Casualties by Elizabeth Marro Page B

the dirt bike. Justin came to the door and yelled to him. Robbie just waved as he revved the engine. He guided the bike down the driveway and roared toward the sugar shack.
    â€”
    When he returned the next morning, stinking and hungover, it was nearly ten. Kevin had gone to the shop and Big Ruth was alone.
    â€œSorry about last night,” he said. His words sounded thick in his own ears. He sank into what had become his regular chair but avoided looking straight at her.
    His great-grandmother reached across the table for his arm. “No need for that.” She kept her hand there until he looked at her. “I want you to go get something for me.”
    A job to do; he felt steadier.
    â€œGo get your book.”
    No.
    â€œGo on, go get it. It’s still in the same place.”
    No.
He stood up, though. Slowly he left the kitchen and climbed the stairs to the landing that separated his mother’s old room from the one Kevin used, first when he was a boy and now when he looked after Big Ruth. The blanket chest was at the end of the landing, wedged back under the eaves. This was where Big Ruth kept whatshe called the “Nolan Family Records.” He dropped to his knees in the smothering heat of the upstairs and opened the chest. He pawed through photographs, baby shoes, old report cards, a book report Ruthie had done in eighth grade marked with a huge red A+, pictures of Kevin’s first car, a wedding picture of their parents whom he’d never met, crayoned drawings by all of them for his great-grandmother’s “refrigerator gallery.” Finally, he saw it, the old brown vinyl book Big Ruth called “The Story of Robbie.”
    He wished he could climb back into the skin of the child he’d been. When he was five, he couldn’t wait to see what she’d added and go over the story behind each picture. Even when he’d been a teenager pissed at Ruthie, more pissed at himself, he’d gone looking for the book. It seemed to hold him between its covers, his small past and all the possibilities that still remained on those blank pages.
    He opened it now. In the first picture, Ruthie held him up like a prize she had won. She was laughing into the camera, her cheek pressed to his so that his infant mouth lolled like a drunk’s. He crouched on the floor ignoring the sweat streaming down his face. He looked at his mother’s smile.
    â€œDid you find it, son?” Big Ruth’s voice sounded from the bottom of the stairs.
    â€œI found it,” he said.
    â€”
    That night the book lay open on the floor of the sugar shack next to a crowd of empty beer bottles and a pint of bourbon. Robbie lit a joint he’d rolled from Kevin’s stash, inhaled, and held his breath while he looked again at the snapshot of Ruth holding him as a baby. He exhaled, deliberate and slow. Then he wedged his fingernail beneath the edges of the photograph and extracted it from the fasteners at the corners. He placed it on the table next to the snapshot of his boot camp graduation portrait.
    These showed the good times, the blank-slate days. The first onewas taken before he’d made any mistakes. The second one was taken when he’d started over. Brand clean, as his great-grandmother used to say. The Marines scraped the fat and laziness off him. He rose like a fucking phoenix from the ashes of his old self.
    He wanted to turn back the clock and see his mother the way she’d looked on graduation day. Those big old sunglasses came off. Her whole face opened up like a door swinging wide on a sunny afternoon. He swore he could feel her surprise and relief blowing toward him from the middle of all those parents, girlfriends, and babies crowded onto the stands at the parade grounds. Later, she hugged him tight tight tight. Everything was forgiven: the drugs, the fights, the struggles. His enlistment. He wasn’t her problem anymore. He was no one’s problem.
    His throat ached