1500, military time

The hot spray from the dishwater diffuses upward and suffocates me, mingling with the heat from the stovetop, where Mom stirs sweet potato and black beans and onion, cumin and cayenne, and the fierce, hot breeze from the bathroom window.

I pick up the plastic bowl, large enough for cookie dough but used for homemade salsa, the tang of tomato and cilantro rising with the steam from the faucet, and pass my hand and sponge over its white surface -- then falter.

The edges of my vision are closing in, a familiar void creeping over me.

I stop.

*****

Spencer is sitting on the edge of the couch but shifts uncomfortably backward, so his knee is pointed in my direction. I wait.

"It's something I've always been thinking of doing," he says.

"I'm worried that you won't make choices, though," I say, "that they won't teach you to think critically or make your own decisions."

He considers this carefully, but it's the sort of consideration seeking diplomatic expression -- to not offend -- rather than questioning first principles.

"I mean, we're at war," I say, helping him to reply despite myself.

"Yeah, but Dad says they don't use the Navy much. It's all the Army over there."

"But what if...I mean, how would you feel if you were responsible for killing someone?"

He shrugged, his eyes staring at a fixed point beyond me.

"I don't know. You do what you've got to do to defend yourself."

*****

"I'd like to think I'd take a bullet for my loved ones," Marc says, and I press on him with my feet. "I think most people would."

I think about Spencer and it's not even a question.

*****

I put the half-washed bowl on the wire dish rack and lean down toward the sink, lowering my face forward into the steam, but it's not helping. I can tell I only have seconds.

"I feel faint," I say before reaching my numbing hand toward the tap and pressing its silvery arm down.

The water stops. I crouch slowly until my knees touch the floor.

I drop my head forward and it makes contact with the cool, thin white metal of the sink door.

I close my eyes.

*****

"Mom! MOM!" I yell from the living room. "Tyler hit Spencer again!"

Tyler looks up, his face registering betrayal. "What? No, no I didn't! I didn't hit him!"

"He fell on the floor," I say, and point to where Spencer's body is curled up, diminutive and pathetic, and Spencer readies tears for Mom. "You pushed him."

"He fell!" Tyler protests. "I didn't even touch him!"

"He's little, Tyler!" I say. "You can't do that to him."

Mom comes in and Spencer starts to cry.

"Tyler pushed me," he says between sobs.

"Tyler! Go to your room," Mom says. "Get up," she says to Spencer.

He does. Half an hour later, we're playing with Duplos, building "a tower to the sky." Tyler's still in his room.

*****

"You don't understand, Alicia," Mom says, and I remind myself that I knew this was worthless from the beginning.

"But he's seventeen," I say. "He can't even vote, why is he allowed to sign up for the military?"

"You just don't understand what the service is like," Mom repeats, as though it makes any difference.

I'm starting to get angry and the desperation leaks out into my voice.

"And you don't understand what college is like! Did you even make him try to find schools he might be interested in? Did you even offer it as a possibility to him?"

I know the answer. Mom is self-satisfied, the way she always is when she's in control. Even the ways she sits is smug.

"Alicia, you'll never understand, so don't even talk about it anymore," she says, and I flash over into rage, but I don't open my mouth to scream at her.

I step away, turn and open the door.

"Okay. Bye," I say. "See you later." I'd been intending to go, anyway.

As I swing my foot over the edge and down to the first stair off the porch, I think, as clearly as I've ever thought anything: If something happens to him, it's over with me and her. I'll never speak to her again.

I'll never recover.

I shiver, despite the warm October sun.

I'll kill her.

*****

The metal door isn't helping.

"It's the heat," Mom says from the stove, and I have a vague sense of the wooden stirring spoon she's holding hitting the edges of the pan. My senses aren't returning, but they're not receding anymore, either.

"Get a fan. Do you have a fan?" Spencer asks, and crouches down near me somewhere.

"In the bedroom," I say, or send into saying like a train traveling through a tunnel. It reaches him and he goes.

I shift, pivot my body slowly, and let my head fall forward to the yellow floor.

*****

"Spence!" Tyler yells from inside the moving truck. "Come 'ere!"

I go around to the back of the truck, look into its emptying mouth. I walk halfway up the ramp.

Tyler's arranging two orange straps on the floor as though setting up a pagan ritual space. They cross precisely in the middle, and he tugs his ends so they're shoulder-width apart.

Spencer appears framed in the doorway of the new apartment, broader-shouldered than I ever remember him, stubble on his cheeks.

"Yo," he says.

"We gotta get the dresser," Tyler says, and from my vantage point I can see them both. Spencer comes around and climbs up into the truck, standing on the opposite end of the orange straps.

"Okay," he says, and the boys go back to the dresser, pivoting it parallel to the straps and hefting it on top of them.

"You ready?" Tyler asks, and Spencer slips his forearms into the ends of his straps.

"No, hold on," he says, then, "yeah."

They stand from bent knees, straightening their backs.

"Move," Tyler says, and I get off the ramp.

They put the dresser in Spencer's room -- Spencer's dresser. We find the drawers and shimmy them back into place, guessing where pants and shirts go in the heirarchy of clothing -- second from the bottom, or second from the top? -- and when the mattresses have gone onto the frame, I sit on it and look out the bay window his bed sits next to.

"You can sleep in here when he's away," I say as Mom walks in. "Or read. He'll only be here like one week a year. You shouldn't waste these windows."

"Yeah," she says.

*****

"The recruiter's picking him up on Monday at 3," Mom says, her voice tinny and distant on the phone, though she's only a mile away. "I don't know what they want him to do overnight, he's not getting sworn in until Tuesday. Are you going to come to the airport with us? Tyler's coming down. Do you want to see his swearing-in if they let us go?"

Regardless of my headache, dizzy with conflict, I don't hesitate.

"Yes," I say.

*****

I hear him return with the fan, which he plugs in somewhere above me, near the sink, and I understand that he's fiddling with the controls.

"There," he says, and I hear him more sharply than anything I've heard in minutes. Cool air rushes at me, a small, private storm.

I feel it acutely. My senses are returning. My forehead presses into the floor.

I breathe. My vision returns to an almost painful focus.

"Thanks," I say, and then, as if adding a talisman, "Spencer."

"No problem," he says. And he stands up and steps away.