zulu slot.”
His father said, “Then when you burn that bridge, you’ll finally accept a commission? You’ll be like a real mustang.”
“Sir. Doing everything I can to avoid ending up as a commissioned officer, sir. No offense, Colonel sir.”
His father shook his head, and his eyes suddenly stared into the past. “I understand completely. You’re a team dog, through and through. The politics alone would make you want to choke some dummy out on a daily basis. Your mother, however, would not have approved.”
Jerry felt himself tense up. “Yeah. She made that abundantly clear.”
The kitchen door burst open, and Mabel rushed in wearing a pink coat and a pink hat with a pom-pom on top of it.
The crisp bite of winter air clung to her coat, laced with the faint, earthy tang of hay and feathers from the henhouse.
She carried a basket filled with eggs. Leo immediately stood and took the basket from her, while she removed her coat and hat.
“Seventeen eggs! Even though it’s cold.” She walked over to Jerry and put her arm over his shoulders, crossing her feet at her ankles, standing like a street tough kid on a light post. “My girls are happy girls.”
Jerry’s grin stretched across his face. “Seventeen! It’s eight degrees outside. That’s great. How many customers do you have now?”
Mabel shrugged her shoulders in a fluid motion. “Daddy knows.” She looked at their father. “Daddy, give him his present now?”
“Not yet. Your day’s not done yet.” He pointed to a whiteboard with a chart. The columns had the day of the week and intersecting rows labeled with pictures. Jerry understood the tasks of feeding the hens, watering them, collecting eggs, and placing the eggs in cartons.
Mabel reached into the left pocket of her coat and pulled out a wooden bead, then made a mark next to the picture for feeding the chickens.
Once she made her mark, she put the bead in a little box under the chart and pulled another bead out of her pocket, repeating the process.
Once she emptied her pocket, their dad said, “What’s next? ”
Mabel tapped the picture of the cartons.
“I know what’s next.” She capped the marker and took the eggs into the utility room. She looked at Jerry and beckoned him with her hand. “Come on. You can help me. I’ll teach you how.”
He got up and followed her. In the utility room, he saw her workstation, the pictures on the wall, and the calendar hanging above the workbench.
She carefully filled the cartons, matching the sizes of eggs, then closed them.
Jerry noted she had twenty-four eggs, not seventeen.
She pointed at the calendar. “Twenty-seven.”
He assumed she meant the date. “Yes. Twenty-seven.”
In her child’s handwriting, Mabel wrote the date on the egg cartons. Then she stacked them next to several other cartons and crossed out the date on the calendar. “Now presents!” She took Jerry’s hand and led him back into the kitchen. “Now presents,” she repeated to their dad.
He smiled and nodded. She rushed out of the room.
Jerry reclaimed his coffee mug. “You’re very good with her.”
“Your mom was better.” Leo shrugged. The grief in his voice from years back had vanished, but the loss still echoed there.
“There was a learning curve. I was gone a whole lot when you two were little. After your mom passed, I suddenly had this amazing daughter and truly no idea what to do. But your mom had perfectly written everything down for me in a notebook. I can follow simple directions.”
“I miss her too, Dad. God knows, it’s hard to even be here without her.”
His dad sharply cleared his throat. “I know, son. But life has to go on, right? Tempus vivendi et tempus moriendi. There’s a time to live and there’s a time to die. Much to our grief and dismay, your mother’s time to die came too soon. It’s hardest on your sister.”
Almost before he realized it, Jerry said, “I met someone.”
“That right? Met someone like casual, or met someone like you’re making plans?”
Was he making plans? In his heart, he felt like he ought to start making plans, but he could hardly be that serious just five weeks in. “Just a few dates. Spent Thanksgiving with her family. Had breakfast at her place yesterday morning before I flew here.”
“You didn’t spend the night before breakfast—”
“No, Dad. I had just come back from—somewhere.”
While his father maintained a Top-Secret Clearance, he still had no need to know, and classified details rested on that two-pronged fork.
“But you like her?”
“What’s not to like? She’s former Army. Officer. Captain, actually. A nurse.”
“That’s what she did and does, but how do you feel about her? Do you like her, son?”
He studied his dad for a long breath before saying, “She reminds me a lot of Mom.”
“Well, in that case, you should probably start making plans.”
Jerry walked over to his dad and put his hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, I don’t visit enough. I think it’s part of the job. I love you and I love Mabel.”
His dad grabbed him in a fierce hug and quickly let him go. “We know that, son. I’m proud of you, and I know exactly what your life is like. You don’t have to explain. We’re just happy to see you when we can.”
Mabel called from the front room. “I’m ready! Come on! I’m ready! Presents!”
Jerry raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t bring her anything because, as you know, I mailed her present weeks ago.”
His dad slapped him on the shoulder, and they walked to the door. “I know. She loved it, by the way. When you said you were coming. I went ahead and got her something from you. She’s gonna love it just as much.”
Jerry couldn’t help but look behind him as they left the kitchen. But his mom was not at the sink. Nor did she labor at the stove, filling the house with Christmas baking. And she never would again in his lifetime.