muffins.”
Jess hung up.
She put her phone face down on the table. She put her face in her hands.
She cried. Not loud. The kind of crying where your shoulders shake and you don’t make any sound. The kind she does when she thinks Caleb might hear.
I didn’t cry.
I sat at the kitchen table and drank my coffee and looked out the window at the backyard. At the old swing set Danny used to play on. At the flagpole I put up in 1978. At the flag, snapping in the wind off the Elizabeth River.
Then I got up.
“Where are you going?” Jess asked.
“Closet,” I said.
Part Three: The Garment Bag
There’s a cedar closet in the upstairs hallway of my house.
Peg had it built in 1985. She said it was for winter coats. Really, it was for my uniforms. She said a
man who served twenty-eight years ought to have somewhere decent to keep them.
