The Colonel Her Family Wrote Off

My father didn’t answer right away. He took a drink of his coffee first, like he needed the extra second to decide how much of the truth he was going to give me.

“Sold it,” he said. “Year and a half ago, maybe two.”

“Sold it,” I repeated. “To who?”

“Scrap buyer out of Kearney. Wasn’t running right anyway.”

It had been running fine when I left. I knew because I had started it myself, two summers before my last deployment, just to hear the engine turn over one more time before I locked the barn.

“For how much?”

He said the number the way a man says a number he’s ashamed of, fast and low, like getting it out quickly might make it smaller. Six hundred dollars.

I had put closer to fourteen thousand dollars into that truck over three years, in parts and paint and a rebuilt transmission I’d saved two deployments’ worth of hazard pay to afford, because it was the one thing in that barn that was mine outright, titled in my name, untouched by anyone else’s decisions. I had left it there because I trusted my father to look after it the way you trust a parent to look after anything you can’t carry with you.

“Nobody asked me,” I said.

“You were gone,” my mother said, still not turning around, still working the knife through the potatoes. “We didn’t think it mattered.”

Twenty years of service, and that was the sentence my own mother reached for. We didn’t think it mattered. You were gone.

“I gave this family twenty years,” I told my father.

“No one asked you to,” he said.

Then he set his mug down, crossed his arms the same way Travis had them crossed in the doorway, and said the sentence that had apparently been sitting behind his teeth since I walked in.

“Maybe you should go back to the barracks where you belong.”

Twenty Years Gone

I want to be honest about something, because the easy version of this story makes my father into a cartoon and he is not one. He is a hard, quiet, proud man who came up on this same farm outside Alda under his own father’s temper, who did two unremarkable years in the Army himself in the early eighties, stateside the whole time, discharged without a single deployment to his name, and who has never once said out loud that watching his daughter outrank every man he grew up with made him feel something he didn’t have a name for. He didn’t have to say it. I grew up watching him not say it.

When I told my parents at nineteen that I was enlisting, my father’s first question was who was going to help him with harvest. Not whether I would be safe. Not whether it was what I wanted. Who was going to help him with harvest, now that his only son was still in middle school and his daughter had decided to go be somebody else’s problem.

I went anyway. I did my first years enlisted, then took a commissioning path through a university ROTC program two hours from home, the kind of thing that should have been a source of pride for a family that hung a service flag in the front window during my grandfather’s war and never took it down. My father came to exactly one of my ceremonies in twenty years, my commissioning, and he stood at the back of the room in his church suit and left before the reception started.