For instance, in “The Last Stand,’’ Specialist Kit Murphy is, when he arrives back in the States, still getting used to the crutches he has to use after an improvised explosive device went off in his Humvee in Sadr City, killing a Sergeant Schaeffer whose body threw Kit’s against the side of the vehicle and shielded him from the flames until Kit could be pulled out. Throughout his tour in Iraq, Kit put himself to sleep by reciting lists at night, the longest of which was “All the Things at Home I Never Thanked My Wife For.’’ But when he returns, he finds that Helena is solicitous of his condition but no longer interested in being married to him, which prompts Kit to recall a soldier buddy who, three months into deployment, opened a package from home to find divorce papers underneath a bag of melted M&Ms. (This is the kind of pitch-perfect, unexpected detail Fallon renders so adeptly throughout the collection. In another story, “Camp Liberty,’’ an investment banker who enlists after the 9/11 terrorist attacks is struck when, searching among the belongings of his missing female Iraqi interpreter, he comes across a worn biography of Oprah Winfrey.)
Kit’s wife does indeed abandon him, and the story leaves him with the “certainty that Helena, that everything, was gone.’’ However, at one point we witness him summoning the fortitude to say to himself, “Something’s got to go right for me.’’ It takes some time, but in the final story of the book, “Gold Star,’’ we are privileged to witness that “something’’: This story is told from the perspective of Sergeant Schaeffer’s wife, Josie, who — having been contacted by Kit — invites him to lunch so that she can hear the story of how the IED killed her husband. Their final moment of connection and intimacy, constituting the final tableau of the collection, seems at once surprising and completely inevitable. It is a moment depicting grace under fire — not of mortar, but of the seemingly incessant fusillade of stress brought on by imaginary or real betrayals, not to mention the constant threat of being killed or receiving word that your loved one has been blown to bits halfway across the world.
