Hailey's War Read Free Page A

from West Virginia. I was born in an off-base hospital near Fort Hood, Texas, where Staff Sgt. Henry Cain was stationed at the time. I missed being born on the Fourth of July by one day; my birthday was the fifth. Maybe I was born to be a failed patriot.
    I take after my father in looks; I have his straw-blond hair and open face, except that mine is marked by a port-wine birthmark high on my right cheekbone. In my one photo of him, he’s a big guy, shouldery, and I have a similar mesomorphic build at five-foot-seven. My only really good feature is my full lips. In high school, reading beauty-magazine articles about the power of a sultry movie-star gaze, I’d wished I could trade my good lips for thick double-fringed eyelashes. My cousin CJ had waved that off, saying,
Guys don’t fantasize about how
eyelashes
will feel wrapped around the johnson
. CJ could get away with saying outrageous shit like that because he had never fully lost his Southern accent, and it gave everything he said a good-old-boy innocence.
    After Texas, my father was posted in Hawaii and Kentucky and then Illinois, where he died in an accident, a truck rollover on the base. I was eleven at the time. The Army’s death benefit wasn’t going to keep my mother and me solvent very long; Julianne had never been what you’d call a career woman. So we went to California, where hersister Angeline had already moved with her husband, Porter Mooney, and their four kids.
    Porter was a guard at the federal prison in Lompoc, and the Mooneys had a big falling-down house outside of town that recreated the way they’d lived in West Virginia. There were always half a dozen cars in the yard—Porter and his oldest son, Constantine, were mechanics par excellence. They didn’t just fix up cars and trucks; they worked on farm equipment, too, when people brought it to them. Behind the house was a half-acre of kitchen garden, and a dozen chickens roamed the yard. Angeline sold the eggs they didn’t need at the farmers’ market, along with sunflowers from the garden, and she gave piano lessons to local kids. There were always people who would sneer at how the West Virginia Mooneys lived, but the fact that six people got by comfortably on just one full-time salary and a few sidelines shamed the debt culture that most of middle-class California was mired in.
    When Julianne and I arrived from Illinois, bereaved and nearly broke, theirs became an eight-person household. Porter and Angeline’s two oldest kids were almost finished with high school, and I never got too close to them. And the baby of the family, Virgil, was only starting first grade. But the middle son, my cousin CJ, he was a different story.
    CJ and I were the same age, almost literally. We’d been born ten days and a thousand miles apart, and never met until I came to California. We were in the same grade and same class in school, and if it hadn’t been for that, I would have been friendless pretty much until high school. I was skinny and unprepossessing, self-conscious about my birthmark, shell-shocked over my father’s death, culture-shocked over my arrival in California.
    I was used to moving—all Army kids are—but Santa Barbara County was different. People hear the words
Santa Barbara
and they think of wealth, and that was certainly true of the city itself, with its gleaming white Mission-style architecture and streets generouslylined with bougainvillea. But where the Mooneys lived, east of Vandenberg Air Force Base, was mostly rural, and yet more racially and economically diverse than an outsider would have thought. In the halls of my new school quite a few of the white students, and some black, were the children of Air Force personnel or staff at the federal prison. Many others were Latino, the sons and daughters of agricultural workers, some of them undocumented. In this working-class mix moved the well-dressed children of winemaker families, new