who should be meeting his wife. It took me a moment to refocus.
'I forgot to get paid,' I explained finally. 'I need to get home and I forgot to get paid.'
'Where's home?'
'Kansas City.'
He looked as if he was going to say the hell with it and leave me standing for a moment, then he said, 'There's a Western Union office at SeaTac airport. If we give you a lift that far, have you got somebody you can call to wire you the money?'
I nodded. They dropped me off and loaned me a quarter. I called my folks collect and talked to the woman in the Western Union office. She had teased hair and her uniform skirt was a mini.
I thought, it's good to be back in the world. A woman with Mary Travers hair and wire-rim glasses and a boyfriend toting a guitar passed me in the broad hall, and I smiled at them experimentally. The woman twitched the skirt of her granny dress carefully aside and looked pointedly at the fatigues and combat boots one of the nurses had loaned me for the trip home.
I wandered into one of the clothing shops in the airport. All kinds of batiks and cotton-gauze ethnic things were on sale there. And gorgeous long dangly earrings, the kind you could never wear on duty. I wished I had my back pay.
'Is there something I can show you?' the young woman behind the counter asked. She had on a nice silky dress of some sort.
'No, I'm sorry. I wish I could afford something, but I just got back from Vietnam and they didn't give me my pay before I left.'
'You were over there? It must have been terrible.' I felt like snapping that no, it had been a lot of fun, really, but restrained myself. She was just being pleasant. 'What were you doing there?' she asked.
'I was a nurse,' I said, and added, 'I took care of GIs and also a lot of Vietnamese civilians.' I didn't want her to think I was a baby burner.
'How interesting.' The loudspeaker came on, announcing a flight, and she leaned forward over the counter. I leaned toward her to hear what she had to say. 'You must have learned a lot about the people, then. Did you get your necklace there?' and she reached out and touched the amulet before I quite knew what she was doing.
She let go of it fast, the bright mustard and green of her aura darkening like snow after a slop bucket has been emptied on it. She backed off. 'Well, if you don't want anything, excuse me. I have to finish this inventory.'
I yearned to see Mom and Dad throughout the five-hour trip, but when they hugged me, I had to fake returning their hugs. I wasn't quite up to their smiles, so very soon those smiles faded. Kansas City looked as if nothing else were going on in the whole world. Trees grew unmolested, people dressed in suits and hats with veils and high-heeled shoes that would have made running impossible. It didn't look real to me.
When we reached our old driveway, I felt like a teenager again. The wind chimes sang cheerily in the breeze. The pine tree in the front yard looked a little taller. All of the pets were long dead. My brother was there, and my grandma and grandpa. I didn't know what to say to anybody. I went upstairs to my room, sat down on the bed, and stared at the pink Chinese print paper I'd picked out when I was fourteen. The last of my cat collection, a couple of Avon bottles, sat on the blond dresser Mom and Dad had bought secondhand for me. I walked over to the dresser and picked up one of the glass cats, to stroke it for comfort.
Its surface was cool and smooth, but it felt warmer than I did. I felt as if my insides had been hollowed out with an ice cream scoop, cold, numb, and empty. I couldn't see my aura anymore. I thought the muddiness I saw in the mirror probably was real dirt. It had been a long trip.
I took off the amulet and tucked it inside my old jewelry box. I wouldn't need it here in the world. I put on a pair of jeans that had been too small for me when I left and were now miles too big, and one of Daddy's shirts, a pair of Mama's shower shoes. At least I'd lost weight. Maybe I could make money introducing the Exotic South China Sea Dieting Miracle-amebiasis and tapeworms. Most of them had been flushed out of my system by various antibiotics, fungicides, and other medications, but some of them were not easily gotten rid of.
Mom made my favorite foods: steak and homemade trench fries, corn on the cob, and fresh green beans and tomatoes. My aunt made my favorite cake, buttermilk chocolate, and put on it the peppermint boiled white icing that only she seemed to know how to do. I couldn't eat much of it. I didn't say, 'Pass the tucking salt,' as I've heard some of the guys say they did, but I didn't say much of anything else either.
So when Mom found the medal, she thought it was a topic of conversation.
'Honey, this is a Silver Star, isn't it? You didn't tell me you'd won a medal. Can I call Mr. Mingel at the Kansan and tell him?
He's been wanting to interview you when you came home.'
I should have unpacked it myself, before she got around to it. The fatigues I had been in when I was admitted were still in there, and that's not the kind of thing you want your mother to see. But my attitude was 'burn the whole damned thing.' My stuff from Da Nang was being sent later.
Mama's eyes were troubled when she opened the box someone had packed the medal in. I hadn't brought it along. I guess whoever threw my stuff in my bag had done it. I wished Janice had come back to say good-bye. Or Llewellyn.
'Silver Star, huh?' I asked, and glanced at it. Sure enough. I guess the general felt I needed a little higher bribe than a simple Purple Heart to keep my mouth shut. Those things take months to review and award normally. It made me a little sick to think that they were trying to buy me off with something most people earned with the loss of one or more limbs, or maybe their lives. 'Don't mean nothin', Mama. Please don't call the newspaper man. I don't have anything I want to tell him.'
'Well, if you're sure,' she said uncertainly, then patted me on the cheek. 'You know your daddy and I love you and we're very proud of you, honey.'
I felt as if she'd hit me. Tears stung the backs of my eyes. Proud of what?
I'd killed a man, had been the cause of death for two others, and had abandoned the little boy I'd been trying to save in a Vietcong village.
Nothing had turned out right. The medal was a mockery. A Hollywood happy ending. Fuck. I'd give it to Duncan. He liked that kind of shit. I'd make up a funny story about it, and give it to him. And then later, maybe he'd hold me and I could tell him how it really was. If I could just tell everything to him, I could really start to feel at home again. That was a good idea. If I could talk to him, he'd make me feel better and then I could be a little more normal around the folks. He was living in Independence, Missouri, now, according to the third and final letter I'd received from him. I sat down on my folks' bed and tried to call, but nobody answered.
I drove out to Independence the next day. Mom and Dad disapproved. They thought I should sit around and regale the relatives with more war stories. But I needed to see Duncan badly. If he was gone, maybe I could wait. I stopped and called again from a 7-Eleven store.
'Kitten! You're home!' He said. 'God, that's about the most wonderful thing I've heard. Hell, yes, come on out. I've got so much to tell you.'
Maybe it would be all right. Maybe he cared more than I thought. Maybe he had realized how much he missed me. I drove into the parking lot at his apartment complex and felt my stomach knot as I came to the front stoop of his apartment, rang the doorbell. The door opened.
A mane of wild red hair held back by a blue bandanna over whelmed a girl who wore rubber gloves, cutoffs, and an overtaxed halter top and who had legs up to her armpits. Maybe I-'d gotten the wrong apartment after all. Maybe he'd moved and had kept the same phone and had forgotten to tell me.
'I'm looking for Duncan-' I began.
She grabbed my hand in her rubber gloves and chirped, 'You must be Kitty McCulley! Oh, that rat didn't tell me you'd be here so soon I've been cleaning this place all morning trying to make it look nice for when you got here. Duncan has told me so much about you I've just been dying to meet you.' She dragged me into the hall and peeled off her rubber gloves. 'I'm Swoozie,' she concluded, as if that was supposed to mean something. Duncan had definitely not told me all about her.
'Uh-hi,' I said, looking beyond her to see if he was there. Across the living room was a stairway. Upstairs, a faucet shut off, there were a couple of footsteps, and then Duncan came bouncing down the steps, attired in fresh jeans and a starched, button-down shirt. I'd forgotten men could look that clean.
He grabbed me in a bear hug and, to my surprise, I didn't feel any more like hugging him than I had Mom and Dad. I just looked at him. If he really meant that hug, who the hell was she?
'I see you met Swoozie. Great, isn't she?'
'Umm,' I said noncommittally.
'She's made us chicken for lunch. You like chicken, don't you, Kitten?'
He didn't wait for an answer. The chicken amply showed off her domestic skills, and the way she hung on Duncan showed off others.
When she had detached herself for a second I said, 'Duncan, I've got so much I need to tell you.'
'Oh, yeah, and I really want to talk to you too, hon. But it's going to have to be later. Swoozie and I have to run out to her folks' farm for an hour or so. You can entertain yourself, right? The TV's in the bedroom.'
I didn't say anything and he didn't ask anything. The two of them piled into
