“Come on, Charlie,” he said. “I need you. Now more than ever. We’re going to win, you know. It’ll be over soon, and we’ll go to Washington, and it will be better, for all of us.”

Arch stood and rounded the desk. “Come on, brother,” he said.

He almost had me. Then I remembered something Vanessa had told me long ago. “Arch doesn’t love anyone as much as he loves being loved,” she’d said. Was that true for Vanessa too? I wondered. For me?

“I do love you, you know,” I said. “And I will miss you.”

“You just need a good night’s sleep,” he said. “You’ll feel better after. We’re going to win, and then we’ll all go to DC, and we’ll start over. All of us. It’s going to be fine. You’ll see.”

I dropped the cup into the wastebasket and walked out the door.

A year later, Arch and Vanessa were in Washington, and I was on the other side of the world, consumed by heat and long hours of fear and dread and suffocating silence between eruptions of violence and the calls to prayer pealing out across the rooftops.

In time, Arch and Vanessa left my dreams, replaced by the faces of dead soldiers, and, sometimes, of my mother, young again, with Sunny and the other women by the pool at Montague Village, and the father I never knew.

Epilogue

The Spirit and the Flesh

The place had been dead when we arrived. It was the sort of joint Mike and I both liked: old and dark, a bit grungy, a single television behind the bar, a string of colored Christmas tree lights strung above the shelves of bottles.

“You never spoke to him again?” Mike asked.

“Not once,” I said. “He kept calling me for a while, but I never answered. I never even listened to the messages. Eventually, I threw the phone away. Everything I knew about him came from what I saw in the news.”

“And her?”

“The same. Or almost. She never called.”

“And you never tried to reach her?”

“I didn’t think I could bear it,” I said. “I wrote her a letter once, in Iraq. I was feeling the way I think my father must have felt when he wrote those letters to my mother. I never sent it. I read it over and over. Then I burned it.”

Mike emptied his drink.

“Another round?” he asked.

“I’d better not.”

A waitress appeared beside the booth. She pointed at the plate between us.

“You want a box for that?” she asked.

We’d ordered food so as not to look like we were just getting loaded: stale tortilla chips smothered by cheese, pickled jalapenos, and watery salsa. The menu called the dish Freedom Nachos.

“No, thank you,” Mike said. “Just the check.”

I emptied my drink.

“Do you still paint?” he asked.