off for the soldiers. The air was electric with anticipation. We could see, through the window, the plane pulling up to the gangway, setting off a noisy cheer and the waving of handmade signs drawn in red and blue marker. Young mothers strained to see through the glass, leaning heavily on the handles of their strollers, as if exhausted by the journey. Senior citizens stood patiently alongside, the men wearing trucker caps embroidered with the names of units and platoons, the women in sweatshirts hand painted with cheerful flag themes. Cade passed his American flag off to a little girl, then unclipped his sunglasses from his T-shirt collar and shifted them to the back pocket of his jeans. When I gave him a funny look he explained, “I don’t want to stab Elias with them when I hug him.”
Then the door opened, and a great wave of a cheer rose up as the first soldiers started down the walkway. Among the colorful crowd, their tidy uniforms—buttoned and tucked, the digital camouflage in subtle shades of sage and moss—gave them gravitas and dignity. So many hands to shake, I thought, so many people to work through, when surely each one must want nothing more than to collapse in a recliner with a beer. One soldier after another worked his jaw around a piece of gum, and I thought about what Cade had said on the highway.
At last Cade’s searching gaze snapped into recognition, and he uncoiled his arms from their crossed position against his chest. “Hey, dude,” he said, clasping Elias’s extended hand, then pulling him into a hug unimpeded by the flat ribbon of the walkway marker wedged between them. “I missed you, man.”
For a year now—ever since Cade and I began seeing each other—I’d been looking at the same photo of his brother, a glowering soldier bulked out by body armor and carrying an M-16, standing on a patch of sand with an American flag pinned to the tent behind him. The image was tacked to the corkboard above Cade’s bed in his dorm room, among the various bumper stickers from campaigns he had volunteered on—local representatives, congressmen, state senate—and a postcard of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders portrait with the quote “Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.” Elias almost never wrote letters home, so on one rare trip back to their farm in New Hampshire, Cade had commandeered the photo sent to their sister, Candy, as a thank-you for her church fundraising the money to buy him the body armor. “Thanks” and “Elias” were scrawled on the bottom in a sloppy cursive that looked as if it belonged to a twelve-year-old schoolboy, not a twenty-four-year-old army infantry specialist, but it looked as if Elias had bigger things on his mind than good penmanship. Sometimes when Cade and I were making love, I caught sight of that scowling image and felt a wave of guilt. Here Cade and I were in the ivory tower of academia, casting aside our textbooks to spend an afternoon at play in his bed, while seven thousand miles away his brother was making a diligent effort not to die. But the fact was, we had each chosen our own path. And now here we all were, together.
As Elias extracted himself from the hug and made his way out of the line, I watched him. He was shorter than Cade by a couple of inches, and stockier; his face offered none of the animation that lit Cade’s, but his blue eyes, like his brother’s, were piercing. His expression was more or less the same as the one he wore in the photo. When he looked at me I felt as if he had been watching me all this time, all these months I’d been with Cade, a witness to my secrets. I felt embarrassed when he shook my hand.
“This is Jill Wagner,” Cade told him. “My fiancée. She’s the one who’s been sending you all the care packages.”
His hand was warmer than my own. Holding my gaze, he indicated Cade with a cock of his head and said, in a tone that was barely jesting, “You’re actually going to marry this asshole?”
“Not for a while yet. We both need to finish school first.” Amusement lit Cade’s face, and so I joked back, “I still have plenty of time to reevaluate.”
“Smart thinking. Thanks for all the packages. You make a mean chocolate chip cookie.” He turned to Cade. “I need a