A banner with the words "Happy 70th" emblazoned red on white greeted Dan Lapp when he stepped onto the back porch, the screen door behind him shutting with a gentle clap. He put his hands on the splintered railing. Not much of a porch, he thought. Nothing like the dream house he's always wanted. No wrap-around veranda. No rocking chairs in the front, comfortable lounges in the back, and a yard large enough for a pint-sized softball game.

He swallowed his regrets. Marge, his wife of 48 years, often suggested, he should be content with what he'd achieved. 

He watched his grandchildren play in the fenced-in yard. A two-year-old girl scuffed her shoes against a decorative stone walkway. Three boys tossed a softball to one another. The twelve-year-old bossed his two younger cousins, pointing to where they should stand, making up rules for a game.

His grown sons sat at a card table, beer cans in their hands. They watched their kids, watched their wives and their mother chatting. Dan waited for everyone to notice him.

A body drifted into his line-of-sight. Christina, his youngest. The girl who used to be his Christy, but who became someone he acknowledged only by her formal name, as though she was someone else' daughter.

He didn't smile at her and she didn't smile at him. Too many words had been said and, Marge claimed, Christina was embarrassed, didn't know how to apologize. Long gone were the days when the little girl climbed into her father's lap begging forgiveness for some slight she'd committed, some childish infraction. Sometimes Dan hugged her and forgave. Sometimes he punished her out of anger or fear or some other emotion brought on by her behavior.

When Christina ran away at age 17 and returned weary and scared and pregnant, there was no punishment Dan could think of that might erase what had happened. He forgave.

"She's our youngest," Marge often said in those days 22 years in the past whenever they discussed the girl. "Our little one."

Looking at her now as she crossed the width of the yard, her bare feet scraping the dirt, Dan told himself he hadn't destroyed what they'd had. He hadn't railed at her or accused her of anything. He hadn't berated her. He even tried to love the grandson she gave him, the boy she named Jordan.

"I'm not to blame," Dan once told her when she snapped at him about what had happened to Jordan, about the tragedy that he became.

Private Jordan Ladd, his face reflecting the sharp features Christina said came from the boy's father, a man she never named, whose picture she never showed to anyone. Dan wondered if his daughter looked into her son's gray eyes and searched for the lover she once had, the man who abandoned her.

In his army uniform, Jordan looked young and eager, much as Dan thought he himself looked when he, like Jordan, was an 18-year-old recruit.

He felt Christina watching him, her eyes boring into him. He couldn't forget what was said, when, distraught and confused about the future, she'd lashed out two years ago.

"It's your fault, Dad," she'd shouted at him. Now, he sensed, two years after that event, she still screamed, still cried, but with sullen glares, angry glances, or no look at all.  

"Your fault! You filled his head with all those stories, those stories of yours, stories, nothing but stories. Made yourself some kind of hero, the great warrior. That's what you were in Jordan's eyes. A warrior. A big deal. Some kind of... of..."

Incoherent words sputtered from her lips.

"But what did you ever do? You never went to war. You never even left the country. You did -- what, Dad? Drove a bus on base? Why, Dad? Why'd you do this to him?"

"They were just stories," he said in defense. "Barracks stuff. Funny stuff. I never made anything up. Jesus. I didn't mean.... I didn't want... I didn't."

"Fuck you, Dad. Fuck you."

He slapped her.

"Fuck you anyway," she said, her cheek red where his palm had touched with enough force to leave a mark.

Now, looking at her with her mother and her sisters-in-law, Dan wondered what she couldn't forgive. The slap, or what she considered his contrivance that sent her teenaged son into a raging desert war.

He looked at the chubby woman in bare feet, jeans rolled up past her thick ankles, her hair tied with a checkered blue and white bandanna, and he didn't recognize the child she'd once been, this Christine who used to be his Christy.

He gripped the porch railing. He looked at his feet stuffed into moccasins. The floorboards he stood on wobbled. His gaze drifted across the yard and came to rest on the figure standing with his back to everyone, his head towering above the shoulder-height wooden fence.

He walked in that direction and stopped to stand beside the young man. A rolling lawn of lush grass, so contrary compared to the dirt and weeds in his own backyard, lay on the other side of the fence.

"Jordan," Dan said.

Jordan grunted. A scar ran along his thin neck, from his jaw line to his shoulder, disappearing beneath his knitted short-sleeve shirt. More scars marred his lower legs. 

"Whatcha looking at?" Dan asked.

Jordan often stood quiet like this, his physical wounds healed, his other scars apparent only by what he said and did. "Happy birthday," he said.

Dan put an arm across Jordan's wide shoulders. Embrace him, he thought. He wished he could tell his daughter, "Embrace the man that came back."  Even if he wasn't the same boy she'd sent away. 

He hugged his grandson.

"Grandpa," Jordan said.

"Yes."