Behind the pictures from deployments and platoon picnics, I find several shots of my dad with Penn, Landry, and me when we were little. He’s in uniform, holding Landry on one hip, while Penn stands on his left and I clutch his right hand. In the background is a parking lot full of folding tables decorated in red, white, and blue, where other men and women in uniform wait in line with their families for food, drinks, and keepsakes like little American flags.

I hold the picture up. “Homecoming?”

My mother squints at it for a second. “Yeah. I think that was his first deployment with the reserve battalion.”

She must have been the one taking the picture, because she’s not in it.

“This is the newest one in the box.”

“Yeah. That’s around the time we quit getting them printed.” She wraps the rubber band around her stack of letters again. “I always meant to start that up again. Walmart will do it pretty cheaply. But there never seemed to be enough time.”

“Can I have this one?” I hold the picture up again.

She nods. “Yeah. I think you should. Remember him like that, Beckett. That’s who he really was. That last year … he was sick. You know that, right?”

I stand, and she grabs my hand. Her grip is warmer and tighter than I would have expected. She squeezes even tighter. As if she can press the words right into my skin.

“Yeah, Mom. I know.”

I want to ask her about the rumors. About who he became when he was sick. When he wasn’t himself. But those questions feel blasphemous, with his guitar and his army coins sitting right there. With his clothes all over the place, filling the room with the scent of his cologne and his deodorant, as if he might walk in from the bathroom any moment and pull my mother up into an embrace.

But that isn’t going to happen, because thirty weeks ago, on a warm night in May, I woke up in the middle of the night and found my father facedown in a puddle of his own vomit, on the living room floor. There was a fifth of whiskey on the end table with the cap still off and an empty pill bottle wedged between two of the couch cushions.

I tried to shake him awake, and when I realized he wasn’t breathing, I started screaming.

Penn cleared his airway and started CPR while Mom called for an ambulance. I held Landry while she sobbed, trying over and over again to turn her so that she couldn’t see him, but she’s nearly as big as I am. So in the end, I just held her as tight as I could until we heard the sirens. Until red lights began to strobe into our living room through the window in the front door.