“She wanted to be a normal person again, but her family seems determined to make sure that never happens,” Jim said before stepping down. My mother seemed to get smaller in her chair with every word he spoke as if the truth was a physical weight pressing on her.
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.