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Scout outside to go “good boy.” My leg ached tonight, as it often did with the rain. A below-knee amputee was shorthand for my condition. The IED that blew up my leg took my buddy Allen’s life. As a lieutenant colonel, I didn’t have to be on patrol with the guys, but I was. That was the part Lucy had the hardest time with: not that I had come home wrapped like a mummy, but that I was reckless.
    I let Scout back in and had just checked the locks when I heard Kate crying. Weeping more than crying—the low, awful hum of my kid hurting. I crutched my way down the hall and poked my head into her bedroom. Kate was a real toughie, so hearing her cry hit me particularly hard.
    I sat on the edge of her bed, smoothed the blanket on her back. “What’s wrong, Kate?”
    “Nothing.” She stopped crying at the sight of me, wiped her eyes. “Just the usual.”
    “Tell me,” I said. This first year of middle school had been an eye-opener. Girls we’d known since kindergarten had turned mean over the summer.
    Kate backhanded her tears and turned to me. “Stupid stuff. I sat next to Anna. She got up and scooted down, so I scooted down, too. Then she yelled at me, ‘Why are you following me? I’m trying to save a spot for my best friend!’”
    “Oh, honey.”
    “Whatever,” Kate said. “I was just scooting down.”
    Little brat, I thought, but of course didn’t say. “Girls can be cruel at this age,” I said. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
    “I’m sorry that happened to you,” she said, patting my reconstructed knee.
    “Can you stay for a minute?” She moved toward the wall and I slid in next to her. We both stared at the ceiling with our arms crossed over our chests, saying nothing.
    Just a year ago, Kate didn’t care about all this girl drama. She was the happy-go-lucky kid who marched to the beat of her own drum, not worrying that her interests weren’t mainstream, happier to read Anne Frank than to listen to Katy Perry on her iPod.
    But then she started middle school, and rather than being satisfied with who she was, she found herself tormented by the attention drawn to her by differences she’d never even perceived before. Some days were fine, then others she realized—more like, she remembered—that she was not quite like the other girls. The girls who made friends so easily, ran in packs, paired up. And poor Kate just couldn’t find her way in. She was made differently than the other girls were, and what she was made of didn’t interest them.
    I stifled the urge to give her advice. This is what you need to do, Kate . . . I couldn’t help it—I was the dad, a guy, and my impulse, my job, was to fix things, even though I knew that that wasn’t what this called for. Just be there for her, my wife—correction, soon-to-be- ex -wife—would say. What about you, Lucy? I’d want to scream. Why weren’t you there for her? A thirteen-year-old daughter needed her mother.
    “I can’t do it anymore,” Lucy had said less than a year ago. “I’ve been a wife and a mother. A marine wife,” she clarified, “and Joe, I’ve had enough. Enough .” When she said the second enough , she cut her hand through the air for emphasis, like drawing a line in the sand.
    Only days later, she accepted a job working as an event planner for an international law firm, setting up conferences and award trips all over the world.
    “Kate’s at risk, Lucy,” I told her when she called the other day. “Middle school is a real battleground for her.”
    “Well, battlegrounds are your specialty,” she said, throwing me under the bus. Lucy took every opportunity to indict me for deploying for my third tour, as if it were voluntary, as if it were my choice to return to Afghanistan. I didn’t have a choice, but Lucy thought I should have tried harder to fight the system. As far as she was concerned, I chose the Marines over my family, and because of it, I lost my leg, lost time, lost years of our children’s