“I haven’t touched a brush in years,” I said.

Mike pointed at my father’s lighter, next to my cigarettes and the overflowing ashtray.

“Can I see that?” he said.

I slid the lighter over to him. He flipped open the lid before setting it back on the table and pushing it back toward me.

“Last week, when I came into the chapel in the morning, there was a boy there,” he said. “A private, about the same age as the kid whose parents we just left. He was standing in the pulpit holding a revolver in his mouth.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Do you know how many times I’ve seen things like that? And it’s not all combat trauma. A lot of these men had never been deployed. Why do they do want to take their own lives? Why would anyone?”

At the bar, an old man sat on a stool at the corner, his face lit up by the blue screen of a video poker machine.

“What did you do?”

“I talked to him. I told him how when Christ hung in agony on the cross, he cried out, ‘Why have you forsaken me?’ I think hell happened in those five words. Why have you forsaken me? In that moment, Jesus was in hell. Not the physical agony, but the death of the spirit. But he overcame death. Body and soul. He showed us the way out of hell.”

“Did that work?”

“Enough to calm him down and get him into treatment.”

“How’s he doing?”

“I don’t know. I was planning to check in on him this afternoon.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You have more important things to do.”

Mike reached across the table and grasped my hand.

“You’re not going to pray for me, are you?” I asked.

He smiled.

“The thought never crossed my mind,” he said.

In the next six months, I delivered two more casualty notifications, one in Goodlettsville, the other in Murfreesboro. Mike Bailey was not with me; both boys were Baptists. After the second, I put in for my discharge.

For a while, I lived with Sunny and her husband—they’d been married for eight years—while I looked for a new place of my own. I’d kept my house in East Nashville when I enlisted; Sunny suggested that I sell it. Gentrification had made it worth more than triple what I’d paid. But I liked the tenants—a high school biology teacher and a midwife with two straw-haired children, one a kindergartner in the neighborhood school.