Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,27
hated to return to Zachary for the summer. But once the school year ended and the dorm shut down, we boarders had no choice. I packed all my belongings into boxes again and moved back home, where a kind of silent truce prevailed between me and my parents. I’d decided that as long as I had to live with them I would be polite, nothing more. My personal life was my own business from now on; I wasn’t going to risk sharing anything with them ever again. When they asked how things were going at school, I’d say, “Fine.” At dinner, it was “Pass the butter, please” and “Thank you.” My father hardly seemed to notice this dearth of communication. My mother, though, more attuned, would stop by my room after dinner.
“Is everything all right, Laura?”
“Yes.”
“Are you enjoying your summer?”
“Yes.”
“Well …” She watched me a moment longer from the doorway, her dark eyes twitching in their sockets. “Nice to have you back. Good night.”
“Night.”
Listening to her steps creaking down the hallway from my room, I could feel the distance between us growing, and I wondered if this distance would grow so great that eventually, passing through opposite doors of the parlor or brushing shoulders on the way to and from the bathroom, we might be no more familiar to one another than strangers at a bus station, bound for different destinations.
Every week or so, I went alone to Jack Prejean’s shop to check for mail from Tim. That was our arrangement: during the school year, Tim would write to me at SHA, and during the summer, he’d write care of his dad’s shop in town.
“Got one right here,” Jack would say, turning around to pick up a letter from his desk behind the counter. I could tell he looked forward to my visits. While I sat in a chair to read Tim’s news, Jack leaned on the counter watching me, the sun angling in through the junked TVs and radios piled on shelves against the shop window. If I laughed aloud or otherwise reacted in some way, he snapped up his eyebrows. “What? What’d he say?” Then we would share what we knew of Tim and his life in Vietnam, which, in the letters that came that first summer, still sounded like one big Boy Scout adventure.
He’d been assigned to an airmobile radio research team, Tim wrote. He figured he wasn’t revealing any army secrets to tell us his job basically entailed him and another guy driving out into a field with a radio mounted on a jeep to try and locate enemy transmitters. “Translate that to me sitting hunched over the receiver all day while Patterson, a guy who’s got one more patch on his shirt than me, lies in the hammock strumming his guitar and getting a suntan.” While they were out snooping on the North Vietnamese Army, they lived off Coca-Cola and C rations, which weren’t so bad really after you heated them up on the exhaust manifold of the jeep. Franks and beans for dinner, bananas cooked in their skins with Hershey chocolate for dessert. Sleeping out under the stars—just like camping out. Most times it was hard to believe there was even a war on. Everywhere you looked it was just farms and fields and dirt roads, with little kids who followed you around like ducks, and everything quiet as a Sunday afternoon in Zachary. Only difference was, in Zachary you didn’t have choppers flying overhead, or military convoys tearing past, or fire-fights that boomed and lit up the night sky over the hills like thunder and lightning before a hurricane. Lucky for him he never had to get too close to the fighting; they just hung back and diddled with their radios. He hadn’t even fired his rifle yet, which was just fine with him, Tim wrote, because then he’d have to take it apart and clean it, which was a real pain in the A.
Jack chuckled, shaking his head. “Man oh man. Army life sure seems to suit the boy, doesn’t it?”
Sometimes Jack and I scribbled responses to Tim on the back of a repair order form, trading wisecracks in writing. “You better get on home. Your girl’s got a dozen beaux circling her!” Jack wrote.
“Don’t listen to Jack,” I wrote below that. “Your girl doesn’t have any beaux circling her. But she does miss you and wish you were here. Be safe.”
At times like these I felt closer to the Prejeans than