Page 7 of Protecting the Flame

“Perfect.” She forced down more tea. She was dehydrated, that was all. Low blood sugar, too. She could tell from the way her lips tingled. I’ll have to get something down before the flight or I will never last. It would be so her luck to suddenly get an appetite at twelve thousand feet and not a peanut or bag of stale pretzels in sight.

“You aren’t thinking of backing out?”

“No,” she lied, running a thumb over the tiny smooth ruby at the heart of her Mogen Dovid. The necklace had been Sarah’s. Emma never took it off, which was stupid in its way because the whole God thing was a non-starter. People never got that, either, that a person could see herself as Jewish but secular, involved in the culture and several thousands of years of history but not the religion. No one could be, say, a secular Methodist. “If I did, I’d have to explain to you and everybody else in the group why I chickened out when there was an alternative.”

“Good. I don’t mind being the voice of conscience.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not sitting in Minot while Burl Ives gives you a frontal lobotomy.” Although Burl had given way to Bing, who wasn’t bad for a crooner. Her bubbe had loved Dean Martin: And that Frank Sinatra? Those eyes? That man could eat crackers in my bed anytime.

“Minot won’t be forever.”

“That’s true.” With her luck, they’d probably be playing Burl Ives on every radio station in Montana. “And dogs are okay. You know, for animals.”

“There you go. From what I heard, I don’t think this guy…what’s his name, Kurtz?”

“Kuntz,” she corrected. “Joseph Kuntz. They call him Kujo, though God knows why. Makes him sound like an escapee from a Stephen King novel.”

“As long as he’s not Jack Nicolson coming at you with an axe, you’re golden. What I was going to say is Kuntz is one of Hank Patterson’s guys. They’re all former military. They get it. They’ve all been through the shit same as us.”

Except they’re still around. She was also positive none had been through the shit she was still going through. “No, no, I get that. It’s that I can’t see a story about vets and their retired war dogs as, you know, Pulitzer Prize material.” Just her luck, she’d chosen journalism when all the papers were dying. “Besides, there have been scads of books out on these guys and their dogs already, before and after. Pick up any paper, do a half-assed search, and there are stories of vets healed by horses, dogs, cats.” Probably gerbils and turtles. Goldfish. Though she didn’t say that. Kim was also a reporter, though a civilian now. Most military newspapers operated that way, with a largely civilian staff supplemented with a few active duty folks like Emma. Given how Emma’s life had gone these last nearly two years, Kim believed she was doing her a favor by getting Emma the hell out of Dodge so she could get her head on straight and decide on her next move. Kim thought she knew the real story, but she didn’t. Emma had decided she couldn’t be responsible for one more dead person.

But she also hadn’t been able to resist. When Kim mentioned southern Montana, she thought, a hop, skip, and a jump, and she’d be in Boise and forty miles from the base at Mountain Home. Ben had been working a lead in Mountain Home. That much she knew because she was the one who’d fed him the tip.

“I am positive I won’t be saying anything new,” she said.

“You’ll never know if you don’t go. When do you see that veterinarian with the search and rescue?”

“Sarah Grant?” Grant and a deputy, Hank Cooper, had made big news a year ago when they’d helped stop a band of smugglers transporting girls for the sex trade as well as a fortune in diamonds and heroin across the Canadian border. That woman…she was interested in meeting. Although it probably wasn’t healthy. Ben’s investigation had been shut down for lack of evidence. “Probably right away. We were scheduled for an interview in a couple days, but with the cancellation, I’ll be coming in closer to her. Kuntz said he’d drive up to Lonesome where Grant and Cooper live and then we’ll head down to his neck of the woods, spend a couple days at Eagle Rock. We might also go to a rehab ranch they’ve got down there, but we’ll see.”

“It sounds great. Dogs, veterans, Montana, mountains. What’s not to like?”

“Right.” She liked mountains, had never been to Montana, and thought the fuss about veterans was way overblown in a way that was similar to the national obsession with honoring anyone in any kind of uniform. Like every other occupation, the military had some truly stellar people on active duty, some okay people, and some complete and utter asswipes. As for dogs? She preferred cats. Dogs were okay, but they slobbered and were like kids, what with their constant need for attention. With a cat, it was understood that you were staff at best, a can opener at worst, and if a cat were larger, it would eat you. (That’s where a dog really was better than a cat; you dropped dead, a dog would at least wait a couple days.)

“I’m looking forward to the terrific feel-good story you’re going to turn in,” Kim enthused. “Actually, it sounds like you’ve got enough there for that series we talked about.” When she didn’t respond, Kim coaxed, “Come on, Scrooge, you can’t tell me the potential for some extra cash isn’t nice.”

“It’s nice.” The Air Force Weekly was footing the bill, although they’d also agreed that since she wasn’t technically reporting on active duty folks, she could take any material she gathered and write up stories for other publications so long as they got first right of refusal. She’d already contacted an editor she knew at TheWashington Post who’d said she’d be very interested in finding a home for Emma’s series. Why, play her cards right, do a couple follow-up pieces—Patterson apparently had this whole network of vets she might be able to tap into—and the woman at the Post thought she could become a regular contributor.

And she did need the work, now more than ever, and especially if she did decide to separate. The military hadn’t paid out for Ben. Not of sound mind, they said, which translated into no insurance and no benefits once she separated. (The military was interesting that way. Kill yourself, and you were automatically considered insane and the military didn’t have to pay. If you tried to kill yourself but failed, they booted your ass out for misconduct. She knew of one Marine…back in 2010, this was…who’d slit his wrists and survived but ended up getting court-martialed because the military decided he’d harmed “good order and discipline” on account of bleeding on a sergeant, using up medical supplies when the corpsmen bandaged his wrists, and not reporting to the brig because, well, he’d been in the hospital.)

But, seriously, why should she stay in? Unless something radically changed, she would never make promotion and, after a couple of cycles, they’d separate her ass for her and call it downsizing. In fact, she had a sneaking suspicion that was the reason the Weekly was so accommodating about letting her shop stories. Short of a mental ward, it was a way of quietly suggesting she show herself out.

Of course, they could assign her to a story in a free-fire zone. A bullet at the right time in the right place or a well-placed mortar would do the trick. One second, she was a problem, the next, boom. Pink mist.

“You there, girlfriend?”

“I’m here. I was only—” Getting morbid. An occupational hazard when a girl went out for groceries and came back to the functional equivalent of an abattoir. “Thinking,” she said.

“Yeah, I could smell the smoke coming out of your ears from here. Listen, kiddo, I know this is hard. I know you have a decision to make. But you got this. When are you due back?”

“Christmas Eve Day.” She’d toyed with jetting back on Christmas, but then she’d feel guilty making people who probably wanted to be at home with their families ask if she wanted cream and sugar with her tea and a bag of pretzels. On the other hand, the upside was that by the time her plane touched down, that excruciatingly long and boring day would be virtually over. Christmas was truly a soul-sucking experience for a Jew. Friends might invite you for a pre-party and eggnog—which had the consistency of liquid snot—but at the end of the day, you were still stuck with empty streets, Chinese takeout, and Netflix.

“Perfect. I’m having a little party at my place. A bunch of girls, no guys. You come and tell us how it went.”

“Hey, so long as you hold the nog and got a bottle of Jack.” Not that she was drinking these days, but a girl had to dream. At that moment, her phone chirped. “Hang on, I think this is the pilot…okay, he’s ready,” she said after reading the text. “I got to go.”

“Safe journey. If you’ve got service, call when you get in. Oh, and wait. Gut yom tov,” Kim said, carefully. “I got that right, didn’t I? Isn’t it the first night of Hanukkah tonight?”

Despite everything…even Burl Ives and snotty eggnog…she was touched. She hadn’t celebrated since Ben died, not that they’d ever done much either. She was marginally observant (more from guilt than anything else), and Ben was nothing, but it didn’t matter because they’d had each other. Besides, Hanukkah was a minor rabbinical holiday and could be distilled into a fairly simple rubric that informed a lot of Jewish holidays: you tried to kill us; you failed, ha-ha. Let’s eat. Hanukkah was totally hyped in the States, mostly so all the little Jewish kids didn’t feel left out. When they were still alive, her own parents had done the candles and presents thing until Emma was bat-mitzvahed when they decided she was an adult and, nu, enough of this nonsense already.

She could see why. Light a candle, mumble a few blessings—except for the first night, they were the same two every single night—then round things out with a rousing chorus of “I Had a Little Dreidel” or “Rock of Ages” (sadly, nothing from the musical, although she’d once channeled Pat Benatar for fun; Bubbe Sarah was not amused). Other than unwrapping that night’s present, that was it unless you went to the trouble of making latkes (a true pain, especially scraping your knuckles grating all those potatoes) or sufganiyot, which sounded exotic but was Hebrew for jelly doughnuts, big whup. Oh, and eat her way through a bag of relatively tasteless Hanukkah gelt, which was foil-wrapped chocolate shaped like gold coins. Like almost all kosher candies, gelt was truly disgusting. The stuff looked like plastic and tasted like brown earwax. Bubbe Sarah always did the feh-feh routine when it came to gelt. Hanukkah is about charity, she would say, about tzedakah and giving to others, not about cavities.

Whatever. In the end, really…Hanukkah just wasn’t all that.

“It’s the first night, yeah,” she said It was also one of those rare years when the eighth day of Hanukkah and Christmas fell on the same day. “Thanks, Kim. That was nice of you to remember.”

“Don’t mention it. Now, go. Catch your plane,” Kim said. “Go see some pretty mountains, play in the snow, pet some nice dogs. And, for God’s sake, Scrooge, try to have a good time.”

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