We all knew: You are dead until you are sent home, at which time you will maybe get to be alive again.

I came home a day early. The letters from Joni had become more and more sporadic, just as had mine, but hers were at least loving and encouraging whereas mine were frankly terse and straining to be something akin to pleasant, since hopeful was out of the question. By the end of my tour, I had probably killed thirty men. And I was fine with that. Because I hadn’t really killed them, had I? The war designated them dead long before I came on the scene.

Anyway, I showed up in La Mirada at the little white stucco house (no picket fence) on La Flor Drive. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if that side door had been locked (the front was). I felt odd, because I’d been away going on two years and was not the same guy, even if I was back in civvies; but the sunshine and the smell of flowers did make me feel alive. Not a walking dead man. Which was nice.

Anyway, I went in to surprise Joni, just sort of crept in, sneaky bastard, not yelling her name or any honey-I’mhome shit. I wanted to enter a room and she would be sitting in a comfy chair listening to our song (“No Fair at All”) or maybe at the kitchen table writing me a loving letter, or possibly taking a bubble bath, and in all those instances, her big brown eyes would get even bigger and she would beam and be in my arms and, before you know it, I’d be in her. You think a lot about such things when you are overseas and a walking dead man.

I know you’re way ahead of me. You wouldn’t have bothered looking in every other room first, before trying the bedroom. And maybe I knew before I opened that door. Hell, I did know. The sounds of heavy breathing and bed springs provided a little clue.