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The doctors advised surgery. Then chemotherapy.

Then a course of radiation. The treatments seemed endless.

Her mother was a good soldier, following one doctor after another into battle.

Never complaining. Ruth admired her courage.

But each treatment left George weaker. Loopier.

“Ivy,” she said, when Ruth, who had taken to sleeping in her old bedroom some nights, came in to check on her.

“No, Mom. It’s Ruth. Ivy’s still overseas, remember?”

“Yes. Yes, that’s right. Sorry, sweetie.”

She knew George wrote to Ivy. Longed to have her real daughter by her side.

Ruth occasionally wrote Ivy herself, detailing the treatments (extensive), the prognosis (uncertain).

Suggesting that her sister try to find it in herself to write to George.

“She did raise you, after all,” wrote Ruth. “No matter who you think you are.”

Months later, Ivy replied. She wrote that she’d been transferred into the Army Special Services.

“It’s not as impressive as it sounds,” read the terse postcard that made no mention of George’s illness.

“Really, it’s just a fancy new way of saying Donut Dolly.

” As this wasn’t exactly news, Ruth didn’t bother to share it with her parents.

“I’ve been thinking,” said her mother on one of her better days. “I want to tell you the truth.” They were strolling around the block, slowly. Once, twice, three times, if George felt up to it. The fresh air put color in her mother’s face.

“What do you mean? The truth about what?”

“Come on, sweetie. The truth about you girls.”

Ruth’s stomach lurched. She concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. “Mom, you don’t have to tell us anything.” Oh, please, God, don’t tell me anything.

“I was going to tell you when you first got home, but then ...” She stopped and passed a hand down the length of her torso.

“Well, here we are. And I want to tell you.” Ruth’s head swung violently from side to side— no, no, no —seemingly of its own accord.

She’d been angry when she came home. Home hadn’t felt like home, which was a betrayal, a robbery, especially after so much else had been taken from her—faith in her country, faith in her family, for starters.

She’d come back ready to demand answers. To demand payment for those losses.

But then George’s illness had confirmed how desperately she didn’t want to lose her mother.

She’d walked out of the doctor’s office holding the maximum amount of truth she could manage.

And now her mother wanted to hand her more.

“But only when I can tell both of you,” said George.

Ruth took her arm as they stepped over a break in the sidewalk.

“That’s fair, I think. As fair as I can manage at this point anyway.

I’ve written Ivy to let her know—more than once.

I made a promise to her, and now I’m making it to you.

When Ivy comes home, we’ll talk about it. All of it.”

Ruth stopped walking. “Have you heard from her? Did she say she’s coming home?

” She’d recently received another postcard.

Ivy was in Laos. “Doing fine. Vientiane is beautiful. Will write more soon.” No mention of any letters received, no questions about how their mother was doing.

No hint that she even thought of home. Ruth hadn’t shared this one with her parents, either, but Ivy might have sent them one herself.

“Someday. She’s coming home someday.” Her mother shrank in Ruth’s silence. “Don’t you think?”

After that conversation, Ruth stopped writing to Ivy. She wanted Ivy to be safe. She wanted her family all on the same patch of earth. But Ivy coming home meant losing her mother. Maybe if they weren’t all in the same place, they had a better shot at staying a family.

After her shift, she found a table in the back of the Jet Way. She circled help wanted ads while she drank.

An airman hovered next to Ruth’s table. “Not interested,” said Ruth.

“You were interested last week.” She glanced up, took in his sharp, feral features. He was the type she occasionally allowed herself to take an interest in. Was it last week she’d taken one of the airmen home with her? Or two weeks ago? These men were interchangeable. And always temporary.

“Guess that was then, this is now.”

“Can’t I even buy you a drink?”

“Suit yourself. But it won’t get you anywhere.”

They never believed this. Because of that, she received a fair number of free drinks. She kept careful count of them. Aunt Vivian used to tell her and Ivy: “Know your limit. And stick to it, no matter how much fun you’re having, no matter who you’re with.”

“This doesn’t seem like the most appropriate conversation for young girls,” Grandma Adele had said.

“The really useful conversations often aren’t,” argued Vivian.

Now that she was stateside, Ruth’s limit was four if she was alone. Three if she was with someone. She planned to sip this drink and then head home. Alone. Leaving a disappointed airman behind.

She circled another ad.

“You looking for a job?”

“I have a job.”

“Why you circling those, then?”

Why indeed? wondered Ruth, when she never, ever applied for any of them.

The plan had been to end up in a bigger city.

The plan had not been Enid. Ivy had suggested, one particularly revealing evening, that she wasn’t sure she herself could get any closer to home than Guam.

Perhaps that’s where she was now. Because she certainly wasn’t responding to the letters their mother sent.

Ruth hadn’t told George about Ivy moving to Laos, but the letters probably reached her eventually.

Ruth inspected the incoming mail, checked the trash for powder-blue airmail envelopes.

Not that she needed to. A letter from Ivy would be the first thing George announced.

“You wouldn’t want to go home?” she’d asked Ivy, that night—a night that seemed a century ago—back in Cu Chi.

“Maybe home is somewhere else for me,” said Ivy.

“Where?”

In the pause, Ruth heard the faint sound of tracer fire off in the distance. Then Ivy said, “Maybe it’s here.”

“Here?!”

Ivy waved to the bartender for another. “Maybe it’s someplace I’m still figuring out.”

Ruth drained her glass and folded up her newspaper.

“Thanks for the drink,” she said to the airman.

She headed out into the twilight ... and found herself still in Enid, still rooted to the place she’d grown up.

The place she lived. Not home. Not exactly, anyway.

Because home was someplace she was still figuring out.

In line in the hospital cafeteria, waiting for her grilled cheese sandwich and pickle, Ruth stiffened as a helicopter flew low over the building, rattling the windows.

She could tell who had been in country by whose white-coated shoulders tensed, who raised up on the balls of their feet, ready to run for the Hueys.

A nurse a bit farther up the line was one of them.

Ruth wondered where she’d been stationed.

The woman shook the tension from her shoulders, then smoothed her hair.

Something about the gesture tugged at Ruth’s memory.

Kimberly smoothing her hair in the lavatory at Tan Son Nhut.

What was Kimberly doing in Enid, Oklahoma?

“My husband—we got engaged over there—he’s from a tiny little town over in the panhandle. And I mean little. There’s not much of a hospital near there, so when he came back, we moved here.”

She said “here” with such disdain that Ruth knew she had to immediately make clear that here was where she started from. Then she interrupted Kimberly’s stricken “I didn’t mean—” with her own qualifier. “My mother’s been sick. She’s getting better, but I want to be close.”

Some days this wasn’t true. Some days she wished she were as far away as she could get—wished she was back in the hospital tent in Cu Chi. She felt listless—lifeless—in Enid. Too listless and lifeless to leave.

They carried their trays to an empty table, but Kimberly refused to sit down.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, “but I just cannot sit anywhere near that .”

She tipped her head toward a long-haired young man wearing a field jacket, flared jeans, and strands of wooden beads. It wasn’t a popular look in Enid, and Ruth suspected it wasn’t making his life easy.

“I know what you mean,” said Ruth, steering them across the room to another table. “I try to remind myself that some of them were actually over there. You can’t always tell by looking.

“And honestly, I’m not sure this is much better.

” Ruth nodded at a nearby table where a couple their age, he in chinos and a button-down and she in a Peter Pan blouse and earrings that matched her necklace, picked at their lunches.

“It’s the spitting that really gets me,” the man in chinos fumed, glaring across the room at the long-haired man.

Ruth knew what he meant—the spitting got her too.

She hadn’t yet seen any evidence of protesters spitting on soldiers—not a single photograph or news clip—but you heard about it everywhere these days.

It was inexcusable. As if the GIs were nothing, not worth even a minimal degree of respect.

Plenty of people in Enid these days complained about the spitting.

And while Ruth didn’t disagree with them, she wasn’t sure why that was what got them so fired up, when they didn’t say a thing about the napalm, about the naked children on fire, about My Lai, about the surge of damaged veterans stumbling among them.

It wasn’t the spitting that had broken those soldiers, after all. They’d endured far worse than that.

“Yeah,” said Kimberly. “I have to admit I’m not sure where I belong these days. Do you ever wish you were back there?”

“Almost every day. And I didn’t exactly have a premium posting.”