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boy up to his older brother, wiry arms clung to his neck like suckers. He peeled the runt away, but the arms came back and strangled him.
    He needed air. He needed to breathe. He opened his mouth.
    Nothing.

Chapter Three
    Grace came back. That surprised Cruz more than anything since he’d stepped on the mine. Today she brought a Canyon Fruit Cooperative box, or rather, she escorted the navy kid carrying the box for her and thanked him profusely.
    “Apps?” Sitting in his wheelchair felt and looked closer to normal, even if he couldn’t talk. He missed his legs, missed using the john like a man, missed more than he had imagined, but he could get through that. Soldiers did. The lost words were another matter, and he shivered, thinking these garbled sound-fragments might be his best effort. “Ah-pul-z?”
    “Cards, I think.” She heaved the container from the guest chair onto a table that shuddered under its weight. “I’m supposed to deliver them.”
    She picked at the tape with her nails, so he pointed to the butter knife on his breakfast tray, but he must be invisible.
    When he tried to maneuver around the foot of the bed to the side table, the Hummer-sized footrest raised to be level with his seat made it like driving a bicycle with an ottoman strapped to the front. His right front wheel locked on the bed frame, but he couldn’t see below the footrest to know whether to go forward or back. Stuck, like a low-rider on a parking barrier.
    The ripping tape irritated him. “Stop.”
    She didn’t hear, or didn’t pay attention, and kept picking at the package until he barked “knife” like a constipated drill instructor. Her hunched shoulders made him feel both guilty and pissed off, and he wanted to pound his forehead into the wall. Couldn’t hurt his brain much more, but he was too jammed to even manage self-injury. Idiot at the wheel.
    He lowered his voice and pointed at the breakfast tray and said “knife” again, but she didn’t turn. Maybe he hadn’t said what he’d intended.
    “I can’t do this.” She rested her elbows on the carton and cradled her head. “I have no idea why I’m here.”
    If spending an hour with him was too hard, then she could march her tight ass out the door. She was nice enough to look at, but she wasn’t his type. He could make it alone.
    Not one word left his mouth.
    “My sister in Pateros said your mother should get here today.” She walked to the knife without looking at him and started sawing the tape. “Do you want to unpack? Or shall I?”
    Hell, he’d been blown up last week and already done two hours of stretches and mat work with a physical therapist, and didn’t think he looked as exhausted as she did. “You.”
    After she stacked envelopes and cards across the foot of his bed, she lifted out a quilt. “This is beautiful apple-print fabric.” She hunted for a tag, the flush returning to her face. “We’ll have to check the cards to see who made it.”
    He didn’t see a
we
in this room, and he didn’t need a lap rug or someone talking down to him. What he did need was to pee from all the hydration they pushed in him, but he couldn’t use his jug with her oohing and ahhing over his card collection.
    “This is nice too.” She stretched her arms wide to show him a purple and gold Pateros High School banner. Hundreds of people had signed it, covering the fabric with wishes that for some corny reason made his eyes blurry. “Maybe I can loop it over the curtain rod.”
    The one-sided conversation continued while she climbed a chair to knot the corners.
    If she were his hometown sweetheart, it would be perfect, with her tight jeans at his eye level and her chatting about people they both knew, but they were strangers. She didn’t know him, so the reason she was here was pity—plain, simple pity. He’d earned respect, a Purple Heart and a pension, but not pity. He rejected patriotic do-gooder pity on principle.
    “You. Done.” The order came out clearly