A Song for Julia

White House. Harvard’s dining service, including the dining room at Cabot Hall, compares favorably. It’s usually very good, filling, well done, and soul-less.
    Home cooked meals? Hardly ever. Once the twins were born, my mom employed a housekeeper and cook. Sure, the food was always good. But it wasn’t the same as what I miss from when I was really young: sitting around the kitchen table with my mom and dad and Carrie on Sunday morning. Some of my earliest and happiest memories are those times. My parents were happier, my mother often smiled and laughed, and Carrie and I felt loved.
    That was a long, long time ago—before Alexandra was born, before my father got the first of several promotions. By the time we were on post in Brussels, I guess I was eleven or so, that warmth was all a memory. My parents were too stressed, my dad was too busy, and most of my free time was spent alone or with my guard.
    Yes, really. I had a guard. He was actually a great guy, a Marine corporal named Barry Lewis. My dad was a senior NATO attaché, and it was right after the Gulf War. There were threats, so the ambassador assigned guards to all of us. I guess it might have been embarrassing at school, but I didn’t exactly go to a public school, and I wasn’t the only kid there with a bodyguard.
    Corporal Lewis was a great guy. An unrepentant chaser of girls and a car fanatic, he bought two antique cars and somehow persuaded the powers-that-be to allow him to keep them in the embassy garage. I remember sitting in the garage, perched on a stool, while he worked on his cars, chattering non-stop to me about cars, girls, growing up in Texas and whatever else came into his head. I had a little girl’s crush on him, but I also looked up to him like a big brother.
    I always wondered what happened to Corporal Lewis. We moved on to China, and I suppose he moved back to the fleet, and I never saw him again. In fact, we didn’t even have an opportunity to say goodbye. Right before my family left Brussels, he was sent home on leave due to a death in his family. I never heard from him again.
    For just a few minutes, smelling the food cooking before I opened my eyes, I was nine years old, happy, excited for what was coming that weekend, getting ready for breakfast with my family. I pulled my jeans on under the blanket, then got up and followed the smell of bacon.
    As I walked toward the kitchen, my eyes fell again on the beautiful grand piano in the corner of the room. It was polished, well maintained. I didn’t know what a police officer in Boston made, but I did know that a piano like that costs upwards of twenty thousand dollars.
    Crank’s dad was in the kitchen. Last night he’d been in a Boston Police Department uniform, but now he was in jeans and a t-shirt, and an old, well-worn apron with “World’s Greatest Mom” embroidered on it. It looked handmade. He was sipping from a cup of coffee in one hand and flipping a pancake with the spatula in the other. The radio on the shelf was tuned in to WBUR, the volume down fairly low as the Car Talk guys joked and laughed with a caller. I watched him for a few seconds and couldn’t help but smile. It was such a domestic scene, and he looked as content a man as I’d ever seen.
    “Good morning,” I said quietly.
    He turned toward me and raised an eyebrow. “Good morning! Coffee?”
    I nodded. “Yes, please.”
    Without looking, he reached up and grabbed a mug, then placed it on the counter and filled it with rich smelling coffee.
    “Cream’s in the fridge,” he said. He slid a tin of sugar close to the cup, reached in a drawer and handed me a spoon.
    “I’m Julia Thompson,” I said. “I’m, uh, sorry about the surprise last night.”
    He let out a deep chuckle. “Nice to meet you, Julia. Though I gotta admit, sitting on a girl in the middle of the night is not how I usually introduce myself. I’m Jack. Have a seat and enjoy your coffee. The boys probably won’t wake up until I start banging things on their doors.”
    I tucked myself into one of the seats at the kitchen table. It was a beautiful table, polished, well cared for and old. I don’t know how old, I’m no judge of furniture, but I had a feeling the table had been here thirty years.
    “Sorry to be a sudden drop-in guest like this,” I said, shifting in my seat. “We were up playing some bloody game with Sean until really late, and they didn’t want me to drive home.”
    “Not safe to drive when you’re too