The Homecoming by JoAnn Ross Page A

without pizza?” Kara asked, drawing a sigh of resignation from her mother, who’d always been as rigid about nutrition as she was about everything else.
    “All right!” He pumped a small fist in the air.
    “Your library book’s on the counter,” Faith informed him. “I found it in the den while dusting last night.”
    Kara wasn’t sure, but she would’ve bet an entire month’s salary that her mother was one of the only people on the planet who dusted and Swiffered before going to bed every night. There probably wasn’t a flat surface in the house Dr. Blanchard couldn’t perform surgery on.
    “Thanks, Gram,” he said around a mouthful of banana.
    “You’re welcome. And don’t talk with your mouth full, young man.”
    That earned an expressive eye roll, but he did finish chewing before he brought up the next topic. “Mom?”
    “Yes?” Kara knew that tone. It was one that he pulled out only for the big stuff. One that preceded relentless wheedling.
    “Can I take the box to school?”
    “May I,” Faith said automatically.
    As she felt the familiar clenching in her stomach, Kara didn’t have to ask which box. One of the suggestions of the family grief counselor the police department had assigned them was that together they choose possessions of Jared’s that meant the most to each of them. Those were kept in a box, with the rules being that Trey would not get them out unless they were both together. That way, the counselor had said, Kara could keep in closer touch with her son’s feelings of loss and abandonment.
    “Oh, honey.”
    The request had come from left field. She also didn’t need it right now. Such a sensitive topic required time. Trey had always been an easy child and she knew he wouldn’t ask if it didn’t mean a great deal to him. But he was also a typical eight-year-old boy. Which, as the third misplaced library book in a month showed, meant he could be careless.
    “I promise I’ll take good care of it. And not lose it,” he insisted.
    Kara resisted, just barely, taking a look at her watch. As sheriff, she felt it was important that she be the first on what could well turn out to be a crime scene. On the other hand—and wasn’t there always another hand?—her role as mother trumped that of sheriff.
    She sat down in the chair across from him. Studied his small, earnest face, which was exactly like looking into Jared’s back when her husband had been the same age.
    “We made the box for the two of us,” she said. “Why would you want to share it with the kids at school?”
    “Because some of them don’t believe Dad was a hero. So, since today’s Take Your Dad to School Day, I wanted to bring his medals. Because it’d be kinda like he was there with me. And they’d prove I’m not making it up.”
    More than one of the reporters in the news clippings Kara had collected had described the action that had won Jared the Navy Cross and Silver Star for “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action against the enemy.”
    Only after his death had she learned that when his platoon had been ambushed in Fallujah, he’d charged through enemy gunfire, knocked out one machine gun, disarmed an improvised bomb, and, along with three other brother Marines he’d enlisted in the attack, killed a dozen insurgents in close-range fighting; then, under yet more fire from a second wave of the enemy who were shooting from rooftops all around them, the four men had carried three wounded Marines to safety and recovered two bodies.
    Jared, unsurprisingly, had been nonchalant about the medals, refusing to make a big deal of them, stating that everyone there that day should be recognized and he’d merely been doing the job the Marines had trained him to do.
    And it was his absolute humility, more than his act of heroism during the firefight, that Kara thought of every time she looked at the medals. And even if Jared had shrugged them off, she knew that Trey would appreciate them even more once he