The Rank His Family Laughed At

Fountain, Three Weeks Later

Word travels fast in a town the size of ours. By the following Sunday, half the church potluck at First Baptist had heard some version of the story, and by the Wednesday after that, the version going around the VFW post on Santa Fe Avenue was close enough to true that I stopped bothering to correct it.

I stopped in at the diner off the highway one morning that first week, the same one my mother used to cut hair behind, and the waitress who’d known me since I was in grade school refilled my coffee without being asked and told me my grandfather would have been proud enough to bust a button, which is about as high a compliment as this town hands out. An older man two booths over, a veteran himself judging by the cap he wore, sent over a plate of eggs he insisted was already paid for and just nodded at me once, like that nod said everything that needed saying between two people who understood the same kind of quiet.

Deanna’s fiance stopped mentioning the surplus store theory. He also, I heard through my mother, stopped mentioning me at all, which suited both of us fine.

My mother called and asked, haltingly, if I would come to Sunday dinner. Not a party. Not a livestream. Just dinner, at the house, the wall photo of my grandmother’s wedding day back up where it belonged, because my grandmother had asked for that too, once she found out it had come down.

I went. It was quiet, and a little awkward, and nobody filmed a second of it, which might be the best thing that’s happened in that house in three years.

My father didn’t apologize in the way people apologize in movies. He asked me, over dessert, what a Guardian Angel actually trains for, and then he listened to the whole answer without reaching for the remote once. For my father, that’s about as close to an apology as I was ever going to get, and I’ll take it.

Deanna wasn’t at that dinner. My mother said she’d wanted to come but felt it was too soon, and I didn’t push the point either way. Some things need more than three weeks and a citation to sort themselves out, and I’ve never believed a family fixes itself in one meal just because everyone showed up to the table. What I do believe is that the door stayed open, which is more than I could have said for it three weeks earlier, when the only thing coming through that door on my behalf was a deputy with a notebook.