Letter to My Daughter by George Bishop Page A

during the summer, he’d write care of his dad’s shop in town.
    “Got one right here,” Jack would say, turning around to pick up a letter from his desk behind the counter. I could tell he looked forward to my visits. While I sat in a chair to read Tim’s news, Jack leaned on the counter watching me, the sun angling in through the junked TVs and radios piled on shelves against the shop window. If I laughed aloud or otherwise reacted in some way, he snapped up his eyebrows. “What? What’d he say?” Then we would share what we knew of Tim and his life in Vietnam, which, in the letters that came that first summer, still sounded like one big Boy Scout adventure.
    He’d been assigned to an airmobile radio research team, Tim wrote. He figured he wasn’t revealing any army secrets to tell us his job basically entailed him and another guy driving out into a field with a radio mounted on a jeep to try and locate enemy transmitters. “Translate that to me sitting hunched over the receiver all day while Patterson, a guy who’s got one more patch on his shirt than me, lies in the hammock strumming his guitar and getting a suntan.” While they were out snooping on the North Vietnamese Army, they lived off Coca-Cola and C rations, which weren’t so bad really after you heated them up on the exhaust manifold of the jeep. Franks and beans for dinner, bananas cooked in their skins with Hershey chocolate for dessert. Sleeping out under the stars—just like camping out. Most times it was hard to believe there was even a war on. Everywhere you looked it was just farms and fields and dirt roads, with little kids who followed you around like ducks, and everything quiet as a Sunday afternoon in Zachary. Only difference was, in Zachary you didn’t have choppers flying overhead, or military convoys tearing past, or fire-fights that boomed and lit up the night sky over the hills like thunder and lightning before a hurricane. Lucky for him he never had to get too close to the fighting; they just hung back and diddled with their radios. He hadn’t even fired his rifle yet, which was just fine with him, Tim wrote, because then he’d have to take it apart and clean it, which was a real pain in the A.
    Jack chuckled, shaking his head. “Man oh man. Army life sure seems to suit the boy, doesn’t it?”
    Sometimes Jack and I scribbled responses to Tim on the back of a repair order form, trading wisecracks in writing. “You better get on home. Your girl’s got a dozen beaux circling her!” Jack wrote.
    “Don’t listen to Jack,” I wrote below that. “Your girl doesn’t have any beaux circling her. But she does miss you and wish you were here. Be safe.”
    At times like these I felt closer to the Prejeans than to my own family, and was reminded of why I fell in love with Tim in the first place. His life seemed so honest and simple that a girl couldn’t help but want to be a part of it.
    •   •   •
    The big surprise that summer, though, had nothing to do with Tim and the war in Vietnam. It was a phone call. One sleepy afternoon my mother hollered for me to come quick to the kitchen.
    “It’s a boy,” she said when I came through the doorway, her face a screwed-up look of expectancy and sourness. After I took the phone, she stood there watching.
    “Laura?”
    “Who’s this?”
    “Chip.”
    I glared at my mother until she left the kitchen. Then I turned toward the wall so I could talk, my heart beating a little faster than it should have been.
    Chip had run into Kim Cortney in town the day before and thought he’d give me a call. A bunch of them from school were planning to get together at his house that Friday night, he said—no big deal, shoot some pool, hang out, maybe go swimming. He knew it was a long drive from Zachary, but hey, if I was in town …
    He gave me directions. A big white house right on LSU lake, easy to find. Didn’t matter if I couldn’t play pool, he said. He’d teach me. No