Thank You for Your Service Read Online Free PDF Page B

there, and before they could say anything she had finished the quick calculations. An injury would be a phone call. A serious injury would be a visit from soldiers in regular uniforms. Death would be dressier soldiers, in their Class As. These two, asking if they might come in, were in their Class As. “There are a few things I have to get done before you say it,” she answered. She wanted to remain in control. That was important to her. She went into the kitchen and turned off the oven, knowing that she was about to forget about the cookies. She made a list. She phoned some neighbors and asked them to come over and get the girls. She phoned her mother and asked her to get on the first plane. She made sure the door to the bathroom was shut. Finally, she sat on a couch in the living room, and they stood in front of her and said it.
    Ding-dong
.
    This day, it is six moving men who are standing there.
    “Good morning!” she says to them, once again trying to sound under control. She has a kind, round face and long curly hair and except for her widow’s eyes looks very much the same as the woman her husband last saw.

    Amanda Doster
    “We got lost,” one of the movers says, apologizing for being late, and when they’re all inside, she leads them through the house and gives them a few instructions.
    “Don’t touch that jacket.”
    “Not that flag case. I will transport that.”
    “I’ll take his uniforms.”
    “I’ll take that phone. It still has his voice on it.”
    “I’ll do the black footlockers. I’ll do those.”
    “Okay,” the foreman says, and as he and the others get to work packing, she and her best friend, Sally, who has come over to help, go down into the house’s tornado shelter, a windowless concrete room in the basement. She flips on the light. There, against a wall, stands a gun safe almost as big as a refrigerator, and after spinning the combination and swinging open the door, she begins removing what’s inside.
    First the long guns, nine in all.
    Three handguns.
    A sword.
    Some knives.
    The ammo.
    And lastly a sealed wood box, inscribed: “James D. Doster, SFC, 19 November 1969, 29 September 2007.”
    “There’s James,” Sally says, as Amanda smiles at the box.
    “Hi, James,” Amanda says.
    For a while, she was taking him everywhere. She took him to his parents’ house for Christmas, strapping him in with a seatbelt all the way to Arkansas. She took him to Sally’s one day when a bad storm was threatening, transporting him that time in a laundry basket.
    For a long while, she kept him on the bedroom dresser, the dresser they got together, front and center. One day, she put a framed poem about grief and faith there and eased him toward the edge, and another day she got new bedroom furniture and moved the dresser to the guest room and carried him down to the tornado shelter. He was on top of the gun safe initially, but eventually she put him inside, reasoning that it wasfireproof in there and giving no thought to the fact that what she was protecting from fire were cremated remains. She closed the door. She spun the lock. She turned off the light. She went upstairs and began adjusting to him being in the safe, behind the door, in the dark. And now she is leaving the house where she last saw him and promised she would be when he came back.
    She had been adamant about that, too. As she told the casualty assistance office assigned to her in those first days, “I am staying here forever. I am never leaving.” She told her friends that as well, and while at first they sympathized, as the months went by, and then a year, and then another year, most of them began to lose patience with her inability to stop being so relentlessly heartbroken. “There comes a point,” one of them said. “You just have to get on with it.” So maybe this day, this move, is the coming of a point, she is thinking, even as she suspects that it isn’t, that she is still very much the woman she had cemented into