You're Working On It

"At the Army hospital they would have called me a, uh, weenie for doing this." I smile at my mom. We both know I'm keeping my language in check around her.

"Well, no one thinks you're a weenie or whatever for using the banister here."

I am three steps up the stairway in our house, both hands on the sleek wooden banister. My mother is enjoying being a mother again, bringing me breakfast in bed, ticking off the exercises as I go through the daily routine in our backyard. This is the final box to be checked off the list. When I make it up the stairs without the banister, the muscle tissue in my left calf will have regenerated and grown strong enough that I can re-enlist. My mom wants to keep me on the banister as long as possible.

"You can't rush a miracle," she says and pinches my unshaven cheek.

Once a week I have to strip down in front of her so she can measure the circumference of my upper-thigh, mid-thigh, upper-calf, mid-calf, lower-calf, ankle. She ticks them off and scribbles numbers on the form for Dr. Cole. Then she massages the calf, which hurts like hell, and tells me the same story about the time my father fell off the tractor and she thought she lost him for good.

"There's no tractors in Iraq, mom," I say. Which is not entirely true.

"But there are mines."

"Really?" I roll my eyes.

I hate this. I miss the sun baking the back of my neck while I lay still like a sunning lizard behind a brick wall that used to be a school. I miss watery chicken at night and sour orange juice in the morning. I miss sneezing red dust into the elbow of my khaki shirt. I miss maps and my gun.

I do the exercises, pretending to be patient, so I can get it all back.