“Alexandre Dumas, more like. It’s an amazing story. Her mother hated Mississippi. She was ten years older than I am, born in 1950. Her name was Charity. Charity took off across the country when she was eighteen, aiming for California. She was in Kansas City during the riots after Martin Luther King was assassinated. She was in Los Angeles when Bobby Kennedy was killed. She even got involved with some Black Panther actions. She knew Bobby Hutton and Eldridge Cleaver.”

“Who’s Bobby Hutton?”

“The seventeen-year-old treasurer of the Black Panthers. He’s dead. Shot by a cop in 1968. Anyway, after all that fell apart, Charity managed to get a music scholarship to an arts college in Philadelphia. She hitchhiked across the country and stayed there two years. Then she got pregnant by somebody—Serenity was never able to discover who—and rode a Greyhound back to Mississippi during her eighth month of pregnancy. She died from preeclampsia right after giving birth to Serenity.”

“That definitely sounds worth a book. Was it more the story that won the award, or her writing?”

“Both, I’d say. Her writing’s first-rate. She has an unbelievable eye for detail, and she’s psychologically incisive as well. Ruthless, really, with both herself and others. But her life is the amazing thing. Apart from being a soldier, she’s worked as a journalist, a teacher, a dancer, and a singer. She’s been married twice, she kicked a drug problem . . . and she’s only thirty-five.”

“Any kids?”

“None mentioned in the book.”

Mia is watching me with an appraising eye. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you this impressed with anybody before.”

“It’s the military service. Combat service.”

“Why?”

“Well . . . guys in my generation got really lucky. We were too young for Vietnam, and by the time the next war rolled around, we were too old, unless you were already in the service.”

“So?”

“Military service is a rite of passage for men. A big one. My father served in Korea. My mother’s father and uncles fought in World War Two.”

“I would think you’d be glad to miss the chance of getting killed or crippled.”

“Sure—on one level. But it’s not that simple.”

A deep curiosity lights Mia’s eyes. “Why not? Not some Hemingway trip, surely?”

I wonder if I can explain this to a twenty-year-old girl without sounding like a testosterone-driven idiot.