rammed it between my chest and the workbench, so I screwed the filter on tight with my right hand.

Listening to Pop talk to a woman again made me think about Mom, much as I didn't want to ever do that again. She hadn't exactly left on good terms, what with her taking Pop's pickup and emptying the money from the quart jar that held the money he'd saved for our new business. We had to make our shop work, we'd decided, if only just to spite her.

Mom would have laughed hearing Pop talk about his job as a treeman, with her old, happy laugh that felt good to everyone who heard it. He had only done that job for a month, and he'd been a wreck every night he came home. Pop was scared of heights. Mom had stayed up late every night for a whole month with him, making sure he didn't overeat like he did when he was nervous, until she made him find another job. The only time he didn't mind being high up was when we took that day trip to the mountains.

I was only five or six at the time, almost ready for the hell that school would be for me. Since I was so big, most people thought I was a third or fourth grader, and I got into lots of fights. Pop and Mom had been planning this trip for weeks, and Pop let me keep my window open all the way up the mountain, and I pretended I was flying. My favorite part of the ride was when the road would fall away on one side of our car, while the mountain would reach up into the sky on the other side. Then I'd squint my eyes, lean out my window on the drop-off side and make-believe I was an eagle looking for sparrows and mice.

The only thing that went wrong on that trip, beside the bumps and bruises I got all the time anyway from falling down and running into things, was when I found Pop and Mom under a blanket. Mom had told me to go pick some flowers for her, pushing me toward a field full of rocks and evergreen trees. I was only gone for a few minutes, because I got scared by a hawk circling over my head and ran back. That was when I saw Pop's stocking feet hanging out of the blue blanket from my bed, with Mom's head and bare shoulders sticking out of the other end. Mom didn't see me at first, because she was looking up at the sky with her eyes half-closed like she was praying. When she saw me, I thought she was going to scream, then she realized it was me. In that split second, though, my own mother didn't know who I was. I kept my window rolled up the whole ride home.

I shut the GTs hood with a soft thump and went back over the outside of the car, cleaning up any greasy smudges my hands may have made. It was almost eight o'clock already. I'd lost half an hour somehow, thinking about Mom and the way things used to be. I shook my head and kept rubbing the Mustang with the rag. When the car was spotless again, I backed it out of the garage, checked everything off in the logbook, and made up a price. I held my breath and crept back inside, not wanting to disturb or surprise them.

Pop was still talking, in a lighter voice than the voice I was used to hearing. Cindy Claire had her face resting in her hands, her elbows resting on her knees. She looked relaxed, and when her hair fell into her face she didn't try to flick it back. I could see a couple of freckles across her cheeks from where I was standing.

"So how did you keep from being scared over in Vietnam, Mr. Peterson?" she said. She said "Vietnam" as two separate words, and the last word rhymed with "damn." I shook my head and let my breath out slowly.

"Scared ain't the right word for it, Cindy Claire." Pop's voice marched steadily into his story. "Had to be on our toes the whole time, watching out for Charlie like hawks. It's like you got to go to the bathroom all the time, but there's no place to go and you got to hold it. If you piss, pardon my French, you die."

"Holy Jesus," Cindy Claire whispered.

After a few seconds to let it all sink in, Pop continued talking about Charlie and the mines and traps they left for his platoon, remembering everything