A Song for Julia

me falling in love with a boy too old for me, of him using me, and treating me like dirt and making me feel like it was my fault. By the time I got to the abortion, and being lost and wandering Beijing in the snow afterward, she was crying.
    After I finished the story, I said, “For the longest time I thought you hated me. That there really was something wrong with me. That it was my fault Harry did that to me. That’s what he told me. That it was my fault.” I sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “It wasn’t, Mother. I didn’t make all the right choices, but I was a kid. And no one was helping me. No one was there to talk to about it, to guide me. The only family I thought I had then was a twenty-year-old Marine who I thought I’d never speak to again.”
    Carrie murmured, “You’ve got family now. You’ve got me.”
    I looked at my sister and blinked my eyes to hold back tears.
    My mom looked at us, her face a portrait of loss and shock. She shook her head then ran out of the room without another word.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

    Part of my armor (Crank)
    Look, I know I cook for a living. On a three foot grill, with set procedures. But it was Christmas morning, and I wasn’t going to let a Christmas morning go by without a big breakfast of bacon and eggs and pancakes. Because if Dad had been home, that’s what he would have done. What I didn’t realize was, cooking in Dad’s kitchen? It was completely different.
    Mom finally stepped in after I set the frying pan on fire, flooding the kitchen with smoke and setting off the fire alarm.
    We finally got it sorted out, though opening the windows and doors when there was a foot of snow on the ground outside was bracing, to say the least. But Mom laughed it off, and Sean put on his winter coat, and we spent the morning laughing and being a family.
    None of us said anything about the fact that Dad hadn’t called. Maybe he’d get to a phone today. I don’t know what the phone situation was over there. He mentioned something like big call centers they get bussed to when he called a couple weeks ago. He’s writing almost every day.
    Mom had gone out and bought a small blue star flag and mounted it in the window. She explained the tradition from World War II: families would put a blue star in the window representing each member of the family serving overseas in wartime. A gold star meant they’d lost a family member.
    I wasn’t much for prayer, but I’d found myself praying for Dad and for this thing to not actually come to war.
    After breakfast, I cleaned up, then offered to start cooking Christmas dinner. My mother shooed me out of the kitchen in a hurry. “Go entertain your brother,” she said.
    I think she was enjoying this.
    I could do that. We hooked up the new Xbox I’d bought him, now that I was actually earning money from the band, and goofed off playing games.
    We hadn’t opened everything. When I woke up this morning, there were two gifts under the tree from Julia. One for Sean, one for me. I’d looked at my mom and she said, “She gave them to me before she left town and asked me to make sure you got them.”
    She’d purchased Sean an updated 2002 edition of the 20-year-old medical textbook he’d been reading for the last several months.
    I hadn’t opened mine yet. I wanted to talk to her when I did, and I was watching the clock, waiting for noon here, nine A.M. in California. She’d be up by then, I was sure.
    It was one minute after noon when I called.
    The phone rang … two, three times. I was afraid she wasn’t going to answer, but on the fourth ring she picked up.
    “Hello?” she said. “Crank?”
    “Hey, Julia.”
    “Is everything okay?”
    I smiled, bitterly. Of course. She wouldn’t expect a colleague, a member of the band, to call her on Christmas morning. That was something close friends did. It was something for family. Or lovers.
    We were none of those things.
    I took a deep breath. “I called to wish you a Merry Christmas.”
    She was silent, and then said in a small voice, “I miss you.”
    My heart started pounding. Did she just say that? Was she screwing with me? Is that all it took to get me into an uproar? I grimaced. “I miss you, babe.”
    “Call me babe and I’ll punch you right through the phone line, Crank.”
    “That sounds more like you,” I said. “How are you? How is … everything?”
    She said, “It’s tense here. I’m sort of in a minefield with my family at the moment.”
    “Families are