Chương 12
Then she took the flag.
Chloe’s arms felt abruptly empty.
For one terrible second, she wanted it back.
The feeling was hot and selfish. She pictured the flag on her desk beneath the crooked stars. She pictured telling classmates that a colonel had chosen her. She pictured strangers calling her an angel and the general kneeling again.
She hated all of it, but she still wanted the flag.
Rebecca must have seen something in her face.
“You can change your mind.”
“No.”
“You’re allowed.”
“No.”
“Chloe.”
“Mr. Arthur didn’t give it to me to keep.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t.”
The room went quiet.
Chloe wiped her palms on her navy skirt.
“I just don’t want being afraid a long time to look like my decision.”
Rebecca held the flag against her chest.
Her expression broke then, but quietly. She pressed her lips together, turned away from Noah, and cried without sound.
No one moved toward her immediately.
Denise busied herself straightening the empty plastic case. Hale looked at the floor. The patient-services employee stepped into the hallway and pretended to review his inventory sheet.
Noah touched his mother’s elbow.
She leaned her forehead briefly against his shoulder.
Chloe picked up Mr. Arthur’s glasses from the table.
The bag crackled.
“He wanted me to have something,” she said.
Rebecca wiped her face.
“Take the drawings.”
“I made those.”
“He kept them.”
Chloe looked through the box.
She chose the wire-rim glasses.
Rebecca stared at them.
“He needs them less than I do,” Chloe said.
Noah laughed again, this time without trying to hide it.
Rebecca let her keep them.
Denise’s meeting with Human Resources lasted fifty-two minutes.
Chloe waited in Marisol’s car with Tessa, eating vending-machine pretzels and watching reporters stand near the main entrance. Tessa had parked beneath a tree that dropped sticky seeds onto the windshield.
“You gave away the flag,” Tessa said.
“It wasn’t giving away if it belonged there.”
“That sounds very mature.”
“I wanted to take it back.”
“That sounds more believable.”
“Do you still want Grandma’s sewing machine?”
“Sometimes.”
“It’s ruined.”
“I know.”
“Then why?”
Tessa considered the question.
“Because I wanted Grandma to choose me.”
“She chose Mom.”
“She chose the person who actually knew how to use it.”
“Mom said she didn’t.”
“She could thread it. That placed her far ahead of me.”
A reporter adjusted her hair in the reflection of a news van window.
Chloe put on Mr. Arthur’s glasses.
Everything blurred.
Tessa glanced over. “You look eighty.”
“He was older.”
“You look like an eighty-year-old tax auditor.”
“What’s that?”
“Someone who ruins birthdays.”
Chloe removed the glasses.
“Did Grandma choose you for anything?”
“Her recipe box.”
“Do you cook?”
“No.”
“Why did she give you that?”
“Maybe she had a sense of humor.”
Denise emerged from the employee entrance at twelve fifteen.
She crossed the parking lot slowly, holding a white envelope.
Tessa rolled down the window.
“Well?”
Denise got into the passenger seat.
“Final written warning. Three unpaid shifts. Mandatory policy training.”
“They didn’t fire you?”
“No.”
Chloe leaned forward from the back. “Why?”
“Because Marisol gave a statement that Mr. Arthur specifically requested your visits, because my supervisor knew you were in the building, because the policy about employee children is inconsistently enforced, and because the hospital would prefer not to fire the mother of the child in the video currently making everyone cry.”
“That’s good,” Tessa said.
“It is not entirely good.”
“It is mostly good.”
“It means people with cameras get exceptions.”
“It means the union representative earned her dues.”
Denise looked back at Chloe. “We are also not allowed on the second floor unless we have an appointment.”
“Ever?”
“For now.”
“What about room 214?”
“Someone else is in it.”
Chloe looked at the glasses in her lap.
“What kind of person?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are they alone?”
“Chloe.”
“I was only asking.”
Denise turned around.
“I know.”
The Friday funeral took place under a white canopy at a veterans’ cemetery outside the city.
Despite Rebecca’s request for privacy, reporters gathered beyond the cemetery gates. A photograph of Chloe entering with Denise appeared online before the service began.
Denise had dressed her in the cream cardigan and navy skirt because Chloe insisted those were the clothes Mr. Arthur knew. Her white socks were new. Her sneakers were still worn.
Rebecca sat in the front row with Noah.
The repaired flag rested on an empty chair beside her. The official burial flag lay across the coffin.
General Hale and the five officers stood together in dark dress uniforms. The Black officer Chloe had questioned in the hallway introduced herself as Colonel Lila Brooks. She spoke quietly and never used more words than necessary.
“We should have come sooner,” Brooks told Chloe before the service.
“Yes,” Chloe said.
Brooks nodded.
The honesty made Chloe like her more than an apology would have.
A chaplain spoke about service, sacrifice, and mercy. Arthur’s military record was read aloud: deployments, commendations, commands. The rifle salute cracked across the cemetery. Chloe flinched at the first shot and hated herself for it, then noticed General Hale had flinched too.
A bugler played taps.
Rebecca received the burial flag from Colonel Brooks, not General Hale.
Brooks knelt and spoke the formal words. Rebecca held the new flag while the old one remained on the chair beside her, its repaired corner visible.
When the ceremony should have ended, General Hale stepped to the lectern.
He did not wear his cap.
“Colonel Arthur Reed saved lives in combat,” he began. “That fact is part of the record. It is also the easiest fact for men like me to repeat.”
The officers behind him remained still.
“Courage in one moment does not make a person courageous in every moment. Service does not erase harm done at home. Medals do not answer telephone calls. Rank does not visit hospital rooms.”
Rebecca looked up.
May you like
Hale rested both hands on the lectern.
“Arthur once told me that the Army was the only family that had to take him back. I laughed because I thought he was making a joke. He wasn’t.”
