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must have—especially with all the liars running around VFW halls bragging about what heroes they’d been.
    A town this size, especially nestled away in a cove of its own, word gets around. Even if the “word” is all wrong. I had been inside Vietnam, all right, but long after the last American soldier had pulled out.
    “Did you ever kill anyone?” That’s their favorite question.
    I always tell them the truth and lie with the same words. “Yes,” I would always tell them, “but that’s what war is. I never killed anyone who wasn’t trying to kill me.”
    That was true for a lot of places I’ve worked. But after La Légion, I never wore a uniform. Dog tags would have been nothing more than extra weight. I wouldn’t have known what to put on them, anyway.
    “Does it make you mad when people say they’re against the war?” they’d want to know. They meant that mess in Iraq—the one that spilled back over from Afghanistan, and was on its way back there now. Some of their relatives had told them stories, about how it hurt them to come home after fighting for their country, only to be hated for doing it.
    “No,” I’d always tell them. “That’s got nothing to do with me.” And that part was the truth.
    “My father says Jane Fonda was a traitor,” one of them said once. I could see he was trying to get me going.
    “I can see where he’d think that,” I answered, calm and mild-voiced.
    “But do
you
think that?” one of the girls asked. At that age, they’re a lot sharper than boys.
    “It’s not people like me who matter,” I told them. “It’s people like you.”
    “How come?”
    “Because the only way anyone listens to someone like Jane Fonda is when people treat them like they’re important. If someone’s a big enough celebrity, journalists ask them questions aboutstuff they don’t know anything about, because fans want to know what their … idol, or whatever they’re called … what they think. About anything.
    “Jane Fonda was never a soldier. She wasn’t a political scientist, or a historian. And she sure was no expert on Southeast Asia. But if she calls a press conference, everybody shows up. That’s all that happened.”
    “That’s true!” one of the other girls said, backing me up. A tough-looking little freckle-face with big owl glasses, she looked like she was used to standing her ground. “Once I saw Britney Spears on TV. They were asking her about global warming. I’ll bet her idea of global warming is when the air-conditioning breaks.”
    I’d caught a glimpse of Dolly smiling at me over the girl’s shoulder. I still treasure how that made me feel.
    T he morning after the day I found Alfred Hitchcock, I told Dolly I was driving over to the city. There’s always some different things I need for my projects, and she knows I’d never buy anything over the Internet. I asked her if she wanted me to bring back anything for her, and she said what she always does: “A surprise!”
    So I’d stopped at the nursery first, picked up a whole mess of stuff for Dolly. A couple of gay guys own the place, Martin and Johnny. They’re nuts about Dolly. I’m not sure how they feel about me, but that doesn’t matter. Not to them; not to me.
    I never ask for anything in particular; they just load up whatever they think Dolly might like. We’ve got all kinds of lilies growing in big tubs I made out of cut-down barrels. I put some PVC to work as a liner and drilled a few drainage holes—and Dolly did the rest. We’ve got purple and white lilacs, too—what Dolly calls a butterfly bush. The fuchsia is reserved for the hummingbirds. Weeven have some black bamboo—thin, strange-looking stalks, not the heavier ones I’d been so scared of falling into a long time ago.
    I got Dolly some new orchids, for inside the house. Those were my own idea. I know I should have left the nursery stop for last, to keep everything fresh. But I had to get Dolly’s surprise out of the way,