Page 47 of Finally Mine
Your plants are doing well, and wildlife has yet to break into your house and claim it as their own. In other town news, I’m organizing this year’s Fourth of July after Merle broke his hip. I’m not sure if it was my people-leasing OCD or a genuine desire to shut Georgia Rae up about the parking space she’s complained about for the last seven years.
I feel…good. Work is fun and challenging, and I think exactly what I need. You’ll be happy to hear that I haven’t broken down and sobbed on any near strangers lately, though I might be holding out for you to come back.
I hope all is well with you. I don’t know if it’s okay to ask questions like where are you, what are you doing, do you miss home?
Good luck. Be safe. I’m thinking about you.
Love,
Gloria
He re-read the email for the 4,000th time. The email he’d never replied to. He’d gotten it two weeks after it was sent. After “the incident,” three surgeries, a touch-and-go infection, and his first torturous rounds of physical therapy that left him weak and gasping.
“Put that thing away before you crash this plane,” his mother bellowed from his elbow in her first-class seat. A retired couple on their way home from a three-week stay in Europe had given up their seats after spotting Aldo in uniform and on crutches. He’d refused the wheelchair.
He couldn’t say why that pissed him off. But most things since arriving in Germany half a limb short had. As far as he could tell, the bastards that had tried to kill the better part of his team—and nearly succeeded with him—had planted their hatred inside him. It thrived in the pit of his stomach, a bright red rage curled around dark, wispy tendrils of something even worse. Fear.
“You don’t need to scream at the whole plane,” Aldo snapped back at his mother. They’d spent the last ten days together, and they were headed stateside for a short stint at Walter Reed and then home. And if he didn’t get some alone time soon, one or both of them was going to end up dead.
“What? You think you deserve the wiffy just because you’re a wounded soldier?”
Ina was both proud of his sacrifice and inconvenienced by it. She managed to roll compliment and jab into the same sentence while butchering the word Wi-Fi.
Aldo shut his laptop, stuffed it back in his bag, and stretched his legs out. Leg. Leg and prosthesis. Mentally, he was no more prepared to have one leg than when Dr. Dreamy had given him the heads up.
He was nothing without his athletic prowess, his strength, his speed. War had taken it all from him. It had robbed him of his sleep, his body, his confidence. He felt like a shadowy monster returning to a place that might not even feel like home again.
“Are you sleeping?” Ina jabbed him hard in the ribs with her elbow, the only part of her body that was pointy. “What movie should I watch?”
“Jesus Christ, Ma.”
* * *
Walter Reed was moreof a formality, and Aldo found himself home within days. “Home” was his mother’s house for the next few weeks. He was determined to whittle that timeline down to days. She had a spare room—practically a closet, and just as jammed full as one—and bathroom on the first floor, and he “required supervision.”
Stubbornness had him insisting on carrying his duffle slung over his shoulder as he crutched his way impatiently up the porch steps.
Through his exhaustion, his constant roiling anger, he didn’t notice the red, white, and blue hanging baskets on the porch. Inside, he blocked out his mother’s incessant yammering about drapes and birdfeeders and hopped back through the kitchen and off the sun porch to the room he was sure he’d need to shovel pounds of shit out of before he could even enter.
He was wrong. The room was neat as a pin. The twin bed made with fresh linens instead of buried under every single issue ofCosmothat his mother had collected since 1974. Gone were the baskets of yard sale find Beanie Babies and porcelain bird figurines. Pawing through the neatly stacked clothing on the skinny table, he discovered several of his favorite t-shirts and shorts.
His iPad, chargers, and underwear all made the move.
His mother, bless her hollering heart, apparently had gone to great lengths to make his transition an easy one. Aldo felt a vague sense of guilt for doing nothing but griping at her for the past few weeks.
Conscience heavy, he crutched back into the kitchen and found his mother cutting into a pie.
“Ma, if that pie was here when you left, you could get food poisoning. I told you before not to eat moldy food.”
“Leave me alone. This is welcome home pie,” she grunted, shoveling a slab onto one of her tiny rose leaf tea plates. For a ham-fisted banshee, his mother sure appreciated fine, dainty things.
She shoved a card into his hands and watched him owlishly as she hefted the first bite to her mouth.
Welcome home, Morettas.
Gloria
“Why is she leaving pies in your house?” Aldo demanded, gripping the card. Reading her name, let alone saying it, was painful. A reminder of the life that he couldn’t have now.
