The details were more than Grace had bargained for, and at one point she put her hands over her ears. “Please, don’t tell me any more. If mothers heard what you’ve told me, there’d be no wars, because mothers would rise up in protest.”

He returned to being technical, providing information that did not touch Grace in the same way as the details of war.

“New evidence indicates that PTSD results from subtle changes in the brain that occur under severe stress. These changes actually alter the way memories are stored.”

He used medical terms that she would not remember.

“Don’t they ever completely recover?” Grace asked, her hand on her heart.

He shook his head. “I have vets from World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam that I’ve been seeing in groups weekly for years. Oh, they learn to manage, to cope, to get on with their lives, but sometimes out of the blue something triggers a recall, and the reaction isn’t pleasant. In these groups, they help one another in ways I can’t help them.” He sat back in his chair. “Unfortunately, not everyone who needs counseling comes in. Some vets feel getting help’s an admission of weakness.”

That sounded like Randy. “How does someone get to you for help?”

“A doctor’s referral; a family member convinces their son, brother, or husband to come in; or the person recognizes he or she needs help.” Then he added a caveat. “We’re finding we can’t just put the vets returning from Afghanistan and Iraq in with the older groups. What they have to say’s so brutal it retraumatizes the older fellows, so we have to see them individually, which isn’t as helpful as in a group, as I told you.”

Does Randy have a doctor? Grace wondered as she drove home. If not, could she convince him to go to one, and which one? And how would she know if that doctor would suggest that he get help, if Randy made light of his problems?

Grace’s head ached. What she had heard today was more than she ever wanted to know, more than she could speak about to others, and much more than she would share with Myrtle Banks. Why, she asked herself, did she take other people’s problems so to heart? Was she a busybody, intrusive and presumptuous? Grace lifted her foot from the gas and slowed the car. She was going seventy miles an hour on the bypass around Asheville. The speed limit sign she’d just passed said fifty-five. Moments later, a police car pulled up behind a station wagon ahead of her. Grace breathed a sigh of relief that this ticket stop did not involve her.