Leo reached for the spacebar. “I’m sorry. I’ll turn it off.”
But last week, Leo had found a worn paperback in the garage: The Greatest Beer Run Ever by Joanna Molloy and John "Chickie" Donohue. The cover was faded, the spine cracked. His father had read it. More than once.
“A movie.”
“They always show the welcome home,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “They never show the nightmares.”
He took the beer. Took a sip. And for the first time in fifty years, he spoke.
“It’s about… a guy who brought beer to his friends in Vietnam.”
“At two in the morning?”
He knocked on the bedroom door. “Dad? You awake?”
“We had a guy like that,” Frank whispered. “Tommy. He used to talk about his mom’s apple pie. All the time. ‘When I get home, first thing, apple pie.’” Frank swallowed hard. “He stepped on a mine three days before his rotation.”
Frank never talked about the war. The only evidence was the Purple Heart in a dusty shadow box and the way he’d flinch at the sound of a car backfiring. For fifty years, the silence between them had been thicker than any jungle. Leo had tried everything—sports, movies, even a shared fishing trip that ended with Frank staring at the river for six hours without a word.
Frank shuffled out in his bathrobe, his face a landscape of deep lines and old scars. He looked at the laptop on the coffee table, then back at Leo. “What is this?”