Thank You For Your Service

This chapter opens with the woman encountered at the end of the previous chapter, the one with Schumann’s wife, at the airport, asking Schumann what happened to her husband. 

The woman, we learn, is Amanda Doster, the widow of James Doster. She has come to associate the doorbell with death, beginning on the day two soldiers arrived at her home to inform her of James’s death. She asked them not to tell her until she took the cookies out of the oven and made some calls. She has been trying to stay in control ever since that moment.

At the start of the chapter, Amanda is in the process of moving to a much bigger house, which she purchased with life insurance money and the Army’s death gratuity. She’s held on to all of her dead husband’s belongings, including the last t-shirt he wore while home, a jar of sawdust he kept in the garage, and an answering machine message from him. Amanda and James have two daughters. At the time of James’s death, Grace is 3, and Kathryn is 6.

Amanda refuses to fully admit her husband is dead, and even checks his hand, in the casket, for the indentation of his wedding ring.