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Her mother, her maybe-mother, Georgeanne, was the hardest to face, and so Ruth had left her for last, but it was past time to go home.

To see if home was still home. Her father had warned her that it wouldn’t feel like it.

“Nothing,” he said, “is going to feel like home for a while. So just go easy, okay?”

Ruth had taken his instructions as another excuse to avoid meeting her mother.

Until not seeing her became more difficult, heavier to bear.

She put on a new skirt and top. Even if she didn’t feel like she belonged back home, she could at least look as if she did.

She phoned and told George she was coming over and then hung up, cutting off her mother’s enthusiastic response.

Some of the cars were newer, but otherwise, the street looked the same.

The pecan tree was gone, but otherwise, the house looked the same.

As she came up the walk, Ruth’s heart racketed around in her chest. Maybe she was George’s daughter, and thus, Adele’s granddaughter.

Maybe whatever had been wrong with Grandma Adele’s heart was wrong with hers, too, and she’d die of a heart attack at age twenty-five, right here on the front lawn where she and Ivy used to play in the sprinkler.

She concentrated on the oil stains on the driveway—another reminder of her grandmother.

She offered up a silent greeting to Adele, wishing she were there, about to roll out from underneath a car.

When the door latch clicked, she straightened her spine, ready for the painful conversation ahead.

She wasn’t Ivy, but she was braver than she used to be. Brave enough, she thought, to learn she wasn’t really her mother’s daughter. No matter how badly she wanted to be.

The door swung open to reveal a haggard, drawn, aged woman.

“Hello, sweetie. I’m so glad you’re home.”

Ruth stepped into the woman’s outstretched arms. They were too bony, but just as comforting as they’d always been.

“Mom,” said Ruth. She held on, not bothering about the tears that flowed freely down her face.

Because her grandmother wasn’t there, her mother wasn’t herself, and they were about to have an entirely different conversation than the one she’d prepared for.

Before an hour had passed, they’d secured an appointment. Before a month had passed, they’d secured a diagnosis. The oncologist lifted his hands in apology.

“But her mother died just a year ago,” said Ruth, as if to demonstrate the wrongness of this. The impossibility of it.

She hadn’t planned to stay in Enid, but her mother was ill, and St. Mary’s had an opening for an ER nurse.

From the start, she hated it. She had to run every decision by a doctor.

Any suggestions she made were ignored. Except for a couple of doctors who’d been over there, too, she’d treated more difficult cases than most of the St. Mary’s ER staff could even imagine.

After a few weeks, she asked to transfer to another department.

“Don’t worry,” soothed one of the older nurses.

“A lot of people find the ER too difficult. There’s no shame in requesting a transfer.

” Ruth refrained from explaining that it wasn’t the trauma she couldn’t tolerate, but the stubborn placidity of the staff.

Of this nurse, with her bright, singsongy voice and her old-fashioned white cap, in particular.

The hospital reassigned her to pediatrics. She knew nothing about children, held no preconceived opinions about how they should be handled. At least in the pediatric ward, she could start with the assumption that the doctors and nurses knew what they were talking about.

“Because no one stateside seems to,” said Ruth that evening, not to anyone in particular. The bartender had long since stopped listening to her.

“Well, hon, neither do you,” said a man on the barstool next to hers. He patted her knee and left his hand on it. “Neither does anyone who hasn’t been over there.”

“But I was over there.”

“Better cut this little lady off,” the man barked.

The bartender chuckled. The man next to her was paying, after all, for Ruth’s drinks and for the hope that they might lead to something more.

Every now and then—more frequently as her mother’s treatments proceeded—the drinks did lead to something more.

Not that the drinks made the decision for her; she knew when to switch to seltzer.

It was loneliness. Since leaving Vietnam, it stalked her, waited for her to find herself at loose ends, pounced whenever she lacked distraction.

Without distractions, thoughts of Cu Chi flooded her mind.

But whenever the subject of her time in Vietnam arose, people shifted uncomfortably, turned the topic to something—anything—else.

Many of them, like the man on the next barstool, his hand now creeping up her thigh, openly disbelieved her.

Even those high school and nursing school friends who had written to her, professing to miss her, didn’t want to know what she’d seen, what she’d done, what it was like.

She slid off the barstool. “Thanks for the drink.”

“Oh, hey, don’t go!”

But she was already at the door.

“It was the same for us,” her mother said when Ruth complained about no one believing her.

They sat in yet another waiting room—Ruth went to every appointment she could—listening to the hum of the HVAC system, the ding of elevators coming and going, the vending machine in the corner spitting five-cent orange soda into paper cups.

Ruth looked forward to these intervals in waiting rooms. Her mother filled them with stories about her days as a WASP.

“People still don’t believe it,” said George.

Ruth winced. For years, she’d been no better than the man at the bar.

She’d never really believed her mother had towed artillery targets while men on the ground shot live ammunition at her.

And she didn’t even have ignorance as an excuse.

She’d seen photos of her mother in uniform.

She’d flown with her in the Cessna. But it was easier to picture Vivian doing these things.

Ruth had preferred to imagine her mother safely at home, taking care of her and Ivy, waiting for their father to return from overseas.

“I’d like to hear about it,” she said. This, she decided, was the sort of truth she was interested in. Her mother’s past. Every story George told her linked them more closely together, allowed Ruth to believe, at least until the tale ended, that she belonged to this woman.

But George looked suddenly tired. “Another time, sweetie.”