When Mom Is Over There

Routines. We wake at 6 each morning, eat our breakfast and get ready for school. Usually my brother drops the kids on his way to work but now I do it, watching the girls' colorful backpacks disappear in the sea of others. I ride around town in the truck with the yellow ribbon on the bumper. Jim says to check out the YMCA, a sprawling new facility for the sprawling new communities devouring the pastures. A woman on a stair climber is reading a book titled "What Would Jesus Eat?" We discuss Biblical dining habits and then I tell her that I'm from Washington. "State or D.C.?" she asks. A look of pity crosses her face. Quickly, I volunteer that I'm visiting my brother, whose wife is in Iraq. This wins her back.

All week, strange moments of charade occur. A neighbor across the street is waxing his car when he sees me coming out of the house. "Welcome home," he says, waving his cloth in the air. He has mistaken me for Angela. I'm just the sister, I say. I wonder if Angela's homecoming will be like this -- a friendly neighbor welcoming her back as if she's been away at a conference.

Her absence is banal and profound. She maintains a phantom presence over her motherless house. E-mails and digital photos zip back and forth. In one of the photos, Angela notices a lump on Jourdan's forehead. She and my brother discuss the lump, and it's decided that Jourdan needs to see a pediatrician.

On the morning of the appointment, my brother gulps down cereal while CNN reports that 10 Marines were killed outside Fallujah, blown up by a homemade explosive. Jim curses and says the insurgents are picking away at us with bombs set off with 25-cent oven timers. He lets the dog out. Pop-Tarts are toasting in the toaster. The first Hilary Duff song of the day is playing in a bedroom. I look at the TV, relieved not to hear the word Kirkuk.

Of all the postings Angela could have received, Kirkuk was among the least dangerous, but lately things have gotten testier. ("Sportier," as Angela says.) The 101st Airborne Assault Division arrived at the base in October and has been deftly thwarting rocket attacks ever since. For safety reasons, Angela has yet to venture off base. Explosions rumble the furniture in her office. I wonder what worries her most today -- the explosions or a small, shiny lump on the forehead of her 10-year-old.

I take Jourdan to the pediatrician's office. She sits on crinkly white paper in an exam room. A nurse practitioner named Miss Yvonne looks at the lump. Using a rubber hammer, she checks Jourdan's reflexes and then turns on a penlight and tells Jourdan to follow the beam with her eyes. "Tell me about these headaches you've been having," Miss Yvonne says.

"I think they're because I don't drink enough water, and I am growing at a really fast rate," Jourdan answers. Miss Yvonne finishes her exam. She doesn't think there is anything to worry about. The minute I'm outside the office, I call my brother at work, and I can hear him typing an e-mail to Angela as we speak.

It's mid-morning and we are late for school. We decide to stop at a convenience store on U.S. 301. We are not sticking to the routine. We go inside and peruse glossy teen magazines and the selection of snack cakes. The packaging is in Spanish because of all the Mexicans and Guatemalans who pick strawberries and tomatoes in the fields nearby. I share the sociology lesson with my niece. "Oh," she replies, feigning interest. She picks up a double-pack of coconut creme-filled snowballs. Next, a big Coke, her eyes wandering to meet mine as she reaches inside the cooler. Her mom's at war. What the hell.

School is an L-shaped set of flat buildings shaded by oaks. The office is in front. Jourdan and I stand there in the bright fluorescence with our sugar-crusted mouths. "See you at 3:30," I say.

* * *

My brother is three years younger than me. He watches NASCAR and trades barbecue tips with someone on the Internet named Jurassic Pork. He washes the truck and cuts the grass on Saturday afternoons. Order is very important, which is funny, because as a boy he was gangly and calamitous, with an uncombed thicket of blond hair. Once he slipped from a boardwalk into a swamp full of alligators. Another time, he lit the gas stove and, whoosh, he had two charred haystacks for eyebrows.

We grew up in rural central Florida, when flocks of white birds would fill the sky as they left the backs of cattle that stood in soggy pastures. Our father worked in citrus. He couldn't keep a job. After our mother decided to leave with us, I remember being so broke that we ate meat only once a week -- Sunday -- but what Jim remembers is how delicious Sunday dinners were, and that would be the difference between us our entire lives.