Dear Kurl,
Your brother Mark is almost exactly how I’d pictured him from your description, except his curly hair is cut short now, and he is extremely, shockingly thin. Did you even know Mark dropped by your house the morning after I slept over? He said he was waiting on a VA check and hoped it had been delivered there by mistake. You didn’t wake up until after he’d left, Kurl, and I don’t think I remembered to tell you about his visit. Mark was surprised to see me playing the mando at your kitchen table, of course—fear not, I was fully dressed except for my socks—but I simply told him I’d been over the night before helping you prep for the SAT, and you’d fallen asleep midway through the session. I think he was more taken aback by the notion of you planning to take the SAT than by the notion of me helping you, although he did ask how old I am.
I will admit I was a little nervous, talking to your brother. Thanks to the mandolin, though, the conversation moved swiftly to music. Mark told me about this banjo player named Davey at one of the bases in Afghanistan who taught everyone to sing “I’ll Fly Away” in four-part harmony. Kurl, did you know that your brother learned to play harmonica over there? “I did a mean little solo on that song,” he said. Sometimes they were ordered to patrol on amber status, and everyone would be so nervous they’d beg Mark to take out his harmonica just to break the tension. “Can you picture us idiots? Strolling around a combat zone playing the harmonica?”
I asked him what amber status meant.
“Cold weapons,” he said. “The magazine is loaded, but the safety is on and there’s no round chambered.”
I thought of your letters about ambushes, surprise attacks, suicide bombers, and I found myself wondering whether guns would have been any help to Mark and his friends at all, in an explosive attack.
“So did you do it?” I said. “Play the harmonica on patrol?”
“Yep.” He didn’t smile, exactly, but I thought he sounded proud.
I better go walk this down to the mailbox, since the pickup time posted on it is 5 p.m. I looked up your zip code online, and I think Lyle has stamps somewhere in the basket above the fridge. I wonder if you’ll even receive this letter before Christmas, given the holiday postal crunch. We really are authentic pen pals now, aren’t we, Kurl?
Yours,
Jo