The Soldier They Seated By The Kitchen

I want you to understand what a year of your only child being at war does to a mother, so you will understand why that table did what it did to me. For a year I had lived with the phone. Not the calls, the phone itself, the object, the way it sat on my counter like a thing that could go off. When it rang at a normal hour I could breathe. When it rang late I could not, and I would stand in my kitchen with my hand over it before I answered, telling God every time, please, not that, not my boy. I stopped watching the news because the news was a map of places my son might be. I taped his letters to the inside of my cabinet door so I would see his handwriting every morning when I reached for a mug. I learned which of my friends I could call when it got bad at two in the morning, and I learned which ones just wanted the drama, and I cut those ones loose. I went to church and prayed and then went out to the parking lot and cried where nobody could see, the way Cal used to do things where nobody could see. That is the year I paid. That is the year every mother in that ballroom with a child in uniform had paid, whether their child came home whole or hurt or in a flag-draped box. And a woman with a clipboard had decided that year was worth less than a sponsor’s check.

Across the room, up front, I could see a table of men Cal’s age and older, some in old service caps, veterans the foundation had seated in a place of honor, and that was right, that was good, and I did not begrudge them one inch of it. But I looked at them and then I looked at my son eating cold chicken by the dish cart, and I thought, those men were young once, and somebody’s mother sat where I am sitting, and how does a country keep learning to do this, keep learning to cheer the memory of the service it will not make room for while it is standing right in front of you in a pressed uniform.

Then the program started.

The lights came down. A man from the foundation, the director, a kind-faced older man in a gray suit, went to the podium and welcomed everyone and thanked the sponsors, and there was applause, and I clapped along from the back by the kitchen because it seemed rude not to. He talked about the mission, the wounded, the families. The slideshow played. And then he said that this year, the foundation wanted to do something a little different, that instead of the usual speeches they had asked one young man to come and share his story, a local young man, one of their own, and he asked us to please welcome, from just two counties over, a soldier the whole region had been praying for, Wyatt Kell.