The Year He Came Home
He stepped off the train in his uniform and a borrowed coat, and the first thing he did was buy a pack of Lucky Strikes from the kiosk at the corner of Main and Sixth. He had not smoked during the war. He started that afternoon and quit thirty-two years later, on the day his first granddaughter was born.
The house on Linden Street looked the same. The porch light was on, though it was the middle of the day. His mother had been leaving it on every night since 1943, and she would leave it on for another six weeks until his father, who was a careful man about electricity, finally turned it off without saying anything about it.
The kitchen smelled like burnt sugar and coffee grounds. That was always his mother's morning. He had forgotten the smell, the way you forget the sound of a particular floor creak in a house you have not lived in for three years, and the forgetting and the remembering happened in the same second. He stood in the doorway for what felt like a long time. His mother was at the sink, her back to him, peeling an apple in a single ribbon the way her own mother had taught her in Donegal in 1908.
She said his name without turning around. Just the one word, the way she had said it when he came home from school, the way she had said it at the train station the day he left in 1942, the way she would say it from her hospital bed in 1971 when she could no longer say much else. Just his name.
He set his bag down on the linoleum and crossed the kitchen in three steps. She turned around, then. The apple was still in her hand. The ribbon of peel was unbroken. He noticed that because his mother noticed things like that, and he had been her son long enough to have learned to see what she saw.
Neither of them said anything else for a while.
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