The panic really started to set in for my mother when the judge picked up the third envelope with my grandfather’s name on it. “Wait, my father was not in his right mind when he wrote anything in that final year,” my mother pleaded while looking at her lawyer.
“Did your grandfather know about your service, Cassidy?” Gwen asked me while I was still standing near the witness stand. I told the court that he knew enough and that he had found out during the very first week I returned home from the war.
I arrived in Tucson with a duffel bag and a shoulder brace that I tried to hide under my shirt while my family studied my face. My grandfather had been sitting on his porch with a blanket over his knees and he took one look at me before asking the truth.
“Show me what they did to you, girl,” he had said that afternoon while the sun was setting behind the mountains in the distance. I told him that I was fine but he insisted that he wanted to see the mark of the sacrifice I had made for my country.
So I showed him the scar and the stiffness and the way my arm stopped obeying me after I moved it past a certain point. His face did not crumple with pity but he reached out to touch my sleeve with two fingers to see if I was still whole.
My mother came outside halfway through that moment and froze on the porch as the screen door banged shut behind her with a loud crack. I remember the smell of cut grass and the way her eyes went from confusion to a sharp and sudden anger that I could not explain.
She realized in that second that my absence had an explanation that she could not control or turn into a story for her own benefit. “Why did you keep this from me, Cassidy?” she had screamed at me that night while standing in the middle of the kitchen.
I told her that I did not want to be a talking point at her church or a reason for people to bring over casseroles for a week. My grandfather told her to leave me alone but she waited until he went to bed before she cornered me near the refrigerator.
“Did he change the will before or after he saw that wound on your shoulder?” she asked with a voice that was dripping with pure venom. That was the moment something inside of me went cold because I finally understood that I was just a variable in her financial plans.