Linger by M. E. Kerr Read Free Book Online Page A

out of the car before I could finish asking her what she was planning to do. I got out, too, my hands stuffed in my jacket pockets, hanging back, not wanting the scene.
    “For your information, my boy is over there!”
    “Then God help him!” said Leonard Wheat.
    My mother calmed down a little. She wasn’t about to argue with a man who’d lost the use of his arms and legs in Vietnam. I heard her telling him what was wrong with his war was that people at home weren’t supportive. And I heard him tell her war was wrong whether or not the people supported it.
    Then Mrs. Wheat got in on the act, and my dentist’s wife, so I stayed out of it, leaned against the car, and watched my breath freeze-frame my sighs.
    Betty Chayka came down Osborne Street (named for the ancestors of Osborne de la Marin the Fourth) on her way to work at Berryville Video Store.
    “Good for your mother!” she said.
    Even in a down coat Chike was a sexpot. She just was. Something about her—I knew what Bobby meant when he said there were a lot of girls more beautiful, but not a one in Berryville with a better game.
    I said, “Well, it’ll make her feel better, maybe.”
    Chike laughed and bumped against me. “What would make you feel better?” She smelled like a women’s magazine.
    “You would,” I said.
    “You’re getting to look more like Bobby every day.”
    “Yeah, but I’m not Bobby.”
    She hooted at that and said, “You don’t have to tell me that! I know you’re not Bobby.”
    Somehow she was insulting me, but I didn’t care. She did everything with a smile.
    She said, “When you write him? Tell him I still like green light.”
    “Oh yeah?” I said. “I don’t like any light at all.”
    “Amateurs don’t.” She smiled and touched a gloved finger to my chin. “And tell Bobby I got yellow ribbons all over my old oak tree for him, okay?”
    I could see Mom down the way surrounded by the group of protesters. I wondered if I should rescue her when I saw Mr. Raleigh take her by the arm and start back toward our car.
    Mom was crying, and Mr. Raleigh said, “Better get her home, Gary.”
    “ You go home!” my mother shouted back at him. “Go home to Russia where you belong!”
    I watched him stagger away on his built-up shoe. He always made me feel bad when I watched him walk.
    “How’d Russia get into this, Mom?” I asked her when we got into the car.
    She said, “He can go to hell!”
    She’d never talked that way before, and when I looked across at her face, she didn’t look like herself.
    Much, much later, I tried to tell myself that: She wasn’t herself. She didn’t do things like that.

16
    —F ROM THE JOURNAL OF Private Robert Peel
    Saudi Arabia
    Both Sugar and Movie Star write “To Be Opened in Case of My Death” letters. Sugar’s is for his father. He says he’s going to write him: Looks like I had to die to live. Movie Star writes two: to his family and then to Amy. I don’t write one because it might bring it about.
    But I think about one to Mr. D.
    “They are coming up here and taking the food right out of our mouths,” he said. “Taking our ideas, our jobs, our land, and the ones who’re legal are taking our welfare. These are people who really mean mañana never comes if mañana means staying where they belong and making something out of their own land.
    “What they lack,” he said, “is national pride. Do you see a flag of any kind hanging from that shack?”
    I said, “They serve their own food, and they play their own music.”
    “Bobby,” he said, “if I say the sky is blue, you point out the white clouds, and that’s what’s wrong with you. You don’t like me to say wetback, but you never had to fight for a dream, work your ass off for one—give up college for one. When somebody older and smarter tells you something: LISTEN! Don’t always look for a contrary sentiment.
    “LISTEN, Bobby!” he said. “ Learn! That’s how you develop entrepreneurial skills. You don’t