The Party At My Own Grill

In November she told him something that sat in my chest for months.

“Kyle, Army families get paid to live over there,” she said on speakerphone. “You’ve got your housing money. You’re fine. I’m the one drowning here.”

Kyle looked at me. I shook my head, and he did not argue with her. He just said, “Okay, Trace. Take care of Dylan,” and hung up.

For the record, and because people on the street apparently believed the same thing, I will say it once. The Army pays an overseas housing allowance, and it goes to our German landlord, every euro of it. It does not pay a mortgage in Kansas.

By the time Dylan’s senior year was ending, we were eighteen months into the tour. Eighteen months at $900 is $16,200. Tracie had paid $1,800 of it. Two payments, both in the first two months.

Then, on a Sunday night in May, Kansas time, Tracie posted on Facebook.

I saw it at four in the morning, Germany time, because I couldn’t sleep. There was a photo of the backyard, our backyard, with a string of lights over the patio.

“Dylan’s graduation party!” it said. “Saturday at 2 at our place. Come one, come all. So proud of my boy.”

Our place.

Under it were sixty comments. Neighbors I didn’t know. Women from the church Tracie had started going to. People from her job at the grocery store deli.

One of them said, “Your house is so pretty, Tracie, I love what you’ve done with that yard.”

I put the phone face down on the kitchen counter and stood there in the dark. Kyle came out in his gray Army T-shirt and asked what was wrong. I handed him the phone.

He read it twice. He set it down very carefully. Then he made coffee, because it was almost time for him to be up anyway, and he sat across from me at our little German table.

“I can’t get leave,” he said. “We’ve got the block, and the company goes out to Hohenfels in two weeks. I already asked about the graduation in March. The answer was no.”

“I know,” I said.

“I want to be there for him,” Kyle said. “Not for her. For him.”

“I know that too.”

We sat there a long time. Outside, the church bells in the village started up for six o’clock.

“Go,” Kyle said finally. “Go see him walk. Hold the phone up so I can see it. And then go home.”

“And do what?” I asked.

“Whatever you think is right,” he said. “You’ve always been better at that part than me.”

The ticket cost $1,400 round trip, Nuremberg to Frankfurt to Chicago to Kansas City. It was money we did not have, after eighteen months of paying a mortgage on a house somebody else was living in for free.

I booked it anyway.

I did not tell Tracie I was coming. I am not proud of that part, exactly. But I knew if I told her, the party would move, or Dylan would hear some story about me before he ever saw my face.