chapter 1
When my brother lifted his beer and laughed, “Come on, sis, tell my Marines your call sign; should we guess, Glitter Six, Cupcake?” his buddies roared, but after I calmly said “Sticky Six,” the gunnery sergeant’s coffee slipped from his hand and he came to attention so fast he knocked over his stool, whispering, “Ma’am.”
The back room of the bar was hotter than it should have been on a June evening in coastal North Carolina, but a back room full of Marines is always its own weather.
Dominic had thrown the door wide and let the smell of cheap pilsner and frying oil follow him in. A couple dozen men in collared shirts came after him, and somewhere in the trail of them, I carried two cardboard boxes from my rental car and set them on the long table by the wall.
Inside the boxes were the kinds of things an older sister thinks to bring to a younger brother’s promotion party: a sheet cake from a grocery store, a cheap aluminum frame with his new sergeant chevrons in it, and a card I had picked up at the airport because the one I had bought a week earlier had been too sentimental to give him in front of his platoon.
I had not seen Dominic in fourteen months.
He had eight inches and forty pounds on me. He had hugged me when I came through the door, lifted me a little off the floor in front of his men, and made a joke about how the wing nut had finally turned up.
I had let him.
The Marines knew me only by face. I had told them my name when they asked for it. I told them I worked for the Air Force. I told them I was based out of Georgia.
None of them pressed.
None of them had any reason to.
I had on a green blouse and dark jeans and a thin gold chain my grandmother had given me at my commissioning. I looked like what I was on paper that night: a forty-year-old woman who had flown into Jacksonville to watch her kid brother get pinned.
Sergeant Dominic Marchetti, United States Marine Corps, twenty-eight years of age. Bravo Company, Second Battalion, Eighth Marines.
He had wanted his sister there.
I had come.
The Gunny was the one I noticed first.
Marines always tell you who the Gunny is without anyone having to point. He was a wide-shouldered man with a clean fade and a tan line where his patrol cap had cut a band across his forehead. He had been standing at the back of the room with a foam cup of coffee in one hand and a beer set down on the high-top behind him, because Marine gunnery sergeants drink coffee at their Marines’ parties for a reason.
He nodded at me when I came in, polite with the eyes of a man who was at work in his own way.
I nodded back.
I did not introduce myself.
Dominic pulled me toward his table when the second round of beers came. His arm went around my shoulders. He was beaming the way a man beams when he has spent his whole life being the loud one and the room has finally given him a stage.
“Marines, this is my sister, Vivian. She is the reason I’m here tonight, mostly.”
He grinned at his own line, and the table grinned back.
“She bullied me into staying through my senior year of high school when I was about to drop out and enlist.”
A chuckle went around his squad.
One of them, a corporal whose face I would later learn went with the name Pace, lifted his glass to me. I lifted mine back.
“Now,” Dominic said, swinging his beer to his right, “she works for the United States Air Force, which we will forgive.”
A bigger laugh.
The Gunny smiled into his coffee.
He did not laugh.
“Come on, sis. Tell my Marines your call sign. Should we guess? Glitter Six? Cupcake?”
The table howled.
Dominic was looking at me with the expression he had used as a boy when he wanted me to play along. The one that said, please be the good sport. Please let me have this.
I had let him have things for twenty-eight years.
I would have let him have this.
But I was looking at the Gunny.
The Gunny had stopped smiling. Not all at once, exactly. The smile on his face had not yet caught up to whatever his shoulders were doing. He had heard the words call sign in a room of Marines, and his face had become quieter than it had been a second before.
He was a man who had been on a radio in his life.
I do not know why I said it the way I said it. I do not know why I did not laugh along. I do not know why I did not give Dominic “Stapler Six” or “Coffee Six” or one of the other answers I had used in the years when I had not wanted to be asked.
Something in the Gunny’s still face was something I recognized.
Something in me had been quiet for too long.
I said, “Sticky Six.”
His coffee cup went first.
He did not throw it. He simply stopped holding it. The foam cup hit the boot mat and bounced. The lid came off, and coffee splashed over the toe of his shoe and across the back of his hand on its way down.
He did not look at it.
His stool was the second thing.
He came to his feet without a noise, the way only men who have stood up under cold field canvas a thousand times come to their feet. The stool tipped behind him and went over with a clatter no one moved to catch.
He brought his hand up.
He saluted.
He held it.
The Marines at his side of the table turned because the stool had fallen. They saw the Gunny’s hand. They saw his face.
The laughter at the table went out the way a candle goes out all at once, with a small thin sound left in the place where the noise had been.
I returned his salute the way you return one when the man giving it is older than his rank suggests. Slowly. Deliberately. The way I had returned the salute of a Master Chief Petty Officer at Joint Base Andrews three years before.
He had been a SEAL. He had known the same kind of thing the Gunny knew.
“Ma’am,” the Gunny said.
May you like
He had to clear his throat.
“Oh, ma’am.”
