I did it was only halftime.”
I had a sudden intuition.
“Do you teach?”
She nodded. “Fifth grade art.”
I smiled. “Middle school science.”
“Middle school’s hard, good for you . . . So, we went into it with our eyes wide open, or at least that’s what we told each other.
But we were blind of course. What bothered him most was how much the people hated us, and how he could put nothing against that except being nice to the Iraqi kids. He loved his men. He had the best men possible he wrote in his last letter. Everyone thinks I’m protesting the war just because of him, but it’s because of his men and those kids and girls like Cassie and moms like you . . . It hurts to think Jimmy knew the bigshots were lying, but it would hurt even worse if he had believed them.”
She told me about her organization, how it had started, how many parents, wives and husbands they had recruited and how more military families were joining every day. Who could speak out better than people who had loved ones over there, how could their voices not be heard? They couldn’t be dismissed as radicals, they had given too much to their country. Their pain and despair needed an outlet, and she was no longer surprised at the depth of that anger and their determination to fight back.
Somewhere during this I realized she was asking me to join. It bothered me a little, it made it seem that all along she’d had this secret agenda to recruit me and Dan.
“I don’t know how you get up the nerve to speak in public. It’s all I can do to talk to my class.”
It was the best I could come up with. I said nothing about the shame involved, that my daughter could smile so vivaciously over a dead man. Or the guilt, that I hadn’t protected her from monsters.
“I would have said the same thing once,” she said. “When I got invited to the White House after Jimmy died, I hesitated for a long time. I was still in the fog that descends, I couldn’t see straight. Half of me wanted to buy into it all, the idea that he had died defending his country and fighting for freedom. The other half worried he had died for a lie. When the Pentagon called and said I was one of ten wives the president wanted to meet with to express his condolences I decided to go, because I thought maybe that would decide it, whether Jimmy was a hero or a sucker . . . Okay, here’s where we get to the emotional part. Ready? More coffee?”
That was her way of ordering another vodka. When it came, she kept it in the middle of the table where the glass caught the light.
“It was a photo op for him, his poll numbers were sinking, so that’s why the ten of us ended up in the Oval office with the generals and cabinet members and TV cameras. We stood in a semi-circle on the carpet, the one with the presidential seal. I was toward the end and I could see him putting his arm around the other women’s shoulders and saying something that judging by his little smirk was supposed to be a gentle joke. Despite the solemn men behind him he was enjoying himself greatly. There were three more women before me. I’m from Nebraska, it said that on the name tag along with Jimmy’s name and rank, and I was absolutely certain he was going to say something about football, like ‘Go Cornhuskers!’ or something awful like that. He came up to me, a general leaned over his shoulder to tell him who I was, but his eyes fastened on my name tag and the word Omaha. ‘Go Cornhuskers!’ he said. Then he mumbled something that was meant to be comforting and moved on to the next woman in line.”
She reached for the drink, put it to her lips, put it back down without tasting.
“They had refreshments for us in the next room. Punch and cake. There were knives on the table to cut the cake, surprisingly sharp ones. You know how you wonder if you ever had the chance to meet Hitler whether you would have the courage to kill him? Kill evil? That’s what I was thinking about, staring at those knives. I thought of grabbing one and plunging it into his chest and then I thought