I never did get the whole story of Fallujah, and I have stopped wanting it, because I understand now that the story was never the point.

For thirty years my father had carried whatever he carried, and he had chosen, with all of it behind him, to become a man who fixed engines and fed stray cats and spoke softly and disappeared into the background of his own life.

As a girl I had read that quietness as ordinariness — had even, in my teenage years, been a little embarrassed by it, wished my father were louder, more impressive, more like the fathers who filled rooms.

It took Gerald Beaumont vomiting into a hospital trash can to teach me what I had been looking at my whole life.