Chương 4
Chloe stood and walked to the end of the hallway.
She stopped at a window overlooking the employee parking lot. From the second floor, the cars looked flattened and colorless under the noon sun. Denise’s old gray Corolla sat near the loading dock because the employee lot had been full at six that morning.
The man with the pretzels approached carefully.
“Excuse me.”
Chloe moved the flag closer to her body.
He raised one hand. “I’m not taking a picture. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“Did you know him?”
“No.”
“Then why are you sorry?”
The man looked toward Mr. Leland’s office.
“I guess because you look sad.”
“I am.”
“Okay.”
He seemed relieved to have received a clear answer. He opened the pretzels, dropped one, and watched it bounce under the vending machine.
“My dad was in the Army,” he said. “He hated oatmeal cookies.”
“This has raisins.”
“He hated raisins more.”
Chloe looked at him.
“Sorry,” the man said. “That was probably not useful.”
“Mr. Arthur liked them.”
“Then he had better taste than my dad.”
The office door opened. Denise stepped out carrying her work bag.
Her face looked calm, which Chloe recognized as the expression she used before crying in private.
“We’re going home.”
“Are you fired?”
“No.”
“Are you going back tomorrow?”
“No.”
“Monday?”
“We’ll talk about it in the car.”
Mr. Leland appeared behind her. “Ms. Miller, I will call as soon as the review is scheduled.”
Denise did not turn around.
The man with the pretzels stepped aside.
Outside, the August heat wrapped around them. Denise unlocked the Corolla manually because the remote had stopped working in June. Chloe sat in the back so the flag could rest flat beside her.
Denise started the engine. The air conditioner coughed warm air.
For three blocks, she said nothing.
At a red light, she looked at Chloe in the rearview mirror.
“You can open the envelope.”
“I don’t want to.”
“That’s fine.”
“What if it says why?”
“Why what?”
“Why he gave me the flag.”
“Then it will still say it when you’re ready.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
Denise looked back at the road.
“Then we may not get an answer.”
Chloe rested her head against the window. “Adults always say that after they mess up.”
“Sometimes there isn’t an answer.”
“There’s always an answer. You just might not know it.”
“That is unfortunately true.”
The light changed. A driver behind them honked before Denise had time to move.
She lifted one hand toward the rearview mirror, not quite making a rude gesture.
Chloe saw it and said, “You almost did.”
“I did nothing.”
“You thought it.”
“Thinking is still legal.”
At home, the apartment felt smaller than it had that morning.
They lived on the third floor of a beige building beside a six-lane road. The living-room window faced a tire shop, and the bedroom window faced a brick wall. Denise had put contact paper over the kitchen counters because the old laminate peeled when water reached the edges.
Chloe carried the flag to the dining table.
The table had only three chairs. The fourth had cracked beneath Denise’s brother at Thanksgiving and remained in the storage closet because Denise kept insisting she would repair it.
She spread a clean towel over the tabletop before setting the flag down.
The cookie stayed in its wax-paper bag beside it.
Denise opened the refrigerator and stared inside. “We have eggs.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“We have eggs whether you’re hungry or not.”
“You said you didn’t like hospital crackers, and you eat those.”
“That was a difficult moment. I was entitled to criticize a cracker.”
Her phone began vibrating on the counter.
The screen showed six missed calls, three text messages from unknown numbers, one from Marisol, and one from Chloe’s aunt Tessa that read CALL ME BEFORE YOU LOOK ONLINE.
Denise turned the phone facedown.
“Don’t open anything,” she said.
“I wasn’t.”
“Don’t answer messages from people you don’t know.”
“I don’t have a phone.”
“Good.”
“You said I could get one when I was ten.”
“I said we would discuss it when you were ten.”
“I’m ten.”
“We’re discussing it.”
“That’s not the same.”
“No, it is much cheaper.”
Chloe pulled out a chair.
The ordinary argument lasted only a few seconds, but it helped. Denise cracked four eggs into a bowl and picked a shell fragment out with her fingertip. Chloe watched the flag instead of helping.
When the eggs were in the pan, Denise’s phone rang again.
This time the screen said GENERAL MARCUS HALE.
Denise let it ring twice before answering.
“Yes?”
Chloe could hear only her mother’s side.
“No.”
A pause.
“No, she has not opened it.”
Another pause.
“I understand what you thought you were doing.”
Denise scraped the eggs harder than necessary.
“General, someone recorded my child being handed a dead man’s flag. There are strangers calling the hospital. My supervisor sent me home. So before you arrange anything else, you will ask me.”
She listened.
“I don’t care what rank you are.”
Another pause.
“Good. Then that part is settled.”
Denise lowered the heat under the eggs.
“Family?”
She looked at Chloe.
“You found someone?”
Chloe sat straighter.
Denise turned toward the sink and lowered her voice, but the kitchen was too small for privacy.
“A daughter.”
The word changed the room.
Chloe looked at the folded flag.
Denise listened for almost a minute.
“No, you cannot bring her here.”
She closed her eyes.
“I did not say Chloe wouldn’t meet her. I said you cannot bring a stranger to my apartment this afternoon.”
She ended the call.
The eggs had begun to brown along the edges.
“You burned them,” Chloe said.
“Yes.”
“He had a daughter?”
“It looks that way.”
“He lied to me.”
“Maybe.”
“You said people mean something else.”
“They do sometimes.”
“What did he mean?”
Denise divided the eggs between two plates.
“We don’t know yet.”
May you like
“Does she want the flag?”
Denise set down the spatula.
