After Eli by Rebecca Rupp Read Free Book Online Page A

mother said, “Oh, God, no,” and just sat down on the chair in the hall as if her legs had lost their bones. Her arms were clutched tight across her middle, and her face had gone so white and pinched up that you could see what she’d look like when she was really old.
    “A Casualty Assistance Officer will be in touch to help you with further details,” Captain Bates said.
    Spelling it out for us, because the army just says
CAO.
    Then she and the sergeant drove away in their van, leaving us to begin our LWE. Life Without Eli.
    The thing about death is that it takes a while before you realize that it’s never going to go away. That sounds stupid, but it’s true. For months after we knew Eli was dead, I’d find myself thinking about the things we’d do when he came home or hearing a joke he’d like, or there’d be something I’d want to tell him. Then I’d remember all over again.
    I’d think how now on every Thanksgiving, Eli’s chair would be empty and he wouldn’t be there to say grace. Eli always said these awful graces.
    He’d say, “Dear God, in your infinite wisdom, please protect your humble servants from the unspeakable turkey tetrazzini we were forced to eat last year in a misguided attempt by my mother, thy handmaiden, to use up thy leftovers,” or “Dear Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I cannot accept, and the cleverness to make that asshole Timmy Sperdle eat dirt, since he is one of thy worst mistakes.”
    Then my mom would threaten to bean him with the gravy ladle.
    I’d think how now there’d be nothing for him under the Christmas tree and how he wouldn’t be here cheering for me when I graduated from high school, like he’d promised, or be around to take me out to Rudy’s Beverage Bar & Barbecue Grill for my first legal beer. We’d already had one Christmas without Eli, but that wasn’t so bad, because we figured next year he’d be back home. We sent him a package with these gingerbread men that my mom and I decorated to look like little soldiers, and on Christmas morning Eli called us — on the computer, so that we could see him — though he couldn’t talk for very long.
    Afterward my mom cried.
    “He looked so tired and thin,” she said. “Didn’t you think he looked tired and thin?”
    “For God’s sake, Ellen,” my dad said. “Of course he’s tired and thin. They’re all tired and thin.”
    I knew what she meant, though. He looked different. Older.
    I had a calendar that Eli got me before he left. I’d cross off every day with an
X,
waiting for the big circled day at the end, which was when his tour of duty was up and he’d be coming home. That was the best part of that last Christmas. X-ing off another day until Eli came home.
    When I was a little kid, Eli’s being older used to really piss me off. I remember throwing a tantrum when I was maybe five or six. I can’t remember what set me off — I wanted to stay up past seven thirty or see some movie that wasn’t G-rated with animated singing mice or something — but I was mad enough to pop a gasket.
    “Why do you always have to be older than me?” I yelled. Stamping around in my choo-choo train pajamas because Eli got to do everything and he could stay up late and drive a car and stay home by himself without a babysitter, and I never got to do anything I wanted to do, ever. I was steamed.
    Eli grabbed me by my choo-choo collar and said I’d grow up eventually unless I kept screeching, which would probably permanently freeze my vocal cords, so that I’d always talk like a girl, and I might as well face it that his being older was just the way it was.
    “Live with it, kid. When you’re eighty, I’ll be ninety-two,” he said. “I’ll be old and irascible, and if you give me any of your pitiful underage eighty-year-old lip, I’ll whack your butt with my cane.”
    Then he tickled me until I got the hiccups, and then we watched
The Lion