When She Came Home Read Free

interrupted. “You only got pregnant to please me. You never wanted her.”
    “I wanted to wait.”
    Rick was ten years older than she and had felt the need to hurry. Probably because of this, he had taken to fatherhood immediately; but until Glory was almost a year old Frankie had only gone through the motions. Accustomed to being good at everything she committed to, she was determined to master the skills of a good mother in much the same way she had learned to block and kick a soccer ball, by repetition and an effort of will.
    She had felt foolish making conversation with a baby who didn’t understand a word, but she did as all the books said she should, pointing out and naming things until her conversational skills deteriorated to the simplest sentences, just nouns and verbs with a modifier tossed in when she was inspired. She read all the recommended childcare books and followed all the prescriptions for a happy healthy baby. Eventually and without Frankie noticing how it happened—by hourly, daily increments, she supposed—the love had come. Now, like Rick and the rest of the family, she was completely smitten with Glory, who was certainly the brightest and prettiest baby who had ever lived.
    “You wanted a baby and I wanted you to be happy,” Frankie said. “I love her now. Isn’t that what matters?”
    Glory followed the conversation, her sleepy eyes looking back and forth between her mother and father.
    “Anyway, I’m doing it for her.”
    “That is such a load of crap.” Glory’s eyes opened wider. “How can you even say it? You should be gagging on the words.”
    “Rick, there were children on those planes. Glory could have been one of them.”
    He exhaled in disgust.
    Rick was doing fast and furious sit-ups on the far side of the bed, his toes tucked under the chest of drawers. He jumped to his feet and faced her. The tendons in his neck stood out like the roots of an old tree.
    “Just tell me why.”
    “Don’t poke your finger at me.”
    “I want to hear the truth. No more bullshit.”
    “I’m not lying.”
    “Frankie, don’t you know yourself better than that? Have you so little insight?”
    He used his condescending, I’ve-lived-longer-and-know-more-than-you voice, and her desire to cooperate froze.
    “I told you. I’m doing it for her.”
    “The hell you are. You’re doing it because you’re a twenty-five-year-old woman who’s still trying to get her father to love her.”
    On the soccer field if someone elbowed Frankie out of the referee’s line of sight, she waited for the right moment and got her back. In games and life, the impulse to retaliate came to her as naturally as breathing. But this was Rick and part of her understood his anger and even sympathized with it. If their positions had been reversed, she too would be confused and heated; however, she would eventually accept his decision to serve and defend because she had been raised to believe that this was what military families did when the country was threatened.
    “It would be different,” she said from the closet doorway, “if it were you who wanted to go.”
    “But it’s not me, Frankie. It’s you, the mother of my daughter.”
    “I’m a woman, so I don’t get to do what my conscience tells me? There has to be some deep dark Freudian explanation?”
    “Shall we pursue that idea? Do you think you’re up for that conversation?”
    She ignored his challenge. “This war is about who we are as a nation.”
    “Stop.” He held up his hand. “If we’re going to talk about this, you have to do one thing for me. Stop the spin. Stick to the truth. You enlisted because you’re the General’s daughter and you’ll do anything, even leave your family to fight in some godforsaken desert, just to hear him say you’re a good girl and give you that look.”
    “What look?”
    “The one he gets on his face when he starts talking about his father and his uncle and grandfather. All the bully Byrnes who risked their