Contracting was lonelier and, in some respects, easier to leave behind each time he came home. The men were professionals. The rotations were defined. The money accumulated in his account with the steady, unglamorous regularity he wanted, because by then the picture had sharpened: not wealth, not status, but a door of his own that no rotation schedule would take him away from. Five years of that work bought the last of his patience with other people's wars and the whole of his house in Cedar Bluff, and he considered the exchange fair. When his final contract ended, he shook hands, turned in gear that had never truly been his, and drove home with his duffel in the trunk and no plan more complicated than unpacking it slowly.
General William Hart had been his commanding officer during the years that made him, and later — at a distance the service rarely permits but occasionally cannot prevent — something closer to a mentor. Hart had been the one to pin nothing on him personally and say everything that mattered in a single sentence in a hallway afterward, a sentence about character being what a man protected when no decoration was coming. Derek kept in infrequent touch after separating: a call at New Year, a note when Hart's name appeared in the news, a brief exchange when a man they had both known died too young and too far from anyone who understood the context. He did not trade on the connection. He never had. Men who name-drop generals, he believed, were advertising a loan they could not repay, and he intended to owe nobody anything he had not earned himself.
By the third week in the house, the Army had receded to the distance he had hoped for, which was not absence but proportion. His boots by the back door were for yard work now. His mornings began with coffee rather than a formation he could not picture without effort. And yet everything the twelve years had built remained quietly available — the steadiness, the habit of scanning a room once and filing what he saw, the discipline that got the gutters cleaned before the rain his knee had promised. He was not a man trying to forget he had been a soldier. He was a man who had finally collected enough peace to let soldiering be one part of his life instead of the rent he paid for all the rest.
Chapter 3: The Sticking Door
The front door began its argument with him during his second week in the house, and by the third Saturday, Derek had decided to settle it. The old oak door was solid and handsome, original to the colonial, with panels worn smooth at the edges by decades of hands. In the dry weeks of his move it had swung clean. Then the Virginia humidity settled over Cedar Bluff like a held breath, the wood drank its share of the air, and the door swelled in its frame until opening it required a shoulder and a particular angle, and closing it required an apology he was tired of making in his own hallway.
He assessed it the way he assessed anything mechanical: patiently, and from the simplest explanation outward. The hinges were sound. The frame had not shifted. The latch side of the door, along its lower third, had grown just proud enough of the jamb to bind, and the paint along that edge had polished bright where wood met wood each morning. The fix was unglamorous. Take the high spots down a fraction at a time, test the swing, take a little more. He had watched an uncle do the same work on a house in another state when he was thirteen, and the lesson had lodged somewhere permanent: doors, like people, usually objected to one specific pressure, and finding it was most of the repair.
Saturday arrived warm, with a sky that could not decide between brightness and threat. His knee had opinions about the afternoon's weather, which he acknowledged by choosing work that let him stand and shift his weight as he pleased. He laid out his tools on the porch with the tidy economy of a man who had packed kits for a living: a belt sander borrowed from no one because he had bought it the day before, sandpaper in two grades, a pry bar for coaxing the frame where the trim had tightened, a pencil, a carpenter's square, a drop cloth folded to the width of the doorway, and a thermos of coffee that went lukewarm by design and bothered him not at all.
What he wore was whatever the work deserved: faded Army sweatpants with a drawstring he had retied a hundred times, work boots scuffed pale at the toes, and an old olive T-shirt that had outlived the unit it once advertised, its lettering cracked into illegibility. He looked, he knew, nothing like a homeowner in a subdivision advertisement. He looked like a man on a day off who had been handed a task list by his own house, and that was exactly what he was. Monica, on the phone that morning, had laughed and told him the sweatpants should have been retired with honors years ago. He had told her some veterans earned their rest, and she had told him not to push his luck.
He worked the door off its top hinge pin first — no, he decided against removing it entirely, because a solid oak door is a two-man weight and he was one man with a knee that had filed its opinion. Instead he opened it wide, braced it with a wedge, and sanded in place, running the belt sander along the binding edge in long, even passes, then stopping to close the door and read the contact marks like a report. Sawdust gathered on the drop cloth and powdered his forearms. The smell of worked oak rose warm and clean, a smell with nothing industrial in it, and it pleased him in a way he did not bother to examine. Between passes he drank coffee and watched the street do its Saturday things: a mower starting up two houses over, a child on a bicycle negotiating the curb cut at the corner with the concentration of a test pilot, sprinklers arguing with the coming rain.