The bar he chose was Apehangers. It was a good hour from the base. He said he didn’t want to bump into anyone from the squadron. He lived only a mile from this dive, down a country road in Bel Alton, far deep into NASCAR, Mary Kay, poker runs, and taxidermy. The waitresses wore Freedom Isn’t Free shirts, and the music was rockabilly. This was a locale Mary found less than easy to fake her way through, but she was working up her acting and getting herself less silent. Frank often said Mary was one of his favorite females because she spoke so little. But about the crash, he wanted more from her. Where was her outrage? What about curiosity?

They sat at a corner table. It was just before Halloween. Skeletons and pumpkins were taped to the ceiling. Orange glitter dusted the place, and Mary was picking it up too. She tried to rub some off a fingertip and just got more on her palm.

“So you kept things zippered up good with the head twister,” Frank said. The base shrink was a woman Mary might have been close to in the life she would have led outside the military. In this life, this woman was outside the squadron’s trust. She was sensitive. She expected that others were too and just wouldn’t admit it. That was why the word on her was negative. She was always looking for what just wasn’t there. Mary always feared being assigned to that suspect category. She tried to think, right now, how to act in this bar to avoid it. Luckily, sitting still was sometimes enough.

“Sure,” Mary replied, hoping she’d been inscrutable with the shrink, but not too much so. It hit her, sitting there, that she would have been happy for this crazycrash to have any origin, just so it wasn’t her doing. And no one, to her great relief, seemed to be saying it was, at least not yet. Could it be that now, despite how roughly it’d first housed her, military had turned into home?

“Anything funny go on?” Frank had an investigatory tone.

“Like?” She barely said it. She was worrying Frank could sense the dependency she’d just recognized in herself. He knew he was kin. That was personal. Taking the armed forces for Ma and Pa—that was dumb.

“Like did she poke around as to whether you knew something was flat-out wrong with the bird?”

Mary considered. There’d been the usual canned questions to gauge paranoia. She’d had those before, on her other psych evaluations. Apparently, she’d passed okay. She couldn’t tell if some of the questions from the shrink were different. She’d been so cramped with anxiety her memories were mostly about feelings, the chief one being panic and how to contain it.