The Cabin My Sister Laughed At

“A cabin suits you perfectly, you stinking woman.”

Roena said it across my father’s dining table with a smile on her face, like she was offering dessert instead of an insult. Nobody at that table laughed out loud, but nobody stopped her either, and in my family that silence has always meant the same thing. Go ahead.

I was still in my Army combat uniform when she said it, because I had flown straight from Fort Riley to Otterville for the funeral and there hadn’t been time, or maybe I hadn’t made time, to change into something softer. Eleven years in the service teaches you to travel light and move fast, and I had done both, and somehow that was already a mark against me before the will was even finished being read.

I had gotten the call about my father from a hallway outside a briefing room, and I had made it to Otterville with barely enough time to stand at the graveside before the chaplain finished his last line. Staff Sergeant is not a rank that comes with much say over your own schedule, and I had spent the flight home rehearsing what I would say to my father if I somehow made it in time, and none of it had mattered, because he was already gone before my plane left the runway at Fort Riley. I stood at that graveside in my Class A uniform instead of the fatigues I’d worn on the flight, because some things you do not show up to in travel clothes no matter how little sleep you’ve had, and I watched them fold the flag over his casket into a tight triangle and hand it to my mother, and I thought, not for the first time, that my father had never once told any of us he’d served. I had always assumed the flag was standard for a man his age. I would not understand until later, sitting at that kitchen table with an ammunition can in front of me, exactly how much of his life he had kept folded just as tight as that flag.