A few feet from him, Deke Jarrell and Ramon Ruiz were playing chess, using a footlocker for a table. Two cots down, Joe Kelvin was listening to Workingman's Dead tape for the millionth time. "We've got some things to talk about..." the Grateful Dead sang, their harmonies too buoyant for the hot, murky air. A couple of guys sat on the plank floor, divvying up the contents of a plastic bag of weed.

Mail call had occurred three hours ago, but Bobby wasn't done with this letter yet. This letter and this photograph.

Labor wasn't bad, Joelle wrote. I had the midwife and all my housemates with me.

After he'd left for basic, she'd taken up residence in a house with a bunch of women. Bobby didn't get it, but she'd insisted the setup was perfect. They all chipped in on expenses, took turns cooking and watched out for one another. Two of the women were attending college full-time, and Joelle had managed to squeeze in a cla.s.s along with her hours as a teacher's aide at a nursery school. She'd told him how much she loved working with little children-a lucky thing, given that now she had her own little child to work with.

Her living arrangement sounded kind of like a hippie commune to him, with heavy overtones of feminism, but if it made her happy, he wouldn't complain. He actually liked the idea that she wasn't all alone, pregnant and struggling to make ends meet.

The midwife, however...Joelle had been ent.i.tled to hospitalization through the army, but she'd claimed that since her pregnancy was progressing well, she saw no reason not to give birth at the house with a midwife. He didn't approve, but he was twelve thousand miles away and couldn't do a h.e.l.l of a lot about it.

It didn't matter now. She'd delivered a healthy baby girl. A beautiful girl, as he could see in the photo one of the women she lived with had taken with her Polaroid camera. A girl Joelle had named after Bobby's mother.

"Hey, DiFranco, you wanna take the winner?" Ruiz called to him from the footlocker, where the chess game seemed to be racing toward checkmate.

"I'm a father," he called back. He couldn't think of anything else to say, anything that had meaning. The only words he seemed capable of p.r.o.nouncing were: I'm a father.

"Wow! No s.h.i.t?" Ruiz shouted above the eruption of voices.

"Hey, DiFranco!"

"Far out!"

"Girl or boy?"

"Watch it," Bobby warned as the guys jostled one another around his cot in order to view the photo. "Don't touch it. This is the only picture I have."

"Oh, man, she's a heartbreaker," one of the guys said, then sighed. Bobby wasn't sure if he was talking about Joelle or the baby.

"Pink. Must be a girl."

"Man, that thing is tiny! You sure it's not a doll?"

Bobby laughed. Someone slapped his right shoulder. Someone socked his left arm. "We need cigars. Go find Sergeant Weaver. He's always smoking those things."

"His cigars smell like t.u.r.ds, man."

"They look like t.u.r.ds, too."

"No cigar for me," Bobby said, raising the photo above his head, out of reach of the grasping fingers swatting at it. With his free hand, he groped in the breast pocket of his T-shirt and pulled out his cigarettes. "Here, who wants these?"

"That ain't no cigar," Deke complained.

"I'm not smoking anymore," Bobby said. "I'm quitting. Do something with these." He tossed the pack at Deke. "Give 'em away or smoke 'em yourself."

"Hey, gimme one of those," Ruiz demanded, and the swarm abandoned Bobby's cot for Deke's, where they wrestled for possession of his cast-off smokes.

No more cigarettes for Bobby. No more weed. No more sips of that swill Schenk kept in a rusty canteen-Bobby had no idea what that stuff was or where Schenk got it, but it smelled like paint thinner and knocked a guy flat on his a.s.s after one good swallow.

Bobby wasn't going to drink that stuff anymore. He was a father now. He had to live right, be strong-be the man his own father had never been. He had to keep his lungs healthy, his body whole, his mind clear.

He had to stay alive. He had to get through the boredom and the terror, the steamy days and the sticky nights, the explosions and the even scarier silence. He had to survive, because there was a baby girl waiting for him back in America.

JOELLE AND BOBBY HADN'T discussed names for the baby-just one of many things they hadn't discussed-but names were important. Joelle had written him a letter a couple of months ago in which she'd asked if he had any preferences. Two weeks later she'd heard back from him, a single tissue-thin sheet of paper telling her about how muddy the base was from all the rain they'd been having.

She'd grown used to his ignoring her questions. Some of them he probably couldn't answer-"What is your mission? Is it dangerous?" Some he likely didn't want to answer-"The newspapers report that everyone's doing lots of drugs over there. Is that true?" He'd developed the habit of writing whatever was on his mind rather than responding to the issues she'd raised.

With no input from Bobby, she was on her own in naming the baby. If she had a boy, would Bobby like her to name him Robert Junior? She couldn't imagine naming a boy Louie, after Bobby's father, since Bobby hated his dad. Nor would she name a son Dale after her own father. She loved the name Michael, but would Bobby approve?

Boys' names went forgotten when, after ten hours of labor-which had seemed like a century to her, but the midwife said was quite fast, especially for a first child-Joelle gave birth to a perfect little girl. Surrounded by her housemates in the rickety old Victorian a mile from the Rider College campus, Joelle wept as the midwife placed the damp, squirming infant in her arms. Gazing into that scrunchy pink face crowned by a tuft of pale hair, she murmured, "Claudia." The baby gazed back at her, and Joelle swore she saw a smile on those puckered little lips.

Bobby's mother had never made a vivid impression on Joelle. Claudia DiFranco had been a vague presence in the background when Joelle was playing in Bobby's backyard, a tangled lot of weeds and scruffy shrubs and old tires that had seemed like a magical world compared with the tiny, fenced-in square of yellowing gra.s.s behind her own duplex. Bobby's backyard had trees to climb and junk to explore, room to move-and his front yard had a bathtub shrine.

Occasionally Mrs. DiFranco would stick her head out the kitchen door and say, "How about some cookies?" As they clambered up the back-porch steps, she'd say, "Wipe your feet before you come in." That was pretty much the sum of Joelle's contact with her.

The winter Joelle and Bobby were in sixth grade, his mother grew gaunt and her skin appeared waxy. "She's got cancer," Bobby confided to Joelle. "Don't tell anyone." Joelle wasn't sure why he should keep his mother's illness a secret, but she honored his request.

Claudia DiFranco died in May. With her death, Bobby's secret became public knowledge. Dozens of sixth-graders showed up at St. Mary's Catholic Church for the funeral. Bobby sat in the front pew with his father and his younger brother, Eddie, three sad, solemn figures in dark jackets and ties. Bobby's and Eddie's cla.s.smates filled the rear half of the church. Some cried openly. Joelle wondered if they could possibly have known Bobby's mother better than she did, but then she realized those kids were crying because they were thinking of their own mothers, of how horrible it would be to lose a mother to cancer.

Bobby missed a few days of school afterward, and when he finally showed up, no one dared to mention his mother. Joelle asked once how he was doing and he said fine, but his tone was clipped and forbidding. It was clear he didn't want to talk about his mother and his grief, and Joelle would never press him. In art cla.s.s, she painted a sunset with watercolors and gave it to him, hoping it would cheer him up. He took it and said thanks, and then never mentioned it again.

One night at around ten, just days after school had ended for the summer, Joelle heard a tapping on her window screen. Her room was dark, the air too hot and stagnant for her to fall asleep. She'd been lying in bed, listening to the cricket song through her open window and wondering if she might die from the heat.

She heard the tapping again. She sat up, glanced toward the window and saw a shadow through the thin voile curtains, Bobby's silhouette backlit by the moon. "JoJo?" he whispered.

"Yeah, I'm up." She slid out of bed, tiptoed to the window and drew open the curtains. She didn't care if Bobby saw her in her nightgown. It fell nearly to her knees, and besides, this was Bobby, not some creepy boy who'd go around boasting that he'd seen Joelle Webber in her nightie. Not that there was anything worth seeing. She was skinny and flat chested, her arms and legs too long and her hips nonexistent.

Through the screen she heard Bobby breathing hard, as if he'd run all the way from his house. Once her vision adjusted to the gloom, she made out his face. His eyes were wild, his T-shirt stained. Who washed his clothes now that his mother was dead?

"I'm in big trouble," he confessed. "I have to run away."

Forcing herself to keep her voice as soft as his, she asked, "What happened?"

"I hit my dad. I...I hurt him, Jo."

"Oh, G.o.d."

"I didn't want to." A sob seemed to clog Bobby's throat, but he wasn't crying. Just struggling to get the words out. "He was beating on Eddie. I couldn't let him do that."

"Why was he beating on Eddie?"

"I don't know. He was drunk and Eddie's little. I was just trying to get him to stop. I think I broke his nose. Or maybe worse." In the silver moonlight, she glimpsed the shine of tears in his eyes. "There was blood everywhere. If they catch me, I'll go to jail."

"No, you won't," Joelle promised. As if she was any kind of a legal expert. "You were just protecting your brother."

"When my mom was around, he didn't touch us. She wouldn't let him."

Bobby had never before told Joelle that his father was violent. He'd mentioned that his father liked to drink, that he usually started getting loaded when he arrived home from work-unless he went straight from work to the Dog House Tavern and got loaded there-and his temper would flare and his mother would steer him into the bedroom to cool off, or he'd fall asleep in front of the TV. But she'd never heard anything about beatings.

"We don't have my mom anymore." Bobby was still breathing hard-from his emotions, probably. He should have recovered from his run by now. "She used to protect us. If they arrest me, who's gonna protect Eddie?"

"They won't arrest you," Joelle insisted. "You're just a kid. And anyway, all you have to do is tell them he was beating your brother."

"Then they'll take us away from him and put us in an orphanage or something."

Joelle wondered if that might not be an improvement over living with a father who beat his kids. But she didn't want Bobby sent away-either to jail or to an orphanage-because he was her best friend. "Is your father still at your house?"

"I don't know."

"Maybe you should go back and find out if he's okay. Maybe he wasn't hurt as bad as you think."

"He was hurt bad. There was so much blood...What if I killed him? I can't go back there. The police could be waiting for me."

She thought some more. He looked so scared. "I'll go with you," she resolved. "You can hide while I try to find out what's happening. If the police are there, we'll figure out what to do then."

"Okay."

"Close your eyes," she ordered him, then hurried across her room to her closet and removed her nightgown. She trusted Bobby not to look.

She donned a pair of shorts, a T-shirt and her canvas sneakers. Then she crept back to the window and unhooked the screen. Bobby hinged it away from the window frame so she could climb out. The moonlight struck the back of his right hand. His knuckles were swollen and bruised.

How hard had he hit his father? What if he really had killed him?

She refused to consider that possibility. After nudging the screen back into place, she and Bobby scrambled over the fence and through the adjacent backyard and the one after that, down an alley and across another tiny yard. They couldn't risk showing their faces out on the street at this hour.

Bobby's house was only a few blocks away. No police cars lined the road. The driveway held only Bobby's father's old truck, with its dented rear fender and rust scabs and bug-crusted windshield.

They sneaked past the truck and around to the backyard. Bright yellow light spilled through the kitchen windows and the screen door and voices could be heard-Bobby's father and another man. Please, not a cop, Joelle silently prayed.

Bobby hunkered down in the shadows of an overgrown forsythia while Joelle inched closer to the back porch, straining to make out what the men were saying. She heard a burst of laughter. If Bobby had hurt his father that badly, he and the other man wouldn't be laughing, would they?

She crouched as she approached the porch, then straightened enough to spy through the vertical slats in the railing. "So, I'm thinking that sumb.i.t.c.h owes me a raise, one way or the other," Bobby's father was saying. "I work harder than he does, don't I? So-Ouch! No more ice."

"It'll keep the swelling down," the other man said.

"The h.e.l.l with it." She heard the thump of a gla.s.s against the table.

Gripping the railing, she inched higher, hoping to peek through the window. Unfortunately Bobby's father saw her as soon as she saw him. His nose was covered with white gauze and tape. "What the h.e.l.l?" he muttered, rising from the kitchen table and crossing to the porch, his friend right behind him. Both men wore sweat-stained undershirts and work pants worn to a shine at the knees and frayed at the hems. Both were unshaven, and both had tousled hair. Louie DiFranco also had a puffy cheek and a purpling eye and all that bandaging on his nose. "Who is that?" he demanded, swinging open the screen door.

Joelle hadn't heard Bobby come up behind her, but he said, "It's me, Dad. Me and Joelle Webber."

"Bobby?" Louie seemed to falter for a moment. Then he managed a feeble smile. "What are you doing out this late? Ya missed all the excitement, buddy."

"Your daddy walked into a door," his friend said, then laughed. "Looks like the door won, huh?"

Bobby and Joelle exchanged a glance. Apparently Bobby's father hadn't told his friend how his face had gotten busted up. If he wouldn't tell his friend, he sure wasn't going to tell the police.

"It's kinda late for you kids to be running around, don't you think?" Louie asked. "A little past your bedtime?"

More than a little. "I gotta take her home," Bobby told his father. "Then I'll go to bed."

Something flickered across Louie's face-anger, maybe resentment that Bobby hadn't apologized for being out late and then meekly entered the house. Maybe fear. But he said, "Fine, you take your friend home and then you get your b.u.t.t up those stairs and into bed."

Neither Bobby nor Joelle spoke as they walked back to her house. No need to run-Joelle's mother never checked up on her after she went to bed, and now that they knew Bobby's father hadn't called the cops, the urgency of the night had vanished. Bobby hadn't killed his father, he wasn't going to jail and in all likelihood no one but Bobby, his father, his brother and Joelle would ever know what had happened that night. The rest of the world would be snickering about the night Louie DiFranco drank too much and collided with a door.

Unlike the DiFranco house, the first-floor Webber apartment was dark and quiet when they reached Joelle's bedroom window. Bobby jiggled the screen loose from the frame, then let his hands drop to his sides and turned to Joelle. "Thanks."

His voice had deepened this past year. It was still a boy's voice, but lower and thicker than it used to be. When he whispered, he sounded almost like a man.

"Will you be okay?" she asked.

He nodded, but his eyes said no. Joelle opened her arms and he let her hug him. Surrounded by the hot summer air, the screech of crickets and buzz of mosquitoes, she held him tight. She felt his rib cage and spine right through his shirt, through his skin. His shoulders had begun to widen, but he was only an inch or so taller than her, and not much broader.

She couldn't tell if he was crying. She hoped he was. He needed to and he didn't have to be embarra.s.sed in front of her. She would never tell anyone.

For a long time they just held each other. Eventually he leaned back. His cheeks were damp, and she knew if she touched her hair she'd feel his tears in the strands. "I miss my mom," he murmured, his voice hoa.r.s.e.

"Of course you do."

He let out a broken sigh. "She wasn't-you know, beautiful or funny and she didn't talk a lot, but...She believed in me."

"I believe in you."

He searched her face, then turned to stare at the moon. "Sometimes I don't know how I'm gonna survive without her."

"You're strong, Bobby," Joelle a.s.sured him. "You'll survive."

"What if my dad starts in again?"

"You're almost as big as he is," Joelle pointed out. "He can't push you and Eddie around. You showed him that tonight."

"He breaks things," he told her. "When he gets mad, he breaks things."

"They're just things. As long as he doesn't break you and Eddie, you'll be okay." She reached up to wipe a stray tear from his cheek. He ducked his head away, but not quickly enough to avoid her touch. His skin was warm and fuzzy, like suede. In another year or two, he'd be shaving. "If he tries to hurt you or Eddie, grab Eddie and come here. We'll figure out what to do."

"This isn't your problem."

She shook her head. "I'm your friend, Bobby. That's all that matters."

He peered down at her. Another tear streaked down to his chin, and she brushed her hand against his face. "Yeah," he murmured, then lifted the screen. "You better go in."

She hoisted herself over the windowsill. Bobby held the screen in place while she hooked it shut inside. Then he sprinted across the small backyard to the fence and vaulted over it.

She stood at her window, watching the night outside. The dampness of Bobby's tears lingered on her palm.

GAZING AT THE SQUIRMING bundle of pink in her arms, she remembered that night. Bobby never mentioned his father hitting him or Eddie again, but sometimes she'd sensed a tension in him. And every now and then, when they were hanging out at the A&W or some other place, he'd have Eddie with him. No explanation, no discussion about why a kid three years their junior was tagging along. Joelle suspected that those were nights when Bobby's father had drunk too much and was breaking things.

She had learned that night how much Bobby's mother had meant to him. Maybe the woman had been quiet, maybe she'd made no more of an impression on Joelle than a pa.s.sing breeze, but she'd protected Bobby and his brother. She'd kept them safe for the years it took Bobby to grow up, to become big enough to fight back. Joelle didn't really believe in guardian angels, but if they existed, she liked to think Claudia DiFranco was watching over Bobby now, keeping him safe while he faced dangers greater than his father's fists.