Read The UnAmericans: Stories for Free Online Page B

back to the car for his duffel. “What are you looking at?”
    “Nothing.” I wanted to stare at him for a long time, but looked at the ground instead.
    He tried to tip himself back to get through the open screen door, but the wheels banged against the raised wood I only now noticed separated the porch from the kitchen. He grunted and pushed again, but the wheelchair didn’t budge. “Here,” I said, reaching for the arms, “let me help.” But he swatted my hand away, and for a minute I just stood there, listening to the wheels hit the threshold over and over.
    Behind us, people trickled up the driveway, carrying foil-wrapped cookies and cakes. Dedy and the neighbors were here again, along with high school classmates Asaaf probably hadn’t thought about in years. I’d made a dozen family visits like this one—earlier this month, even, when a soldier from the moshav had been wounded in a raid on his base—and knew to wheel Asaaf to his room and stay out of the way while the guests lined up to see him. But every one of them came forward and slapped my back and asked about the drive—and as I stood beside his bed, the only thing stopping me from holding court all day was knowing I’d seem even more impressive if I didn’t.
    As the crowd shuffled into his room I followed my mother, hoping to be of use. She moved quickly, making sure guests’ glasses were filled and then rushing outside to pull our good napkins and tablecloth from the clothesline. She’d always been this kind of worker, quick and impatient, and I saw it reflected throughout our house: in the sagging shelves filled with paperbacks and my father’s old Yehoram Gaon records; in the herbs she repotted in anything she could find, coffee cans or olive oil tins. It felt good working as a team, and for the first time she didn’t seem annoyed as I trailed behind her: handing me cucumbers to dice into a salad, asking me to drag over the picnic benches from the groves so there was enough seating in our yard.
    When I checked on Asaaf, he was in bed with the guests all around him. His bandaged leg was propped on a pillow and hidden beneath a blanket. The shades were up, and his bedside table, which a few days ago had held gum wrappers and cigarettes and keys, was now cluttered with orange prescription bottles and rolls of gauze.
    “It’s good it was below the knee,” Dedy, self-proclaimed expert on everything, was saying.
    “Better for the prosthesis,” Yael said. She twisted her long dark hair into a braid and curled up beside Asaaf. I had no idea how she could seem so unfazed. Maybe it was hearing guns fired all day as a shooting instructor in the army, or maybe she was just tougher than I’d thought.
    “And that won’t be a problem,” Asaaf said. “I’ll be so bored by tomorrow I’ll be doing laps around the house.” This was the solid, capable tone he always used in public, but when he sat up to face the group, his blanket slid off. Everyone stood there, silently rocking back on their heels, looking as if they wanted to leave but didn’t know if they should. They all had to know what a bandaged leg looked like, and anyway there was nothing to see, just that sweatpant leg pinned back. But still they stared, and suddenly the last place I wanted to be was in that room, so I slipped out the front door.
    Outside the moshav gates, the brown roads were almost desolate: just a few kids selling sunflowers at the bus stop. Sheep huddled together in the open yellow field, as if desperate for contact, and above them, far beyond, ran the long barbed fence tracing the Syrian border. Being in these hills reminded me of all the days Asaaf and I spent playing out here as boys. Other times it made me miss a part of my life I couldn’t even remember, before I lost my father to a mine while he was on reserve duty, almost twenty years ago. I imagined a different mother then, sleepy and smiling, leaning into my father’s knees like in the photos she kept shelved