While Dad Is Away

The Deployment

Garrett pressed his forehead against the cold window and counted the headlights on the highway. Seven. Eight. Nine. Each one was somebody going somewhere, and none of them were his mom coming home.

The house was quiet in that way it got after dinner, when Dad was loading the dishwasher and humming some old song he didn't know the words to, and Garrett's little sister Ruby was on the floor building something catastrophic out of Legos. The TV was on but nobody was watching it. The dog, Captain Biscuit, was asleep on the couch like he owned the place, which, honestly, he kind of did.

Six months. That was a hundred and eighty-three days, give or take. Garrett had stopped counting the exact number around day forty because it made his chest feel tight, like someone was sitting on it. But he still knew. He always knew.

His mom was a helicopter mechanic in the Army. She'd explained it to him before she left, kneeling down even though he was way too old for that, showing him pictures of the base, the hangars, the tools she'd be using. "I keep the birds flying," she'd said. "And the birds keep everybody safe."

He'd nodded like it made sense. And it did make sense, in his brain. It just didn't make sense in the rest of him.

"Garrett!" Dad called from the kitchen. "Seven minutes!"

Seven minutes meant seven minutes until the call. Mom called every Thursday at eight fifteen, which was Friday morning where she was, and the whole house rearranged itself around that phone call like planets around a sun. Dad would set his laptop on the kitchen table. Ruby would put on the sparkly headband she was convinced Mom could see better through the screen. Captain Biscuit would do absolutely nothing different, because he was a dog and didn't understand video calls, though Mom always asked to see him anyway.

Garrett slid off the window seat and went to the bathroom to check his hair, then told himself that was stupid, then checked it again.

When he came back, Dad had the laptop open and Ruby was already sitting on her chair with her knees pulled up, the sparkly headband firmly in place.

"Do you think she'll like my bridge?" Ruby asked, pointing at her Lego creation, which looked less like a bridge and more like a very confused robot.

"She'll love it," Garrett said.

The screen flickered. Buffered. Went black. Then there she was.

Mom.

She looked tired. She always looked a little tired now, but she smiled so big when she saw them that it almost didn't matter. Almost.

"There are my people!" she said, and her voice had that slight delay, that half-second lag that reminded Garrett she was on the other side of the actual planet.

Ruby immediately launched into a monologue about the bridge, the headband, a girl named Sophie who had allegedly stolen her eraser but then gave it back so maybe they were friends now, and a dream she'd had about a talking sandwich. Mom listened to every single word like it was the most important news broadcast in history.

Garrett waited. He was good at waiting. He'd gotten a lot of practice.

"And what about you, bud?" Mom said, turning her eyes to him. Those dark brown eyes that were the same as his. "How was your week?"

"Fine," he said.

Dad gave him a look.

"Good," Garrett corrected. "It was good."

"Yeah?" Mom leaned closer to the screen. "Just good?"

Here's the thing about Garrett. He had decided, somewhere around month two, that he wasn't going to tell his mom hard things. She was far away, doing important work, keeping the birds flying. She didn't need to hear that he'd missed the winning shot in basketball. She didn't need to know that he sometimes ate lunch with the custodian, Mr. Hannigan, because the cafeteria felt too loud and too full of people who all seemed to have their lives completely figured out. She didn't need to worry about him.

So every Thursday at eight fifteen, he said "fine" or "good" and talked about easy things. Funny things. Safe things.

But tonight there was something sitting right behind his teeth, and it was getting harder to keep it in.

"Actually," he started, then stopped.

Mom waited. She had this way of waiting that was different from anyone else. She didn't jump in, didn't prompt, didn't fill the silence. She just stayed there, like a dock you could tie your boat to whenever you were ready.

"So there's this thing at school," Garrett said. "The talent show."

"Oh yeah?" Mom's eyebrows went up.

"Mr. Patterson — he's the music teacher — he heard me playing piano in the practice room. I was just messing around, playing that song you used to play. The Stevie Wonder one."

"'Isn't She Lovely,'" Mom said, and her face did something soft.

"Yeah. And he came in and said I should play it in the talent show. In front of everybody. Like, the whole school." Garrett paused. "So I said yes."

"Garrett!" Dad said, looking genuinely surprised. "You didn't tell me that."

"I'm telling you now." Garrett kept his eyes on the screen. "But here's the thing. I've been practicing every day. Every lunch period. Mr. Hannigan lets me into the music room — he's cool, he just sits there and eats his sandwich and listens. And I was getting really good. Like, actually good. I had the whole thing memorized."

Mom was nodding, leaning so close to the camera that Garrett could see the fluorescent lights of whatever room she was in reflected in her eyes.

"So today was the talent show."

"Today?!" Ruby shrieked. "And you didn't TELL me?!"

"Ruby, shh," Dad said gently.

Garrett took a breath. "I walked out on stage. And I sat down at the piano. And I looked out at all those people — there were so many people, Mom, the whole gym was packed — and my hands just..." He held them up. They were steady now, but he could still feel the ghost of the shaking. "They wouldn't stop shaking. Like, really bad."

Mom's face was still, but listening. Always listening.

"So I put my fingers on the keys. And I played the first note. And it was wrong."

He heard Dad shift in his chair.

"It was completely wrong. Like, not even close. I think I played a C-sharp instead of a G, which, if you know anything about piano, is basically the musical equivalent of calling your teacher 'Mom' in front of the whole class."

A tiny sound escaped from the laptop speaker. Mom's hand was over her mouth.

"So I stopped," Garrett continued. "And the gym was dead silent. You could hear the clock ticking on the wall, that's how quiet it was. And I just sat there, staring at the keys, and I thought, okay, this is it. This is how I die. Not in some cool way. At a piano. In a middle school gym that smells like floor wax."

The sound from the laptop got louder. Mom was laughing. Not at him — Garrett knew the difference, and he'd always known the difference with her — but at the way he was telling it, at the beautiful disaster of it all.

"So what did you do?" she managed.

"I took a breath. A really big one. And I thought about you."

Mom's laughter caught, just for a second.

"I thought about how you showed me that song when I was little. How you'd let me sit on the bench next to you and press the keys while you did the real playing. And I just... started over. From the beginning. And this time my hands weren't shaking."

The kitchen was so quiet that Garrett could hear Captain Biscuit snoring in the other room.

"I played the whole thing, Mom. The whole song. And I didn't mess up again. Well — I messed up a little in the bridge section, but I don't think anyone noticed because I did this face like it was supposed to sound like that." He made the face: eyebrows up, slight nod, very confident. "Very professional."

Mom was laughing again, really laughing now, the kind of laugh that made her shoulders shake, the kind that Garrett hadn't heard in months, the kind that made something tight in his chest loosen like a knot finally letting go.

"And then," he said, "people clapped. Like, a lot. Mr. Hannigan was in the back row, and I'm pretty sure he was crying, but he's also the guy who cries at car commercials, so."

"Garrett." Mom wiped her eyes. She was crying too, but the good kind. "I am so proud of you. You have no idea."

"I didn't win, though," he added. "This girl Maya did a gymnastics routine and she literally did a backflip off the stage, so, you know. Hard to compete with that."

Mom laughed again, and this time Ruby was giggling too even though she clearly didn't understand half of what had happened, and Dad was smiling that quiet smile he did when he was trying not to get emotional, and for just a moment the distance didn't feel so far.

"Mom?" Garrett said.

"Yeah, bud?"

"I'm glad I told you."

She pressed her hand against the screen, and even though he knew it was just pixels and light, Garrett pressed his hand against it too.

"Me too," she said. "Always tell me. The hard stuff too. Okay? That's what I'm here for."

"Even from seven thousand miles away?"

"Especially from seven thousand miles away."

After the call ended, Garrett sat at the kitchen table for a while. Dad was putting Ruby to bed, and Captain Biscuit had finally migrated to his actual dog bed, and the house was quiet again. But it was a different kind of quiet now. Not empty. Full. Full of his mom's laugh, still ringing in his ears like a song he'd never forget how to play.

He pulled out his phone and texted Mr. Hannigan: Thanks for the sandwich concerts.

A minute later: Anytime, maestro.

Garrett smiled, closed the laptop gently, and went to bed.

A hundred and eighty-three days down.

However many were left, he could do them.