Darlene Huber had driven a boy to the Army once before, in the spring of 1969, with his duffel bag in the back seat and her hand on his knee the whole way down to Des Moines.
He'd been nineteen. She'd been eighteen. They'd been married for five weeks.
Fifty-eight years later, she backed her late husband's Buick out of the machine shed, wiped the dust off the windshield with a dish towel, and went to pick up her grandson.
Brayden had enlisted in June, two weeks after he graduated from high school. He'd walked into the kitchen at supper and set the papers on the table between the potato salad and the ham, and his mother had put down her fork and gone very quiet.
He was eighteen. He was six foot two, all elbows and appetite, and he'd never been farther from Garner, Iowa, than the state fair. He wanted to be a combat engineer.
He wanted to see something, he said. He wanted to do something that mattered.
His father, Darlene's son Rick, was proud and scared and didn't know how to say either one. Rick worked the night shift at the ethanol plant and couldn't get the day off. Brayden's mother, Jen, had told him she'd drive him down, and then admitted, crying in Darlene's kitchen two nights before, that she didn't think she could do it without falling apart in front of him.
"I'll take him," Darlene said.
"Mom, it's two hours. And you'd have to drive back alone."
"I've driven home from Des Moines alone before," Darlene said. "I know the way."
The recruiter had explained it all. Brayden would report to a hotel in Des Moines the evening before he shipped. In the morning, he'd go to the processing station for his last physical and paperwork, and take the oath, and that afternoon they'd put him on a plane for basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.
Darlene listened to all of it at Rick's kitchen table and didn't say much. Fort Leonard Wood. She hadn't heard anybody say those words out loud in a very long time.
That was where Duane had gone.
They left at two in the afternoon. Brayden had one small bag, because the recruiter had said they'd issue him everything else. His mother hugged him on the porch for a long time.
His little sister gave him a rock she'd painted with an American flag. His father had left for his shift, but there was a note on Brayden's pillow that he'd read in his room with the door shut.
Then he folded himself into the passenger seat of the Buick, and Darlene pulled out onto the county road, and they turned south.
It was the third week of October. The corn was half harvested, and the combines were working the fields on both sides of the road, throwing up long gold clouds of dust in the afternoon sun. The radio was on low.
For the first hour, Brayden talked. He talked about the Army the way boys talk about a thing they've read everything about on their phones. The obstacle course.
The rifle range. The gas chamber, which he said was supposed to be the worst day.
Darlene let him talk. She knew what talking was for.
Somewhere past Clear Lake, he ran out.
He sat with his hands between his knees and watched the fields go by. Darlene drove.
The Buick hummed along on the interstate. She thought of Duane, who'd bought it new in 2004 and kept it washed every Saturday until the week he went into the hospital.
"Grandma," Brayden said after a while. "Did Grandpa ever talk about basic?"
"Some," said Darlene. "He said the food was terrible and the sergeants were loud."
"That's what Dad says he said." Brayden turned the painted rock over in his fingers. "Dad said Grandpa was never scared of anything."
Darlene kept her eyes on the road.
"Is that what your dad said?"
"Yeah. He said Grandpa went to Vietnam and came back and never talked about it, and he was the toughest man in the county." Brayden laughed a little. "I'm not really like that."
Darlene didn't answer. She wasn't sure yet what she wanted to say.
They passed the Highway 20 interchange. The sun was lower now, coming in gold and slanting across the dashboard. A semi went by them on the left, throwing a little wind against the car.
Brayden was quiet for a long time. Then he spoke without looking at her.
"Grandma, can I tell you something, and you won't tell Mom?"
"Yes."
"I don't think I can do this."
His voice cracked on the last word, the way it hadn't since he was thirteen. He was staring straight ahead through the windshield, and his hands were clamped together between his knees so tight his knuckles were white.
"I've been thinking about it since June," he said. "I keep thinking I'm going to get there and I'm going to be the one who can't do it. Who quits. Who washes out and comes home, and the whole town knows." He swallowed hard. "I haven't slept in three days. I don't want to go. I want you to turn around and take me home."
Darlene put on her blinker.
She took the next exit, a county road with nothing on it but a grain elevator and a field of standing corn. At the bottom of the ramp, she turned right and pulled the Buick onto the gravel shoulder, and put it in park, and turned off the engine.
The wind moved in the corn. A pickup went by and the driver lifted two fingers off the wheel.
Brayden waited for her to say it. That he'd signed the papers.
That he'd made a promise. That he was a Huber, and Hubers didn't quit.
Darlene unbuckled her seat belt. She reached into her purse, and took out an old, yellowed envelope, soft as cloth from being handled, and set it on her knee.
"Your grandfather wasn't the toughest man in the county," she said. "And he was scared to death."