I didn’t know that a plate of cold pancakes could summon the United States Army.
I am Jenny Miller, twenty-nine years old, and until that Tuesday in October, my life was measured in coffee refills and the rhythmic scrape of a spatula against a grill. I was a waitress at Rosie’s Diner, a small, grease-stained establishment tucked like an afterthought between a hardware store and a laundromat in rural Kansas.
My routine was a fortress of solitude. Wake before dawn. Walk three blocks to work against the biting prairie wind. Tie the faded blue apron around my waist—double knot, always—and greet the morning regulars with a smile that was practiced enough to hide the hollowness behind it.
I lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment above the town pharmacy. My only family consisted of photographs that were slowly turning yellow in their frames. My father had passed when I was fifteen; my mother followed him two years later. The aunt who raised me had moved to Arizona for her arthritis, leaving me with little more than obligated holiday phone calls and the occasional card containing a twenty-dollar bill.
