‘You can do that?’
‘It’s what she wants. We owe it to her.’
I got breakfast items in the Rue Saint Dominique again and
we ate them with bowls of coffee, the French way, all three of
us together. My mother had dressed in her best and was acting
like a fit young woman temporarily inconvenienced by a broken
leg. It must have taken a lot of will, but I guessed that was how
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she wanted to be remembered. We poured coffee and passed
things to each other, politely. It was a civilized meal. Like we
used to have, long ago. Like an old family ritual.
Then she revisited another old family ritual. She did something
she had done ten thousand times before, all through our
lives, since we were first old enough to have individuality of
our own. She struggled up out of her chair and stepped over
and put her hands on Joe’s shoulders, from behind. Then she
bent and kissed his cheek.
‘What don’t you need to do?’ she asked him.
He didn’t answer. He never did. Our silence was part of the
ritual.
‘You don’t need to solve all the world’s problems, Joe. Only
some of them. There are enough to go around.’
She kissed his cheek again. Then she kept one hand on the
back of his chair and reached out with the other and moved
herself over behind me. I could hear her ragged breathing. She
kissed my cheek. Then like she used to all those years before
she put her hands on my shoulders. Measured them, side to
side. She was a small woman, fascinated by the way her baby
had grown into a giant.
‘You’ve got the strength of two normal boys,’ she said.
Then came my own personal question.
‘What are you going to do with this strength?’ she asked me.
I didn’t answer. I never did.
‘You’re going to do the right thing,’ she said.
Then she bent down and kissed me on the cheek again.
I thought: was that the last time?
We left thirty minutes later. We hugged long and hard at the
door and we told her we loved her, and she told us she loved us
too and she always had. We left her standing there and went
down in the tiny elevator and set out on the long walk back
to the Op6ra to get the airport bus. Our eyes were full of tears
and we didn’t talk at all. My medals meant nothing to the
check-in girl at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle. She sat us in the back
of the plane. About halfway through the flight I picked up Le
Monde and saw that Noriega had been found in Panama City. A
week ago I had lived and breathed that mission. Now I barely
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remembered it. I put the paper down and tried to look ahead.
Tried to remember where I was supposed to be going, and what
I was supposed to be doing when I got there. I had no real
recollection. No sense of what was going to happen. If I had, I
would have stayed in Paris.
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SEVEN
G
OING WEST THE TIME CHANGES LENGTHENEI) THE DAY INSTEAD of shortening it. They paid us back the hours we had
lost two days before. We landed at Dulles at two in the
afternoon. I said goodbye to Joe and he found the cab line and
headed into the city. I went looking for buses and was arrested
before I found any.
Who guards the guards? Who arrests an MP? In my case it
was a trio of warrant officers working directly for the Provost
Marshal General’s oce. There were two W3s and a W4. The
W4 showed me his credentials and his orders and then the W3s
showed me their Berettas and their handcuffs and the W4 gave
me a choice: either behave myself or get knocked on my ass. I
smiled, briefly. I approved of his performance. He carried himself
well. I doubted if I would have done it any different, or any
better.
‘Are you armed, major?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said.
I would have been worried for the army if he had believed