Page 76 of The Infinite Light of Dust

And of course, it’s not. It’s Gloria, standing behind me in a black dress with white flowers stitched across the top. I think I’ve seen her in that dress at all ten funerals. This has been a wild fucking ride already, from meeting Karina at the coffee shop yesterday to seeing Silvin again, to losing the bid on a hell of a deal on a fourplex apartment just outside Fort Benning—and now seeing Gloria, who always reminds me of her husband. I’ve been failing to come to terms with the situation with him. It’s proven to be a lot harder than anything I’ve done in my entire life.

“Hey, Gloria.” I get up from the pew and hug her.

Gloria hugs me and pulls back, then hugs me again.

“How are you? I’ve been worried about you. You never answer my calls anymore.” She makes a face. “Asshole,” she whispers, looking me straight in the eyes.

“I’ve been swamped with work. You know I hate the phone.”

“The kids miss you, okay? And they ask about you a lot.”

The kids. Acid born of guilt burns my throat.

“I miss them too.” I look at her feet, where the littlest one usually clings. “I’ll call more, I’m a shitbag.” I smile at her and she nods, letting me off the hook a little.

“You are a total shitbag,” she agrees, a smile on her face. “Uncle Shitbag still needs to call them once in a while.” She looks up and down my face. “I didn’t even recognize you at first because of this.” She touches her palms to the stubble on my jaw.

“Yeah. I’m a free man now and decided to start acting like one.”

“I’m glad. It’s good to see you. Even if it’s here of all places. And you—” She looks at my mom and, without breaking her conversation with the woman she recognized from earlier, my mom hugs and kisses her on the cheek.

“Karina looks great.” Gloria purses her lips and stares into my eyes. “She always does but she looks . . .”

I look away as she pauses.

“She looks happy. That’s what it is.” She smiles.

Gloria always loved Karina, and I’ve heard through the grapevine that they still hang out; the gossip reaches me even though I’ve moved far away from post.

Happy?

She couldn’t have seemed further from happy yesterday, but maybe I only get the cold, detached Karina now. It’s not like I don’t deserve that.

I quickly scan the church for Karina’s hair. It’s brown again. That color that’s “right between chestnut and chocolate,” she told me once. It was her go-to color when she felt like she had her shit together. Controlling and changing her hair color was one of her rituals. She had many little things she did to exercise control while disguising it as luck.

“Yeah. I’m glad she is,” I tell Gloria. “I saw her yesterday.”

She doesn’t have to tell me that she already knows. It’s easy to gather from how unaffected she is.

“Anyway, the kids with you?” I change the subject. She gives me another eye roll and shakes her head.

“No. My mom’s with them back at Benning. I figured they’ve been to enough of these for a while.”

“Haven’t we all?”

“That’s for damn sure.”

A woman approaches us and moves to hug Gloria. She seems to know her, and they start talking. My mom is still in deep conversation, so I look for Karina again. How is it possible that I haven’t seen her yet? The church isn’t that big. Then again, she’s good at blending in, hiding in the midst of a crowd. It’s one of her “things.”

My mom’s voice cuts through the hushed greetings and condolences being shared around me while I’m lost in my own head.

“Mikael, where is it your sister is wanting to go to college again?” she asks, confusion in her eyes despite the hundreds of conversations we’ve had about it.

“MIT,” I tell the woman talking to her, whom I now recognize as Lawson’s mom. I know she’s a better person than her son, but that’s not exactly hard to accomplish. After spending my last few years in the Army with him in my platoon and two deployments to Afghanistan later, I know Lawson better than even his own mother does. War brings people closer than anything can, except death. They go hand in hand in my world.

“That’s it. MIT. She’s the smartest in her whole class this year, and last. Two more years to wait, but they would be crazy not to accept her.” My mom’s black hair is falling out of the clip thing she always wears. The curls I helped her put in her hair this morning are fallen now. I reach down to push her hair back from her face.

The memory of Karina laughing at me as I burned my fingertips on a hot curling iron fills my mind. I knew she had to be the most thoughtful, selfless person I would ever meet when she offered to teach me how to curl my mom’s hair after we noticed the burns on her hands. Some mornings Mom’s hands would shake so badly that she couldn’t do it herself, but she was too stubborn to ask for help.

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