The Soldier They Seated By The Kitchen

So when the invitation came, I wanted to go, and Aaron did not.

The invitation was to the Freedom Foundation gala, the big one, held every fall in the ballroom of the nicest hotel in the county seat, forty minutes from us. The Freedom Foundation is a real and good thing, a regional charity that raises money for wounded veterans and for the families of the ones who did not make it back, Gold Star families, and every year they throw this dinner where the well-off people of three counties put on their good clothes and write checks and feel warm about themselves, and I do not even say that with as much bite as it sounds, because the money is real and it helps real people. The foundation had sent a blanket invitation to service members in the region who had recently returned, a nice gesture, a way of saying come, be honored, be among people who understand.

Aaron did not want to go. “It’s a room full of strangers in tuxedos, Mom,” he said. “That’s not my thing.”

I told him it was my thing. I told him I had spent a year with my stomach in a knot every time the phone rang, and that I had earned one evening of seeing my son in his uniform in a nice room where people said thank you, and that he could give his mother that. It was not fair of me, using it like that, but it worked, because he is a good son, and he put on his Army service uniform, the greens, and he stood in my kitchen while I fussed at his collar and cried a little, and he looked so much like a photograph of Cal I keep on the mantel that I had to sit down.

He wore his ribbons. I did not know then what all of them meant. He never explained them and I never asked, the same as always. I just knew my boy stood in my kitchen looking like something out of a better world, and I was proud enough to burst.