Free Riding In Cars With Boys by Beverly Donofrio

living room, we were weeping. “Bev,” I heard. It was Raymond. He’d lost his keys.
    We ran down the stairs and told him everything. He looked at the baby and said his eyes were normal. Then I looked, too, and they were.
    Virginia was too spooked to drive home, so she slept on the sofa. The next night, she was back in our kitchen. “Nancy went nuts because of Bobby,” she said. “He’s dead.”
    “What?”
    “Shrapnel. They said he didn’t feel a thing. His mother called. It’ll take a couple of days for his body to come home.”
    “You’re kidding,” I said.
    “Right. I made it up. It’s a big joke.”
    “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …” I said.
    Virginia started crying. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I wished I could cry too. I hugged her and we rocked, stretched between our seats. When Ray came home, he sat in the rocker to take off his work boots, and we told him the news. He threw a boot across the floor, then flung himself back, pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, and said, “My buddy. My buddy.”
    The night before the funeral, Ray and I didn’t put Jase to bed at six o‘clock as usual. We sat on our steps, and Jason, eight months old now, pushed a dump truck around our feet. We put the “White Album” on and, one by one, as if they’d been invited, people began to pull into our driveway and park on the road. There were about a dozen of us sitting on our steps and lying on our lawn that night, listening to the Beatles, reminiscing about Bobby. He’d gone to Dag Hammarskjold with me and had been responsible for the rash of bomb scares one freezing fall. The whole school had to stand outside while the cops searched every locker and desk in the building. A guy named Lenny flicked a cigarette into the night and told us how he’d been waiting for his turn outside the vice-principal’s office when Bobby called the vice-principal an ape, then decked him. Bobby was expelled for that one. Rather than face his father, he ran away to Maine and got a severe case of frostbite. But then in high school, he’d joined the football team, and made more touchdowns than anyone. His father was proud of him. Which was Virginia’s theory of why he joined the marines: to keep his father that way.
    On leave after boot camp, Bobby’d come over for Sunday dinner. He hardly ate any macaroni, then he drank so much he puked in the living room. After he’d come downstairs from washing his face, I’d asked him if he was scared to go to war.
    “Bev,” Ray said.
    “What?”
    “You don’t ask a guy those questions.”
    “Oh,” I’d said, and Bobby turned his face away.
    Sitting on the steps, I pictured Bobby the way he’d looked at my wedding, wearing a shirt with huge polka dots and maroon bell-bottoms. Then I pictured him in the photo he’d sent me from Nam. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder and his hair cut like a Mohican. He was standing on a hill and looked like a statue. I wondered if I’d still remember Bobby when I was thirty or forty. I’d be an adult, but in my memory he’d still be a kid. I wondered if Bobby would’ve always been wild or if he’d have calmed down, settled in a job somewhere, had a couple of kids, a bald head, a beer belly. I wondered if Bobby was the lucky one. I looked at the back of my son’s neck—he was passed out on the grass. It looked so delicate, so tender. Finally, I wept.
    “Blackbird” was playing in the background, and I thought how Bobby would never get the chance to spread his wings and learn to fly. I wondered if any of us would.

CHAPTER 6
    A year after that—in June 1970, to be exact—at the tail end of the most glorious spring of my youth, if you can still consider the age of nineteen youth, my heart broke.
    The thing that got me, the real kick in the ass, was I was happy. Really happy. Marriage was working, because marijuana had changed our lives. Not only did Ray and I dress differently—we both wore sunglasses (we called