cousin Cap here was fighting for his life, for our lives and freedom and way of life, way off in the jungles of Vietnam. Fighting against the enemies of freedom, fighting against those who would see America and all it stands for wiped from the face of the earth. While we gentlemen were safe abed, to paraphrase, he put himself in danger every day, under fire every day, and one day last year all hell broke loose, and—well, we all know what happened that day. As of yesterday, the whole country knows what happened that day.”
The last traces of jocularity dissolve into the evening air, which has just begun to take on the bluish tinge of twilight.
I look down at my empty plate. My shadow is outlined on the gossamer porcelain.
“Cap,” says Frank gravely, from the other side of the table, and I close my eyes and see an unscarred Caspian, a pair of trustworthy shoulders in a shaft of May sunshine, drinking coffee from a plain white cup. “Cap, there’s no way to thank you for what you did that day. What you sacrificed. Medals are great, but they’re just a piece of metal, a piece of paper, a few speeches, and then everyone goes home and moves on to the next thing. We just want you to know—we, Cap, your family—we love you. We’re proud of you. We’re here tonight because of you, and whenever you need us, we’ll band up for you. The whole gang of us. Because that’s what we do, in this family. Cap? Come on, stand up here, buddy.”
I force myself to look up, because you can’t have Franklin Hardcastle’s wife and hostess staring down at her plate while Franklin Hardcastle polishes off the toast to the guest of honor.
Frank stands at the head of the table, and his arm climbs up and over the trustworthy shoulders of his cousin, who stares unsmiling and unfocused at a point somewhere behind me. “Cap. To you.” Frank clinks Caspian’s glass.
The chorus starts up again, hear hear and clink clink, and then Louis stands up and claps, and we all stand up and clap, until Caspian raises his wide brown hand and hushes us with a single palm.
“Thank you for coming here tonight,” he says, all gravel and syrup, vibrating my toes in their square-tipped aquamarine shoes. “Thank you, Tiny, for the superb dinner. Thanks for the speech, Frank, though I really don’t deserve it. We’re all just doing what we have to do out there. Nothing heroic about it. The real heroes are the men I left behind.”
He breaks away from Frank’s encircling arm and sits back down in his chair.
For some reason, I cannot breathe.
There are twenty-two people seated around the baronial dining room table of the Big House, and all of them are quiet: so quiet you can hear the teenagers squealing secrets by the pool, you can hear the bugs singing in the dune grass.
Until Constance’s husband, Tom, throws his napkin into his plate.
“Goddamn it,” he says. “I can’t take it anymore.”
“Tom!” snaps Constance.
“No. Not this time.” He turns and tilts his head, so he can see down the row of Hardcastle cousins and in-laws to where Caspian sits, staring at a bowl of hyacinths, as if he hasn’t heard a thing. “I’m sorry, I know you lost a leg and everything, and you probably believe in what you’re doing, God help you, but it’s fucking wrong to award a medal in my name—because I’m a citizen of this country, too, man. I’m an American, too—award a fucking medal for invading another country, a third world country, and killing its women and children just because they happen to want a different way of life than fucking capitalism.”
The silence, frozen and horrible, locks us in place.
“I see,” says Caspian, absorbed in the hyacinths.
Frank rises to his feet. His lips are hung in a politician’s smile, so slick and out of place it makes me wince. “Tom, why don’t you go back in the house and take a little breather, okay?”
“Oh, come on, Frank,” says Constance. “He’s allowed an opinion. Tom, you’ve had your say. Now calm down and let’s finish our dinner.”
Tom stands up, a little unsteady. “Sorry, Connie. I can’t do this. I can’t sit here and eat dinner with you people. You fat, satisfied pigs who give medals to fucking murderers—”
“Jesus, Tom!”
“Now, Tom …” I begin.
He turns to me and stabs a hole in the air between us with his rigid index finger. “And you. Sitting there in your pretty dress and your pretty face. You’re a smart girl, you should know better, but you just keep smiling and nodding like a pretty little fascist idiot so you can get what you want, so you can smile and nod in the fucking White House one day …”
Somewhere in the middle of this speech, Caspian wipes his mouth with his napkin and stands up, sending the chair tumbling to the stone rectangles behind him. He walks down the line of chairs and yanks Tom out of place by the collar. “Apologize,” he says.
The word is so low, I read it on his lips.
Tom’s face, looking up at Caspian, is full of vodka and adrenaline. “Why? It’s the truth. I can speak the truth.”
“I said. Apologize.”
Just before Tom replies, or maybe too late, I think: Don’t do it, Tom, don’t be an idiot, oh Jesus, oh Caspian, not again. I think, simultaneously, in another part of my head: Dammit, there goes dinner, and also: Should we try serving afterward or just put everything in the icebox for a cold buffet tomorrow at lunch?
“Oh, yeah? And what are you going to do if I don’t? Knock me out in front of everyone?”
Caspian lifts back a cool fist and punches him in the jaw.
Well, hell.
If it were just Caspian occupying that diner booth, he’d be on the guy’s ass in a second, two-bit potbellied crook waving a gun like that. Wearing a goddamned suit, for God’s sake, like he was a wiseguy or something.
But Tiny.
He reached across the table, grabbed her frozen hand, and slid the engagement ring off her finger and into his pocket. She was too shocked to protest. She stared at the crook, at flustered Em trying to open the cash drawer.
“Get down,” he muttered.
She turned her head to him. Her face was white.
“Get down!”
The man waved his gun. “Hey! Shut up back there!”
From underneath his mother’s protective body, the little boy started to cry.
“Shut that kid up!”
The boy cried louder, and the man fired his gun. The mother’s body slumped.
Em screamed, and the man lost his cool, flushing and sweating. “Shut up! Shut up!”
Em tried to dodge around him, to the mother on the floor covering her boy, but he grabbed her by the collar and held the gun to her forehead. “Nobody move, all right? Or the waitress gets it. You!” He nodded to the frozen-faced couple in the first booth. “Put your wallet on the table! Right there at the edge!”
Em squeaked. Looked right across the room at Cap and pleaded with her eyes.
Damn it all.
Cap reached for Tiny and shoved her bodily under the table. In the next second, he launched himself down the aisle toward the man, who spun around and hesitated a single fatal instant, trying to decide whether to shoot Cap or to shoot Em.
As Cap knew he would. Because only training—constant, immersive, reactive training—can counter the faults of human instinct.
Or