Chapter 9
They walked three blocks in silence, keeping a careful, respectful distance from one another as they navigated the crowded pedestrian sidewalk beneath the skeletal branches of the autumn-stripped park trees. Arthur led the way toward a rusted green slatted bench facing an empty playground where a solitary swing set groaned back and forth in the rising wind. He sat down heavily, resting his elbows on his knees and staring down at the cracked toes of his work boots, while Eleanor remained standing for a moment, letting the familiar sights and sounds of the city wash over her. It was here, near this very park, that her father's old importing business had once maintained a small brick warehouse—the same building where Arthur had worked as a stockroom loader before Uncle Sam handed him a rifle and a one-way ticket to a war nobody wanted to talk about anymore. "Marcus kept all of it, didn't he?" Arthur asked quietly without looking up. "The letters, the back pay, the insurance settlement when they declared me legally dead after the five-year mark." Eleanor sat down beside him on the cold metal bench, the iron bars groaning under their combined weight. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the crumpled photograph, smoothing it out as best she could against her knee, though the burn marks remained stubborn and black. "He managed the estate after my father's stroke," she said, her voice barely audible over the roar of a passing city bus. "He told me the records from your unit were destroyed in a warehouse fire back in the eighties. He said you chose not to come back, that you walked away from us because the things you saw over there changed you too much." Arthur let out a bitter, rattling cough that ended in a low chuckle. "Changed me? Maybe. But I never walked away. I spent four years in a military prison in Hanoi after the firebase fell, and another ten years in a VA hospital in Oregon learning how to walk without a limp and speak without stuttering. By the time I got my mind back together, Marcus was already running the company, and your family had moved into that estate on the hill."
