I’m not sure she believes me, though.
Across the room I see Kevlar, Moss, Ski, and Starvin’ Marvin. We call him Starvin’ Marvin—or usually just Marv—because he’s tall and skinny, and with his head shaved he looks like the African kid the boys adopted on South Park. I wasn’t as tight with Ski and Marv as Charlie, Kevlar, and Moss, but we hung out together night after night in Afghanistan, circled around the fire pit, smoking, telling dirty jokes, and arguing over the hotness of female celebrities. Peralta is with them, too. “Charlie told me she thinks she has, as she puts it, a touch of the ESP,” I tell Harper.
“She’s… unusual,” she says. “But I like her.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
Harper follows my sight line and spots nearly all of Kilo Company—a forest of dress blues. “I, um—need to use the ladies’ room,” she says, and leaves me to join my friends alone.
In the corner of the room a band plays a reggae-fied version of one of the sad Beatles songs, and the people dotting the room are dressed in everything from dark business suits to tie-dyed hippie skirts with those jingly ankle bracelets. There’s even one woman with bare feet. She’s got about half a dozen plastic grocery bags draped over her arm and she looks as if she hasn’t showered in a while, so she might be a homeless lady Charlie’s mom invited in for a free meal.
“Here’s the man.” Kevlar whacks me on the back as I walk up. He smells like whiskey. “How’s it going, Solo? Did you bring the whip?” He giggles. “Because you’re whipped. Get it?”
“That was weak, Kenneth,” I say as I shake hands all around. “Get back to me when you’ve got something original.”
“Whatever.” He works his tongue into the empty space where his dip would be, making his lower lip stick out. “Where’s your girl?”
“Ladies’ room,” I say. “But she’s kind of pissed at me right now.”
“What’d you do?” Moss asks.
“I hooked up with my ex.”
“The”—Kevlar air-mimes an enormous rack in front of his chest—“that ex?” I might not have carried around a picture of Paige, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t describe her.
“That’s the one,” I say.
“How’d she find out?” he asks.
My face goes hot as I admit I told her.
“Solo…” Kevlar shakes his head at me. “For a smart guy, you can be such a dumbass.”
I don’t tell him I didn’t have much of a choice.
“Don’t listen to him,” Moss says. “Messing with your ex when you’ve got a good thing going is a bonehead move, but telling her the truth is the honorable thing.”
“Honorable, my ass.” Marv leans forward and pokes me in the chest with his finger with each word. “It’s plain and simple stupid. What she don’t know don’t hurt her. Period.”
“So if your girl stepped out on you while we were in Cali last year for training, you wouldn’t want to know about it?” Ski is always the devil’s advocate in an argument, especially with Marv, who gets worked up easily.
Marv’s forehead wrinkles as his eyebrows pull together. “You know something I don’t?”
Ski laughs. “It’s a hypothetical.”
“A hypo-what?”
“A what-if, you retard.”
“Oh. Well, that’s different,” Marv says. “I’d want to know if she’s been playing me for a fool while I was gone. And I’d beat the crap out of the guy she’s been banging.”
“So why doesn’t Solo’s girl deserve to know?”
“Is that how you got the fresh black eye?” Kevlar asks. “Harper punch you again?”
“No, my brother hit me when he caught me with his girlfriend,” I admit, which cracks them all up. And it would be funny, if Harper didn’t hate me. Thinking about her makes me feel like my insides are nothing but a series of knots, and it makes me not want to be here right now.
“Stephenson, you got a second?” Peralta asks, like he’s reading my mind. His voice is quiet. Even when he was pissed at us he rarely raised it. We step away from the others. “You doing okay?”
“Just suffering from a raging case of stupidity.”
Even his laugh is quiet. We walk in silence for a few beats. “Are you… getting things squared away?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
If he knows I’m lying, Peralta doesn’t mention it.
“Listen,” he says. “I just wanted to let you know that Leonard volunteered you for bomb dog school.”
“Me?” I deflate a little. It’s not like my plan for doing the recon course was set in stone, but training to be a bomb dog handler isn’t something I’ve ever considered.
“He asked me to recommend someone,” Peralta says. “I chose you because I know you’ll do a good job… and I think it could help you.”
“I don’t have a choice, do I?”
He smiles and pats me on the shoulder. “Consider yourself voluntold, but trust me on this, okay?”
Harper comes back into the banquet room as Charlie’s mom and a small blond woman I’m guessing is Jenny step up to a podium with a microphone. “Welcome, everyone. If you’ll all take a seat, we’ll begin in a moment.”
The undercurrent of conversation ebbs away as everyone finds a chair, the Marines a solid row in front. I leave a seat on the end for Harper. Her thigh touches against mine when she sits and even after she shifts away it feels warm, like it’s still there.
“Thank you,” Charlie’s mom says, reaching out to take the blond woman’s hand. “Jenny and I thank you all for coming today and sharing in the celebration of our son’s life.”
Kevlar turns and makes a did-you-know-about-this? face, but I shrug my shoulder a little in a silent get over it.
Ellen talks for a while, taking us back to when Charlie was a little kid and was horrified to find flamingo on the menu at a restaurant—it was really filet mignon. I didn’t know that kid, but I envy his life because even though his mom is a little strange, they were connected in a way I’ve never been with my parents. They did things together. Went places that didn’t involve football.
As Charlie’s mom talks, I catch a glance at Harper out of the corner of my eye. She’s wiping her nose with the back of her hand, so I pull off my gloves and hand her one. I’m probably breaking some stupid USMC uniform regulation, but she doesn’t have a tissue and the glove is absorbent enough. Her words hiccup in her throat when she whispers thank you.
Charlie’s mom doesn’t try to paint him as a patriot whose love of country came before anything else. He was like the rest of us—trying to figure out what he wanted from life and the best way to get it. She’s strong, though, standing up there in front of everyone with her eyes all shiny, but not breaking down as she talks about a son she doesn’t have anymore.
When she’s finished, she looks at me. “Before he died, Charlie would e-mail me as often as he could and his letters were always peppered with Solo this and Travis that. So I’d like to invite Travis Stephenson to say a few words.”
I stand up and look into the middle distance, trying to calm nerves that haven’t been this jangled since the last firefight before we left Afghanistan. No matter how many times we engaged the Taliban, it was always completely butt-clenching scary. I blow out a breath and though I don’t look at her, I think I feel Harper touch my palm. I curl my fingers around the spot, holding it there, then go to the podium. Ellen smiles at me and I wait for her and Jenny to sit down before I begin.
“Many nights in Afghanistan we played poker,” I say. “Since none of us carried much cash, we’d use make-believe money. At last tally, I owe Charlie eight million dollars—” Charlie’s mom gives a little chuckle from the front row, which sends a ripple of quiet laughter through the room and dissipates my fear that a joke would be in bad taste. I give Ellen a grin. “I really hope you’re not planning to collect.”