She told them I had issues, that I’d been written up, that officers had concerns. She used words like struggling and difficult and we’re worried about her, words that sounded like compassion if you didn’t look too closely and sounded like a campaign if you did. And then Mosul. In 2017, while I was lying on a concrete floor in a collapsed field hospital with two fractured metacarpals in my left hand, taping my own fingers together with medical tape and a tongue depressor so I could keep applying pressure to a lieutenant colonel’s severed femoral artery, Diane told my father’s social circle that I had been discharged for insubordination. Dishonorably discharged. That was the phrase she used. She said it the way she said everything, with concern in her voice and a slight shake of her head, as though it pained her to deliver such difficult news about someone she’d tried so hard to help. She told them while I was still deployed. She told them while I was still wearing the uniform, and my father, Richard Allen Callaway, the quietest man I ever knew, the man who taught me to bait a fish hook and who cried at my mother’s funeral and who never once raised his voice in my presence, heard it and said nothing. Not because he believed it, not exactly, but because Diane’s voice was the one in the room and mine was seven thousand miles away. And Richard Callaway was a man who survived by not making waves in water someone else controlled. Grief, I would learn, was Diane’s best staging tool. I came home in 2019. Honorable discharge. Sixteen years. I took a job as an emergency department trauma nurse at a regional hospital in Northern Virginia. I tried to see my father. I drove to the house on Maple Drive. I called. I sent letters. Diane controlled access the way she controlled everything, with the appearance of reasonableness and the substance of a locked door. Phone calls went unreturned. Holiday invitations were not extended. When I asked Tyler, my half brother, Diane’s son, thirteen years younger than me, if I could come for Thanksgiving, he said awkwardly that Mom thought it might be too stressful for Dad. Tyler wasn’t cruel. Tyler was twenty-six and had been raised inside Diane’s narrative the way a fish is raised inside water. He didn’t know there was anything else. And then there was Richard’s sixty-ninth birthday, February 2023, his last birthday alive, though none of us knew that yet. I drove four hours from Northern Virginia to Fairfax. I brought a card. I brought a box of Arturo Fuente Hemingways, his favorite, the Short Story size, because he liked to smoke one on the porch after dinner, and he said the short ones meant he didn’t feel guilty about finishing them. I parked in the driveway of the house on Maple Crest. I walked up the steps. I rang the bell. Diane answered. She stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame and the other holding a dish towel, and she looked at me the way you look at a solicitor you’re about to decline.
“He’s sleeping,” she said. “He doesn’t want visitors.”
It was four o’clock in the afternoon. I stood there on the porch in February holding the cigars. The air was raw and damp and the sky was the color of wet newspaper. I could see through the front window that the lights were on in the living room. I could hear the television.
“Can you give him these?” I said.
She took the box. She didn’t look at it.
“I’ll let him know you stopped by.”
I left the cigars on the porch because she had already closed the door. Three weeks later, Harold Mitchell, a retired Army major, my father’s oldest friend, the one man in Richard’s orbit Diane couldn’t fully control, called me on a Tuesday evening and said, almost carefully,
“Megan, I want you to know your father was awake that day. He asked where you were. Diane told him, ‘You canceled.’”
