I’ve always been unpoetically anal about trips, though. On the way back home, I have to sit and review all that has happened so it takes root in me as deep as any seed Papa ever sowed in the panhandle soil; I don’t want to forget a thing.

Jimmy came home two days before Christmas in ’51. He spent three days in California getting discharged and he never called because he wanted to surprise me. Kill me is a better word. The widows’ doorbell rang just after supper. Of course I was standing barefoot on the arm of the couch trying to hang a Christmas cookie on the highest bough beneath the angel. Mama opened the door and gasped, then started crying. I could hear Jimmy’s voice but I was still shaken from the gasp and now I somehow thought Jimmy was dead even though I could hear him and when I turned around and saw him walking towards me, twenty pounds leaner, I screamed and fell back against the tree and he caught me and it.

If I lived to be a thousand I would never have another holiday as wonderful as that. Right away I took my husband upstairs to show him sleeping Leo. He lay on his stomach in his crib next to the bed in my old room, which Leo and I now shared. We could see him in the light from the laundromat across the street and Jim reached down and rested his big hand on our son’s back, then Jimmy began to cry and we hugged each other for twenty straight minutes.

Later, after coffee, pie, and some brandy Jim brought us from San Francisco, Mama and Gram left us alone in the parlor. I could hear them upstairs rolling Leo’s crib into their room. On the couch, Jimmy gave me a small wrapped package and I opened it to find a pearl necklace from Japan. A belated third anniversary present, he told me. He was still in uniform, his tie off and shirt collar open. He sat on the couch next to me looking so different, yet so the same too. He’d lost a lot of his chest and neck thickness, but it was his face that seemed so foreign. His cheeks went in where they didn’t used to, and there was more of a line to his jaw, which made him seem less big-headed. But Lord, his eyes hadn’t lost a bit of their softness. In fact, they seemed deeper set and more brown than ever.

“I lost track of Ryder four months ago. We were out at Pusan together. I don’t suppose you’ve heard from him?”

I said I hadn’t and I reached over and ran my fingers across the short hairs at the back of his head. “Was it just horrible over there, Jimmy?”