But before I enlisted, a long time ago, I had wanted to teach history.
I’d even started the degree.
And then life and the Army and Cora and Lily and the leg had happened, and I had folded that version of myself up and put him in a drawer with everything else I thought the war had taken.
Danny Shaw, the kid I went back for, handed him back to me on a porch in Asheville.
“They need teachers,” he said. “Especially ones who’ve seen something. Especially ones who know how to look at a scared kid and make him believe he’s going to be okay. You’ve got a whole leg’s worth of that in you, man. Don’t let it sit in a drawer.”
It took me a year.
I finished the degree online, at night, after Lily went to bed, the way her mother once studied for her own exams at that same kitchen table.
