May 3
Ron’s July 3
Kim closed Good Yarn early and walked Main Street alone. She’d sold more in the past three weeks than the previous two months combined, a fact she’d noticed but hadn’t told anyone, because it felt like the wrong thing to feel good about.
She didn’t bring her phone. Didn’t bring her keys. Just locked the door, dropped them in her coat pocket, and walked.
The town was ready.
Bunting hung from every lamppost, tight and even, the way David Fleming’s crew had learned to do it after three weeks of practice. Banners stretched across intersections: 250 YEARS. AMERICA’S BIRTHDAY. PAX RIVER CELEBRATES.
The hardware store window still had David’s hand-painted GOD BLESS AMERICA sign, now flanked by two rows of miniature flags. The barber shop had added an Uncle Sam cutout that leaned slightly to the left, which someone would fix in the morning and someone else would knock crooked again by noon.
Kim walked slowly. She read the signs, checked the banners, counted the flags like column inches. Looking for the gap. The error. The thing that didn’t belong.
There was no gap. It was perfect.
She turned down Elm and passed First Baptist. Pastor Josh’s parking lot was closed off with sawhorses, which tomorrow would be pulled aside to reveal two flatbed floats, a portable stage, and a sound system that Bill Hayes had borrowed from the VFW hall in Bridgeton. The floats were covered in tarps. Kim had seen them yesterday. Red, white, and blue crepe paper, hand-lettered signs, a framework of chicken wire and tissue paper that Pax River art students had built.
The band itself had rehearsed three times this week. Fourteen kids, most of them nervous, all of them sworn to secrecy by a teacher who told them they were preparing a surprise for a veteran. Which was true. The truest version of the lie any of them had told.
Kim turned back toward Main Street. The sun was dipping. The storefronts were closing, one by one, lights clicking off, but the decorations stayed lit. Someone, Jan Williams, Kim suspected, had strung white lights along the awnings of the three shops nearest the bridge. They glowed in the dusk like a photograph you’d find in a magazine about towns that looked like they had it all together.
Frank’s last newspaper was already at Meadow View. The July 3 edition. Front page with a schedule of events Frank had typeset himself. Parade. Speeches. Picnic. All of it invented. All of it about to be real.
Kim thought of Frank and the Register story. He’d called in his favor weeks ago, and it had worked. Emma Richmond was now writing about another 250th celebration in southern Virginia. And if she ever came back to Pax River with that reporter’s eye of hers, it wouldn’t be until after July, and by then the story would be different. By then it would be true. One less thing.
Kim thought about the people who had built this.
Jan Williams, who couldn’t stand David Fleming six months ago and now called him every morning to coordinate.
Mrs. Durfee, who had turned fourteen teenagers into a mini marching band in three weeks.
Mayor Balcerzak, who had expedited every permit.
Catherine Hayes, who had made four casseroles for the planning meetings and never once complained about the greenbean one going untouched.
Bill, who in Good Yarn that first night told them all who Charlie Drummond was.
Frank, who had built a fake world out of newsprint and memory and two-fingered typing because a man he’d met once in a bar in Saigon had talked about his brother like he was the last good thing.
Carol, who had briefed her staff at 6:45 in the morning and adjusted medications and answered every question about the weather with a straight face.
Annie. Who had started all of this with one lie in a hospital room and carried it every day since.
Kim reached the bridge.
She stopped at the midpoint. The bench was empty. The railing was cool under her hands. Below, the river was dark and slow and flowing, as it always would.
The sun was almost gone. A thin line of orange sat on the hills to the west, and the sky above it was deepening from blue to purple to black. The bunting on the lampposts was still. The white lights on the awnings glowed. Somewhere a dog barked. Somewhere else, a screen door closed.
Tomorrow they would wheel Ron Drummond out of Meadow View and across this bridge and into a town that had rebuilt itself for him. Tomorrow he would see the parade and hear the speeches and believe, for one afternoon, that his country had kept its promise. Tomorrow would be the most beautiful thing they’d ever done.
Or the cruelest.
Kim didn’t know which. She suspected it might be both.
We tried, Charlie, she thought. We really tried.
One day.
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