“Maybe. Someone has to drive Jake’s DNA to the state lab in Memphis. Not sure yet who that’s going to be, but I’ll let you know if I draw the short straw.”

Fact-Check Rating: False.

My mother just told Grace Mercer no one would be able to take that DNA kit to the lab until tomorrow.

I get in my car and start the engine, then I watch as Officer Green pulls away, carrying my mother back to the station. She’s going back to work, and she’s lying about why. But the truth is no big mystery.

She stays gone as much as possible, because there’s nothing to do at home but remember. Because even with Penn, Landry, and me in it, our house feels empty to my mother.

I can only imagine how empty her heart must feel.

Chapter Seven

SEVEN

My father came home from Afghanistan with a cast on one leg and a prescription for Oxycontin. The cast went away eight weeks later. The Oxy stuck around.

He never talked about what happened over there. All I know is what I heard my mom tell one of her friends over a third glass of wine one night after my father went into the “hospital.”

Two years ago, my dad was a full-time firefighter and a part-time reservist in the local CE battalion—a unit of army civil engineers. He’d been to the desert six times before that last deployment to Afghanistan, twice with the reserve unit, and four times when he was on active duty before joining the reserves. Before separating from the army after ten years of service and moving us all to his hometown, when Penn and I were in elementary school and Landry was barely three years old. But this time was different.

This time, several weeks before he was due to come home, Mom got a call in the middle of the night. She tried to be quiet, but I heard her crying, so I woke up Penn, and we went into her room just as she was hanging up the phone. She said Dad had broken his leg in three places. She said they’d flown him to a base in Germany, and that he had just come out of surgery.

She said that he would still get to come home with his unit, and that he was going to be just fine.

I think she really believed that at the time.

A year later, I heard her tell her friend that my father’s jeep had hit a roadside bomb. The other three men who were with him died right there in what was left of their vehicle, but my father was thrown clear. He landed in the middle of the road, where his left leg was basically pulverized. It was a miracle he’d survived.