Eli the Good by Silas House

defending our fathers and not understanding them. “Do you feel bad, for doing that? For that picture?”
    She sat up stiff again and a tenderness spread itself out over her face, centering in her eyes and moving outward until it had changed the whole shape of her forehead and mouth. “No, Eli, I don’t. Not for a minute.” She shook her head a little, as if she didn’t even know she was doing it. She looked so pretty to me, the way her face had come down to a little patch of sunlight that was falling through the screen. A block of light spread across her freckled nose and turned her eyelashes golden. “You should never feel bad for doing what you believe in. Your daddy was off fighting in Vietnam, and he believed in that. And I was up in New York City, fighting against the war. And I believed in that.”
    I didn’t know what to say, so I just looked at her, feeling stupid and too young and full of some kind of longing I could not put a name to.
    “I hate that it hurt him,” she said, quiet. “But at the same time, I wish he could see that I was doing it for him.”
    Then she sat back again, and her eyes drifted out over the yard to fall onto my mother. After a time I turned my head so I could see Mom, too. She had squatted down again, on her knees in the dirt, studying the strawberry plants. She had her hair pulled up in a tight bun, which made her look much older than she usually did.
    “She’s the best friend I ever had,” Nell said, and I turned back to face her. She had lit another cigarette and was still looking at Mom. “She’s having a hard time out of Josie right now, you know.”
    I clenched my hands before me and stared at the way my fingers fit together. “I know it. They fight all the time.”
    “I tried to talk to Josie about it last night,” Nell said, each word coming out with a blue puff of smoke. “But she’s impossible sometimes. She just won’t listen when she doesn’t want to.”
    “I know all about that,” I said.
    “Lord have mercy, she’s stubborn. Like Stanton.”
    “He says you’re stubborn.”
    “Does he, now?” She laughed and took another draw off the cigarette. “He can’t see that the real problem between us is that we’re just alike,” she said, but then shot me a surprised look, like she didn’t mean to say such aloud.
    “Where’s Josie at now?”
    “Lord, I don’t know,” she said. “Gone off somewhere with Charles Asher.”
    “He’s rich.”
    “Is he?” She leaned forward a bit, as if genuinely surprised. “He doesn’t act it.”
    “His daddy owns the hardware store
and
the drive-in. He was in the war, too. Somebody at school told Charles Asher that everybody who went to Vietnam got laid over there and took dope all the time.”
    “Well, that’s not true.” She looked at the cover of her book and ran her hand over it, like someone wiping fog from a bathroom mirror.
    “I know it,” I said, my words darting out. I loved this story and wanted to tell the rest of it. I worshipped Charles Asher. “He busted that boy’s mouth and got suspended for two days.”
    “Well,” she said, “I guess he did what he believed in, too.” And then she looked out on the backyard again, but it seemed to me that she was looking past my mother and the garden, past the ridge of good beech and hickory trees that rose up behind our house, even past the air, so thick with heat that it seemed like something solid one could walk through. I wondered what she was studying on, but figured it was something that grown-ups daydream about without realizing why.
    To break this spell that had befallen her, I felt like I had to keep talking, so I asked her something I’d been wondering for a while now. “How come you never married?”
    Nell didn’t answer me, and I couldn’t figure why. This seemed like a perfectly good question to me. Everybody else I knew her age was married, after all. She was still looking beyond everything, still caught up in some faraway thought