“You don’t need to scream at the whole plane,” Aldo snapped back at his mother. They’d spent the last ten days together, and they were headed stateside for a short stint at Walter Reed and then home. And if he didn’t get some alone time soon, one or both of them was going to end up dead.

“What? You think you deserve the wiffy just because you’re a wounded soldier?”

Ina was both proud of his sacrifice and inconvenienced by it. She managed to roll compliment and jab into the same sentence while butchering the word Wi-Fi.

Aldo shut his laptop, stuffed it back in his bag, and stretched his legs out. Leg. Leg and prosthesis. Mentally, he was no more prepared to have one leg than when Dr. Dreamy had given him the heads up.

He was nothing without his athletic prowess, his strength, his speed. War had taken it all from him. It had robbed him of his sleep, his body, his confidence. He felt like a shadowy monster returning to a place that might not even feel like home again.

“Are you sleeping?” Ina jabbed him hard in the ribs with her elbow, the only part of her body that was pointy. “What movie should I watch?”

“Jesus Christ, Ma.”

* * *

Walter Reed was more of a formality, and Aldo found himself home within days. “Home” was his mother’s house for the next few weeks. He was determined to whittle that timeline down to days. She had a spare room—practically a closet, and just as jammed full as one—and bathroom on the first floor, and he “required supervision.”

Stubbornness had him insisting on carrying his duffle slung over his shoulder as he crutched his way impatiently up the porch steps.

Through his exhaustion, his constant roiling anger, he didn’t notice the red, white, and blue hanging baskets on the porch. Inside, he blocked out his mother’s incessant yammering about drapes and birdfeeders and hopped back through the kitchen and off the sun porch to the room he was sure he’d need to shovel pounds of shit out of before he could even enter.

He was wrong. The room was neat as a pin. The twin bed made with fresh linens instead of buried under every single issue of Cosmo that his mother had collected since 1974. Gone were the baskets of yard sale find Beanie Babies and porcelain bird figurines. Pawing through the neatly stacked clothing on the skinny table, he discovered several of his favorite t-shirts and shorts.

His iPad, chargers, and underwear all made the move.

His mother, bless her hollering heart, apparently had gone to great lengths to make his transition an easy one. Aldo felt a vague sense of guilt for doing nothing but griping at her for the past few weeks.

Conscience heavy, he crutched back into the kitchen and found his mother cutting into a pie.