The Mother at the End of the Bleachers

The gate

The visitor center opened at six. I was in the parking lot at five forty, and I was not the first one there. There were maybe a dozen cars ahead of me, families with grandparents in folding chairs and little kids in their pajamas wrapped in blankets.

When the doors opened, I stood in line, and when I got to the counter I said, “I’m looking for Ron.”

The young woman at the counter smiled and turned around and said, “Ron, she’s here,” like she’d been expecting me. A man came out of a back office, tall, gray, with a white mustache and reading glasses on a cord around his neck.

“Mrs. Rourke,” he said. “Indiana.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How was the drive?”

“Foggy,” I said, and he laughed.

He took my license. He went back to his office and picked up the phone, and I stood at the counter with my hands flat on it and watched him through the window. He talked for maybe two minutes. He wrote something down. He nodded twice.

Then he came back and said, “His company office says you’re his emergency contact and his next of kin on his record. Staff sergeant over there was a little surprised you weren’t on the guest list. He’s adding you now.”

He handed me back my license and a printed pass. It had my name on it, Tammy Rourke, and the date, and a little bar code. I held it in both hands like it was a diploma.

“Did they tell him?” I asked. “Tyler. Did they tell him I’m here?”

Ron shook his head. “No, ma’am. Those new Marines are busy this morning. Nobody’s passing messages. He’ll find out when he finds you.”

I must have looked some kind of way, because he put his hand on top of mine on the counter for just a second, the way an uncle would.

“Get there early,” he said. “Get a spot where he can see you. The end of the bleachers, by the walkway, that’s where I’d stand. That’s where they come out.”

The parade deck

The parade deck at Parris Island is a huge flat stretch of pavement, bigger than any football field I have ever seen, with a reviewing stand on one side and long rows of metal bleachers along the edge.

By seven thirty the bleachers were filling up. Families were spreading out blankets on the metal seats and passing around thermoses and taking pictures of each other with the palm trees behind them.

The sky was the brightest blue I have ever seen in March. In Indiana, March is gray. Here it was blue all the way down to the edges, with a breeze off the water that smelled like low tide.

I did not look for Dale. I want to be honest: I told myself I wasn’t looking, and then I looked anyway. I saw him about two-thirds of the way down the bleachers, sitting on the third row, in a brown jacket. Crystal sat next to him with a little flag in her lap.

They didn’t see me. I didn’t want them to. I walked to the far end of the bleachers, by the walkway, the way Ron had said, and I stood.

There were seats left. I could have sat. I didn’t. I wanted to be on my feet, where a boy looking across a parade deck could see his mother without having to search a crowd.

A man beside me, a grandfather with a Vietnam veteran cap and a cane, looked at me and said, “First one?”

“First and only,” I said.

“Mine’s my grandson. Third Battalion.” He nodded at the parade deck. “You’ll cry. Everybody cries. Don’t fight it.”

“I won’t,” I said.

The ceremony started at nine. The band came out first, the depot band, in their dress uniforms, and they played, and my chest got tight before anything else had even happened.