A Fair to Remember by Barbara Ankrum Read Free Book Online

about—
    Jake slammed his foot on the brake!
    He jerked a hand out to catch Monday from flying off her seat and fishtailed to a stop a few feet from…
    …a red and silver soda can lying in the road.
    He blinked hard and swore.
    Of course it was just a damned, empty soda can. Lying on a back road in Montana. It was nothing else. But the cold sweat that had broken out on him was accompanied by the familiar chimpanzee using his insides as a punching bag.
    Soda cans were a favorite among insurgents to house IED’s on the roads of Kandahar or Kabul. Cans, toys, and baby car seats and… other things he didn’t want to remember.
    There were no trip wires here. No grenades with pulled pins inside waiting to take the bottom of the truck he was riding in out. Or missiles trying to knock his chopper out of the sky. He was in Marietta. Safe.
    And he wasn’t a soldier anymore.
    Monday whined and licked his face. He took her by the neck and hugged her. As was her way, she allowed it and licked his ear. That calmed him, forced the chimpanzee back in its cage.
    “Sorry, girl.”
    He gripped the steering wheel hard, staring down the road. Things like this still happened to him now and then. Less now than when he’d first come back, since his leg had healed. But if it wasn’t an innocent soda can lying by the side of the road, it was a dream that sucker-punched him in the middle of the night, or an old acquaintance, buying him a drink in a bar.
    He pulled back on the road and started driving, but his peace was gone.
    When he’d gone five miles or so, he slowed and pulled into the open gates of the Marietta cemetery. He took the familiar drive up the hill to where a huge pine sheltered the stones planted underneath.
    He stopped the truck near the markers etched with the names William and Kelly Lassen. He reached behind him and pulled some flowers from the backseat and let Monday out.
    His parents’ graves were well-tended because he paid for them to be so, and in a spot that overlooked the river and valley below. He liked to think they would have been pleased with this place. Not that it mattered to them now. They were long gone to somewhere better. But it felt good to come here and talk to them. He couldn’t really say why.
    Sometimes his parents came to him in dreams—good dreams—and they’d have long talks about everyday things, as if they had just come down to the kitchen for coffee and settled around his table. Sometimes there was no talk at all, only relief at seeing them again. And then, he’d wake and find them gone.
    He placed roses on his mother’s grave, arranged them in the permanent container and stepped back.
    “Well,” he said, in a low voice, “I made it back. God knows how, but I figured you two must have been watching over me. I’m sorry I haven’t come here sooner. Had a hard time coming.”
    He sat down on the granite bench beside the stones and leaned down, with his elbows on his knees. “I suppose you saw all of it. The crash, everything. Sorry, Mom, for the scare. I did my best to fly us out of that attack, but… I hope you two showed up for them. The boys who came your way.”
    He scrubbed a hand across his forehead. Even now, when he closed his eyes, he could hear the whine of the Taliban mortar rip out a chunk of the MH-60 he’d been flying that day. Still feel the terrible shudder of the crippled chopper as it slipped out of his control less than half a click from base. The terror of seeing the ground rush up to meet them still echoed somewhere deep inside him and sometimes woke him at night. Just like Brody and Link’s screams for help did, coming from behind the licking blue and orange flames erupting in the ruined tangle of metal which, only seconds before, had been his chopper—
    Jake snapped his eyes open and took a deep breath, forcing the memory away, tucking it into the place he’d resigned it to. And, mostly, it seemed content to stay there. But not here in this place, amongst