Free Prague by Arthur Phillips

know about it. Beth, her elder sister, married and with two kids on another farm about forty miles closer to Lincoln, did say once that the circles were maybe not that helpful, even to Dad. (Beth remembered their mother most clearly and said her death affected Dad just by "making him even more like him.") Emily had repeated Beth's heresy to Robert, her younger brother, a marine now at Twentynine Palms. Robert disagreed, said Beth just hadn't thought hard enough about it yet. No one could ask her older brother, Ken Jr., of course, since he just took off one day and that was the last of Ken Jr. "Drugs," her father explained, and never mentioned him again, though he did do some volunteer work with a local church group that helped recovering addicts.
     
    "So you pretty much come from arranged-marriage country," John said.
     
    "Oh absolutely. I'm promised to a farmer seven counties over, and I come with three nice cows, but I have to pass a purity test after I come home from Hungary."
     
    She didn't tell John all of the rest of this, but she told him enough that she later wondered what was happening to her in this country.
     
    From 1961 to 1967, Ken Oliver's tours in Vietnam and the surrounding countries were reasonably rare and of reasonable length. After Tet, however, he had no choice but to leave his wife and four kids in Georgetown and spend more than three leave-free years in Saigon, making frequent trips up north and into Laos. The last of these expeditions occurred just after Christmas 1971, during which he witnessed the death of "the noblest man I ever knew, Emmy." He made it back to Saigon "by the grace of God" only to receive word that his wife, Martha, had gotten quite suddenly ill and that he had immediate leave to go back to Georgetown to see her. He never returned to Vietnam, resigning from the service after Martha's rapid death and taking the kids to Nebraska, where his own parents lived in a vast agricultural expanse better suited to raising children than Georgetown's diplomatic parties and cancer wards.
     
    John must have been sitting there watching her sleep for a couple of hours, she realized, even after his friends and brother had left the island. Men who thought and spoke like lesser versions of her dad were all around the embassy, but people like John were not. He was so aimless. He enjoyed this sort of aimless talk, seemed to have no need to be busy. He was not like the Julies, who were just party girls, not serious at all, just biding time until they found men. Nor was he like Charles, who resembled nothing so much as certain money-
     
    grasping (and Emily-groping) agribusiness majors at Nebraska. Scott was angry, like a smart-aleck teenager. But John ... and Mark was a new type, too. The strangest thought came to her as she stared up at the birds on the lowest branches and John talked about what sounded like a miserable childhood, though he was laughing about it: There was probably a range of people she had never experienced in this world and for which she had no preparation.
     
    He asked about her mom, and she simply answered him. "I was only five. I remember my dad cried at the funeral. But never again, Beth says. It was hard, I think, for him. I missed her for the longest time, but that wasn't really the sort of thing you could talk about. It wasn't fair to him to bring her up or make him think he wasn't enough for us. Not that I'm complaining."

 
    "Jesus, Special Assistant. I think you're allowed to complain about that. You had two great parents and you lost one. What else is complaining for?"
     
    She lay on her back in the silence, watched the branches and the softest blue sky. What indeed was it for? There was an answer to that. It was just bubbling up in her memory, something about—and she recognized the look in John's eye, had seen it cloud up boys' faces, just before they leaned in to kiss her. " 'Complaining,' " she quoted with a smile, shoving her book into her knapsack, standing up,