Wilma was just finishing folding the ninth, unlucky napkin when Harry called from the kitchen. “Mom? Dad? They’re here,” he said.

She quickly finished the napkin, and went to find John in the living room. She thought she would like to be hanging on to his arm, seeing JJ for the first time.

They were flies buzzing around him, trying to help him out of the backseat, getting in the way of his maneuvering his crutches and the Navy leg that his sister had insisted he wear. “You’re going to have to get used to it, JJ,” Elissa had told him that morning. She had insisted on helping him with it, and had shooed him into his new room.

His new room in the house that seemed both familiar and unfamiliar, both smaller and larger than it had been.

Mary and Jack had made over the old office off the living room into a bedroom for him with an attached bath. Mary had even decorated it with his old bedspread and curtains from upstairs, so it would look just like his old room. JJ could almost pretend he had never been gone.

Last night, after his parents brought him home from the train and his mother fed him venison stew, he had tried sleeping in the bed, but it was useless. The house was too quiet, and he was too alone, after years of sleeping in the same hole, tent, or room as two or ten or twenty other guys. The grandfather clock that stood in the corner of the living room ticked away the minutes, and chimed every quarter hour, playing longer tunes on the half hour and the hour, until his fists were clenched and ready to break it. In the hospital, when he couldn’t sleep, there was always someone to talk to, a buddy, a nurse. Here, there was no one. So he got up, started drinking, chain-smoking, pacing the living room floor on his crutches, watching the photo of his dead uncle Chase hanging on the wall.

He didn’t remember falling asleep in the chair, but that was where he woke up, sometime past nine. His mother was crouched next to him, a knot above her blue eyes. “JJ? It’s time to get up, honey,” Mary said. Her face had the hazy edges of a dream, and he blinked to try to clear his vision. “Elissa and Ty are home,” she said, “and Grandma said she can’t wait another minute to see you all. We’re going over there for breakfast, if you’ll get dressed.”

He had smiled, despite the sledgehammer pounding between his eyes. See, Mom, I’m all right?