The Handcuffs My Stepfather Used On Me

He stood in front of it every Veterans Day and told a room full of people in Ashford that he had served in a forward unit he never set foot near, that he carried wounds he did not have, that he had seen things he had only read about in paperback novels from the drugstore rack. And because nobody in that town had any reason to check, because checking felt like an insult to a man who ran the hardware store and sponsored the Little League team and sat on the town council, nobody ever did.

Nobody except me, and I had learned a long time ago that saying anything out loud in that house cost more than it was worth.

I remember the first time I almost said something. I was twenty two, home on leave after my commissioning, and Wayne was telling a table of relatives about a firefight that never happened, describing the sound of rounds going past his head with a specificity that made my stomach turn, because I knew exactly where that specificity actually came from. He had been watching the same three war movies on cable for fifteen years. My mother caught my eye across the table that night, a silent, pleading look that said not tonight, Jess, please, and I swallowed the correction whole, the way I swallowed a hundred more after it. Every time I let it go, it got a little easier to let the next one go too, and a little harder to imagine ever starting.

“She pushes paper,” Wayne liked to say about me, to anyone who would listen, usually with my mother standing close enough to hear and not close enough to argue. “Logistics. It’s a good job for a girl who wants structure.”

I was a logistics readiness officer for four years. I have also stood on a flight line at two in the morning in a combat zone directing fuel to aircraft that needed to be in the air in under ten minutes or men were going to die on the ground waiting for them. Wayne never asked what the job actually involved. He had already decided what it meant, the same way he had decided what his own service meant, and neither decision had anything to do with the truth.

I let him talk for years.

I told myself it was not worth the fight. I told myself my mother had enough to carry without watching her husband and her daughter go to war in her own living room. I told myself a lot of things that were really just me making myself small so the house could stay quiet.