The horse is already out of the barn and making its way to their doorstep. There are the children to think of first. Sam is still too young to be trusted but keeping him sheltered will not be easy. Should anything happen to him, it will be up to Brenda to tell her mother, who is the one person who would understand everything, the one person who was always there to share it with him, and the one person he isn’t ready to talk to yet.

___

It’s one of those things you’d like to forget, but something won’t let you. He can see Alice now, sitting there, like a photo you keep in your wallet that every now and then you can’t help looking at. Though he’d been working at Primus for over a year by then, he was on his way to meet with one of his ex-law professors, a noted Vietnam War scholar, on a matter of some importance. She was sitting on the steps of Hamilton Hall, in front of the statue of Alexander Hamilton. She wasn’t lost in the crowd. There was none. There were a couple of signs hanging from his statue, and she was flanked by a couple of others. On his way back from his meeting she was still sitting there.

He figured her for an undergrad. Who else could have been that dumb? He would never forget those four handmade signs:

“The IDA Is Part of America’s War Machine.”

“Columbia Is Affiliated with the IDA.”

“We Are Affiliated with Columbia.”

“What Does That Make Us?”

After a closer look at the signs, he decided to give her some free advice. “You needn’t connect all the dots. Anyone on campus who doesn’t know that the IDA is a weapons research think-tank, and of Columbia’s affiliation to it, isn’t going to sign your petition anyway. Keep it simple. How about, ‘Columbia’s affiliation with the IDA = Your affiliation with the IDA.’ Cut to the chase. Make the equal sign in a different color. Get their attention. One quick flash point that appeals to their conscience. Whatever else you have to say belongs in your petition.”

He was right and she knew it. They sat together for the rest of the day. A couple of grad students recognized him, and he insisted that they sign her petition. When she inquired, he told her who he was.

“You’re Miles Curtin! I read your article in the law review!” You’d have thought he was the next Dalai Lama. Whatever it is that you call it, she never really let go of it. The older folks might have said, “She worshipped the ground that he walked on.” Where she was concerned, “he was just about it.” On a bad day she never did more than question it, though she never stopped believing in him. But it’s impossible to put a name to “it.” It just is … until it isn’t.

The divorce wasn’t a soft landing for Miles. When he’d landed, he’d landed with a thud. Still, if there was one person he wanted to talk to about what was taking place, it would have had to have been Alice. He felt a profound sadness knowing that he couldn’t.

How is he going to tell Brenda?

It always brought a smile to his face when he recalled their first parents’ night at the Woodstock Elementary School. Her teacher told them what a wonderful child she was, but that she refused to recite the “Pledge of Allegiance” or to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This was news to them. She’d already lived in Woodstock for a year by then. But the teacher explained that she had insisted she was Canadian. It took another year and a whole lot of preaching from both her parents to instill a sense of good old American pride, to let her know what it meant to be an American: “The land of the free and the home of the brave.” Besides, Vietnam had never been Brenda’s war to fight and, in spite of themselves, he and Alice had kept it pretty much at bay. Miles knows that Brenda will be appalled. “How could this happen in America,” with tears to follow, is the response he expects.