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“How do you know what he
thought, anyway?”

“I am—correction: I
was
—a pretty close friend
of a friend.” He doesn’t make eye contact. His free hand fiddles
again in his pocket and coins scrape.

“But he went,” I
say.

“He did go. Yes. And now?
Where is he now?”

He’s looking down at his
cigar.
Should have been smart, William,
like me,
I imagine him thinking.
I was screwing her—did you know?—when you
died.

“You’re disgusting,” I say,
and I swing at him again, wanting to draw blood this time and
wishing I had the strength, a man’s strength, to leave him crumpled
on the floor. He catches my arm—I should have expected it, but
didn’t—and clenches it, his fingers pressing hard on bone. The pain
feels good, like a fight I’ve been craving.

He says, “If you’re trying
to knock me across the ocean, you’ll have to hit a lot harder than
that.”

“Let go.”

“Promise not to hit me
again.”

I twist my wrist.

“Do you promise not to hit
me again?”

“No.”

“Fair enough. Do you promise
to
try
not to hit
me again?”

“Yes.”

He releases me and neither
of us looks at the other.

“I’ll come back later,” he
says. “I’ll write my number and…just call me when you find
it.”

“No,” I say, for some reason
afraid to have him leave. “I’m—it has to be somewhere. I haven’t
taken it out of the apartment.”

Brian says yes to
coffee.

He sits at the kitchen table
and fingers an orange pepper jutting straight from a branch of
deep, smooth leaves. I saw the plant yesterday, last minute. It sat
among paired gerbera daisies, faded ivy hanging from plastic pots.
Red-striped dracaenas and African violets. I scooped it in my arm
and took it—and my dinner, frozen in a box—to the
cashier.

Jake likes peppers if
they’re not yellow.

“Milk or sugar or
anything?”

“No, thanks.”

I set down our mugs and sit
across from him and he pushes the plant, tall between us, against
the window and taps his fingers on the table. His hands look soft,
his nails professionally manicured.

“So.” Brian blinks and a
long curl tugs his eyelash. He moves it aside with his thumb.
“Thanks for the coffee.”

His cigar smoke makes me
nauseous. Not a real cigar, but a cheap, dollar cigar from the
corner gas station. It smells like raspberry and he smokes it like
a cigarette.

I ask him why he joined the
Army.

“A few reasons,” he says,
“and none of them too exciting.”

“Security,” I
say.

“Mostly, yes. You were
hoping for patriotism.”

“I don’t care what your
reasons are. How much time do you have left?”

He tells me, one
year.

I tell him it’s probably a
good thing.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t
rather I come back later?” He looks at me with something like the
start of a smile and says, “I get the feeling you don’t like
me.”

Two coffee grounds drift in
a slow circle in my mug. The window is open wide, but the breeze
blows in, dragging the smoke past us and into the hallway, the
living room, my bedroom.

I say, “She says she got rid
of you.”

“Yes,” he says. “She ‘got
rid of’ me.”

“And you want to see her
again?”

“Very much.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not. That’s all
right. I don’t know you or like you well enough to care.” He smiles
and takes a drink.

“You must have been
excited—well, or, you know—at first. Just like that, she was free,
open, but then, just like that,” I hit the table, “his accident is
what’s left you sitting here with me, just waiting for this
little…thing…you can bring her. Like a ball. Or a dead
mouse.”

He puts out the cigar,
barely smoked. “It was more than that, that did it,” he says. “I
suppose it started months ago. Disagreements. Nothing too out of
the ordinary, or too special, but special to us.”

“William would be so
relieved.”

The way the sun—a wide patch
broken only by the tree branches just outside the window—falls on
his neck and upper chest, his dog tag chain glints against his skin
and a thin shadow-line follows the linked balls over his
collarbone, under his shirt.

“Why are you wearing
those?”

Brian looks down, his neck
wrinkling under his chin, and tugs at the chain. “These?
Why?”

“It’s just a
question.”

He laughs.

“What?”

“You’re incredibly
unremarkable.”

“I don’t know what you
mean.”

“How do you continue to find
ways to take issue with me, bit by bit?”

“What issue?”

“Outstanding.” He laughs.
“But, I’ll play. What else is there to do while I wait?”

“Sorry. Really—it was just a
question. Someone like you—”

“Someone like me. Listen,
now.” He leans forward and talks fast. “This—the Army—is my job,
the same as it’s John Smith’s job to take the elevator to the
seventh floor every Monday through Friday. But, in a curious way,
you’re so involved in what some of you—and by ‘you,’ I mean
civilians, but more specifically, the respected wives and
girlfriends (and, of course, all praise given is due and your job
is the hardest job in the military, and all that, as they say)—call
the ‘military way of life’ that you will sit there and question
what I wear. For the record, there is no dog tag regulation. Did
you know that?”

No. “Yes.”

“But, let me get back to
your question. Why
am
I wearing my dog tags?” He taps his chin with his finger.
“There’s no good reason. I forget to take them off, half the time.
Now, what if I were to ask you why you’re wearing red underwear?
You have no boyfriend here to wear them for. What must that
mean?—Yes, I saw them. When you were bending over your desk. My
point is, you’re very eager to enforce rules you don’t—as a
civilian—have any obligation to live by, but I have a feeling it
hasn’t occurred to you that it’s not any of your business.” He
picks up his cigar, relights it, takes two short puffs and puts it
back down. He looks at me through the smoke. “You get so engrained,
some of you. And you’re not even married to the military, yet. How
is that? How does it happen?”

“I’m not
engrained.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Just because I know things
doesn’t mean anything,” I say. Much of my familiarization happened
sporadically and by accident. Jake’s salute of a higher ranking
officer outdoors came after a simple nod he’d given another higher
ranking officer while we were inside, and I’d asked him why, when
indoors, he only nodded.

“Because we were inside,” he
said.

“
So?”

“So, you don’t salute
inside.”

“Why not?”

“You just don’t.”

“But why?”

He sighed. “I don’t know, M.
Tradition.”

Some other time, some other
day, on a trip to the commissary, Jake and I drove past a Humvee
convoy.

“Are they going to the
field?” I said.

“Maybe. I don’t
know.”

“They’re wearing
helmets.”

“You have to wear your
Kevlar any time you’re in a military vehicle.”

“Even if you’re just driving
from one building to another?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“But—”

“Mia. I don’t
know.”

And the language—some of it,
at least, bits and pieces—came over time: K-pot, MOLLE,
DONSA.

Controlled flight into
terrain.

Involuntary loss of
life.

“It’s a culture,” I say.
“There are customs. Traditions. You can’t help learning
them.”

“Obviously, to a point,”
Brian says. “But people like
you
sometimes go too far, and you forget you have your
own role in the universe. That his life is not your
life.”

“I know that.”

Brian is right, of course,
and Jake would be disappointed, would wonder who I’ve become, if he
knew how much I think about him. His world, his
day-to-day.

“I’ll be right back,” I say.
“I think I know where the lighter is.”

In the bedroom, I sit on the
bed next to yesterday’s underwear. I stuff them under the blanket
and look outside, at the house across the street, the weeping
willow in the front lawn.

I close my eyes and take a
breath and immerse myself in a cloud of nothing.

No Jake.

There is no
Jake
.

Emptiness, this letting go,
but at the same time, less hollow. Exciting, but scary—like waking
up in a strange man’s bedroom in the blind hours after
midnight.

Brian calls, “Are these
peppers edible?”

A pepper, half white and
half purple, floats into my nothingness. “Yeah, sure, have one.”
The peppers, some are—

“No, thanks,” he says. “Just
curious.”

—yellow, the pretty yellow
that comes between early-phase white and end-phase red, and whether
Jake likes yellow doesn’t matter, now.

I like it.
I
like yellow.

Brian’s chair slides, and
alone with just him I am suddenly very aware that his
attractiveness isn’t ordinary, at all.

“Hellooo,” Brian
says.

My eyes open to the willow,
swaying, and to the bedroom I’ve come to hate, and to his picture
taped to the wall beside the bed. I touch his forehead.

When I lean out of the
doorway, I see Brian waiting in the living room with his hands in
his pockets.

“Tell me,” he says, “is
there any chance I’ll be leaving with that lighter before
evening?”

“I just remembered where I
put it.” I step back into the bedroom and pull the lighter from my
pocket. William’s initials shine like scratches in the brushed
silver. Expensive. Worn. Too precious for war? A gift from Denise,
maybe. “What’s so special about it?” I look in the mirror, put on
just enough lipstick to moisten, but not so much he’ll be likely to
notice. “The lighter, I mean.”

“His father gave it to him.
That’s what Denise said, anyway,” he calls back. “Why?”

I squeeze it, and then I
hide it in a bowl of makeup—old lip gloss, old mascara, the
lipstick I haven’t worn in full force since the party. As I enter
the living room, he opens his mouth to say something and someone
knocks on the door.

“Just a minute,” I say, and,
“Come in!”

Safia swings open the door,
but stays in the hallway with her black cat draped over an arm.
Shoes scrape in the stairwell behind her and Safia takes a step
inside when my floor neighbor, long red hair caught under the
shoulder strap of an oversized bag, says, “S’cuse me,” and drags
her feet to her door and struggles with her lock.

Safia smiles over my
shoulder at Brian. “Hello.” She uses her cat’s paw to wave, then
invites me (“And you, too, if you would like to come,” she says to
Brian, who declines) to a Friday dinner. Just a few friends, she
says, and plenty of good food. I tell her I’m busy, and I’m sorry,
but she insists I stop by when I’m done doing whatever it is I’m
doing. “Please,” she says. “You made me lunch and I would like you
to come.”

“Lunch was to pay you back,”
I say.

“Yes! That is what I said,
but it was too much for one cigarette. You must come, and we will
be even.”

I tell her I’ll try to make
it.

“Not you?” she looks at
Brian

“No, I don’t think so,” he
says. “I’m…busy on the weekends.”

“It will be fun! Mia, bring
your friend.”

“He’s not my
friend.”

“Ohhh,” she says, smiling,
flipping the paw at me.

“Really,” I say.

“Maybe,” Brian says. “I’ll
see if I can get out of—of my engagement.”

“Good!” She claps her hands
and her cat jiggles on her arm. “I will see you then, and if not
you, then you.” She points at me. “You for certain.”

“For sure.”

She waves again, hand and
cat paw both, this time, and pulls the door closed.

“You’re not going with me,”
I say.

“It was just an answer she
wanted to hear. I never say no to anyone.”

“Clearly.”

“Give it a rest.”

He follows me into the
kitchen and leans against the counter. “So, I’ll be happy to get
out of your way whenever you want to give me that
lighter.”