Chapter 1 — The Gate
I had not driven through the gates of the Lockridge estate in ten years, and I would not have driven through them now for any living member of that family.
I came for a dead one.
The morning was gray and close, the Georgia sky the color of old pewter, and the church bells were still going somewhere behind the pines when the car came up the long drive and stopped near the family cemetery.
I got out in my service uniform — not as armor, though I know that is how it looked to them, but because I had flown in overnight from Fort Benning after a training rotation and there had been no time to be anything but what I am, which is a soldier.
Then the doors opened behind me, and my children climbed out one at a time, and I heard the whispering start before the last of them had both feet on the grass.
Five of them.
Wes first, nine and grave, already reaching for his little sister’s hand.
Then Ira, then Abe.
Then Romy.
Then Delphie, the baby, four years old and blinking at the crowd.
I did not have to look at the mourners to know what they were seeing, because I had spent ten years watching it dawn on strangers in grocery stores and school pickup lines.
Five children with the same dark hair, the same set to the jaw, the same particular Lockridge eyes.
But they were not a matched set to me, and I need to say that, because I know how it looked and I know how a story like this gets told — the wronged wife arriving with her five little pieces of evidence, a walking accusation in ascending heights.
That is not who my children are and it is not why they were there.
Wes is grave and watchful and carries his siblings’ worries like a coat that is still too big for him, and I worry that I have let him grow up too fast.
Ira is the one who laughs, who cannot hold still, who would have been fidgeting through the service if there had been a service for us to sit in.
Abe is quiet and reads the room before he enters it.