"She said that," he said. "That's what she said."
"She said you were brave. She said it was their fault, not yours."
His father sat back down. He did it slowly, as if his legs had gone out from under him a little. He put his elbows on the table, right next to the meatloaf, which his mother never allowed, and she didn't say anything about it. He put his face in his hands.
When he took them away, he was looking at the photograph.
"I was twenty," he said. "When the letter came. Twenty and a half. I was working in the electrical shop for Phelps Dodge, rewinding motors. I liked it. I was good at it." He touched the edge of the photograph with one finger. "My father went into the Marines when he was seventeen. He lied about his age. He was on Guadalcanal. He was on Tarawa. He came home with a piece of shrapnel in his thigh the size of a quarter and he never complained about it once, and he never slept through one night in my entire life. Not one. I used to lie in my room and listen to him. He'd yell. He'd yell names. Guys' names. My mother would sit up with him in the kitchen with the light on until it got light out, and then he'd go to work."
"Ray," his mother said again, in a different voice. "You don't have to—"
"He wants to know." His father didn't look at her. He looked at Carter. "You want to know?"
Carter nodded.
"I watched that my whole life. And then I got a letter that said I had to go do it too. Some other jungle. Some other war that nobody could explain to me. And I sat at that same kitchen table and I told him I wasn't going." He was quiet a moment. "I thought he'd understand. That's the stupid part. I thought, of everybody, him. He's the one who knows what it does. And he stood up from the table just like I just did, and he said, If you run, you're dead to me. Those words. And I said, Then I guess I'm dead. And I got on a Greyhound."
"To Seattle," Carter said.
His father's eyes flicked toward the carport. Toward the drawer.
"To Seattle," he said. "And then I walked. There's a park on the border, up at Blaine. Peace Arch. There's a big white arch, and it says on it, Children of a Common Mother. I walked through it with a suitcase on a Sunday afternoon and nobody even asked me anything." He almost smiled. "I got a job fixing radios in a shop on Hastings Street. I wrote my mother every week. Every single week. For a year."
He stopped.
"And?" Carter said.
"And they came back," his mother said quietly. She reached across the table and put her hand over his father's hand. "Every one. Unopened. In Walt's handwriting. Return to sender. No such person at this address."