Unremarried Widow (6 page)

The morning we left for
Fort Hood dawned cool and gray, and we pulled out of town before the sun had a chance to burn off the clouds. We wound through the mountains of western North Carolina, along roads shaded by towering trees, with steep rock embankments that dropped to the green forest floor below. We cruised past Hickory and Asheville, through the Great Smoky Mountains and onto the sun-covered plains of Tennessee. We drove through Knoxville and Memphis before crossing the churning blue-gray waters of the Mississippi. Then it was west to Arkansas, humid and crowded with mosquitoes. We reached Oklahoma and continued through the pointing finger of the panhandle until we hit north Texas, where Miles's family owned three hundred and twenty acres. We pulled off the highway on an afternoon in late July, the heat so intense it sucked the air out of my lungs. Acres of scrub brush stretched across the dry land, and a plume of dust rose behind the truck as we rattled over the dirt road. Cows grazed alongside a barbed-wire fence, their coats ruffling in the
breeze. I was finally out west, as Psychic Suzanna had predicted the year before.

Miles spent the days of our visit outside under the big Texas sky. He rode horses and worked the ranch with his father while I stayed inside with Terry. She showed me how to make her meat loaf and wrote the recipe for her sugar cookies on an index card for me to take to Fort Hood. She talked endlessly, hardly pausing for breath, as if she wasn't used to having an audience and needed to unload the things she carried in her heart. Mostly she talked about Miles—about how long it took to conceive him, about the miscarriages that came after. She numbered her lost babies among her children. She talked about breast-feeding, sleepless nights, and Miles's sweet baby smile. She cornered me once about the move to Texas, but before she could get to the sinful parts, Brad and Miles tromped into the kitchen.

We stayed just a couple of days before heading south to Fort Hood. The night had only begun to give over to dawn when we left the panhandle. The sun sent up angry red fingers that turned the sky a mottled pink like a bruise. Blue filtered in as we drove southward, and by mid-afternoon the light had hardened, all sharp edges that made me wince as I stared through the windshield. By the time we hit I–20 the day had given way to pale twilight. A violet light split the air, smoky and flint-tipped like Indian arrowheads. I thought of ambushes in that vast and craggy country. We parked at a rest stop overlooking a valley fringed in red rock and sat beside each other in moody silence.

“What's the matter with you?” I said after a time.

Miles scowled. “Me? What's the matter with
you
?”

“I'm not the one in a bad mood.”

“You've been a pill all day. Ever since we left this morning.”

I stared across the cliffs without answering, and the wind picked up and scattered the leaves at our feet.

“I'm just worried,” I said.

“About what?”

“That Fort Hood will be like Fort Bragg. That I won't be able to find a job, that I'll be sitting there every day waiting for you to come home. That you'll always be gone.”

“Don't make this my fault.”

“I'm not saying it's your fault.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I don't know.”

Miles stood. “Then how can I fix it?”

“I don't know,” I said again. “But later, when this is all done, I want to have a say in what we do, in where we go.”

“Of course. What do you think? That I'm not going to take what you want into consideration?”

I turned the dirt with the toe of my shoe.

“I've seen how some guys in the unit are. It doesn't matter what their wives want.”

“Well, that's not me.”

“I know, but I worry—”

“Stop worrying, babe. We'll make it through Hood together. We'll make it through the deployment. When I get back, we can talk about what base we want to go to next.”

“But what if all the bases are the same?”

The city of Killeen crouched
at the edge of Fort Hood the way Fayetteville loitered outside Fort Bragg. Its streets smelled of hot concrete and old grease, and the city was pocked with fast-food joints and pawnshops. Plastic bags blew through empty parking lots and roaches crawled across the sidewalks at night. Killeen had a high murder rate and hookers on the corner of Rancier and Second Avenue, where Miles and I found an apartment. It was cheap and convenient
and already furnished. Anyway, we told ourselves, we'd only be there nine months. I found a job at an elementary school as a second-grade teaching assistant making less than eight hundred dollars a month. Every Monday I prayed my old Saturn would limp through anther week.

Our first month at Fort Hood, Miles trained every day. At night he only wanted to eat dinner and go to bed. He laughed less; he was always exhausted. Even on the weekends, the unit worked. I'd sit by the pool and read until my eyes ached. I'd move inside and watch news reports from New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina had recently passed through, pulverizing the city. By the time Miles came home I would have the restless, irritable feeling that comes with unfilled days. One Saturday morning, as I scooped cat food onto the sidewalk in front of our apartment for the strays who lived in the complex, I had a sudden thought. I stood and dusted my hands on my shorts.

“You know what?” I said to the scattered cats. “I don't have to stay here today.”

I traced the route from Killeen to Austin on a map. I showered, brushed my hair, and dressed in my nice clothes. The morning was clear and fresh, and I cracked the windows of my car on the drive to let the air blow through. In Austin, I parked downtown and walked the empty streets. I ate lunch in a small Korean café and listened to the sound of my footsteps echo off the marble floors of the capitol building. It was lonely in a way, but I'd forgotten the joys of discovering a place on my own.

Miles called as I headed back to the car.

“Hey,” I said. I smiled into the phone. “How's your day going?”

Miles sounded angry. “Where are you?”

“I'm in Austin,” I said brightly. “Where are you?”

“I just got home from class.”

I looked at my watch. “Already?”

“We got done early,” Miles said. “I thought we would spend the rest of the day together. But I guess that's not what you want to do.”

“I'll come back right now.”

Miles sulked. “No, no. Take your time.”

“I'll be home in an hour,” I said, the day suddenly spoiled.

At school one afternoon during
cafeteria duty, I sidled up to another aide, Kelley, who wore her red apron over tailored clothes. She had just turned forty, sported an athletic build and perfectly highlighted hair, and was in every way the kind of woman who makes other women say,
I hope I look like that when I'm forty
.

“Ready for this day to be over?” she said.

“Been ready.”

Three tables away, a hand shot up in the air.

“I got this one,” I said.

A girl lifted a milk carton and I pulled out the snub-nosed scissors I carried in my apron pocket. After I cut open the cardboard and passed the milk down to her, I walked the length of the table. Small hands reached out to pat me on the way by, leaving sticky handprints on my pants. When I got back to Kelley, she started up the story she'd been telling me all day. We talked like that, in fits and starts, picking up threads where we could. Her husband had come home from Iraq over the summer, she told me.

“And do you know what that bastard did?”

I scanned the cafeteria, trying to look busy.

“He told me he was leaving me.”

I looked at her, all pretense of work gone.

“He did what?”

“He told me he'd met someone else.”

“In Iraq?”

“One of his soldiers. A young woman.”

“Shit.”

“Guess how old she is.”

“Tell me.”

“She's twenty-five.”

“Jesus.”

On the far side of the room, Ms. Walker ushered her second graders through the line and waved at me across the cafeteria.

“How are you doing?” she yelled.

I gave her a thumbs-up.

“You coming by my classroom later?”

“This afternoon,” I said.

“Good. I got a bulletin board I need you to hang.”

In the opposite line, a tall girl with her hair in braids whacked the boy behind her with a tray. He leaned forward and karate-chopped the girl in the stomach.

“Second grade!” Kelley shouted across the cafeteria as she strode toward the pair. “Cut that out.”

I circulated through the back tables and she eventually worked her way over.

“She's pregnant,” she picked up.

“The soldier?”

“She got pregnant while they were over there.”

I shook my head. “Kelley, that's unbelievable.”

We stood side by side, our backs to the painted cinder-block wall, surveying the open space of the cafeteria.

“You know the worst part?” Kelley said.

I looked away from the racket and directly at her.

“I went to college. I studied art history. I had plans for my own life, but I gave them up for him. In the military, you know, his career would always come first.”

She pushed her hair behind her ears and tucked her hands into the front pocket of her apron.

“Now look at me.”

I did. She was beautiful and smart, overeducated and working a dead-end job. She turned and laid a hand on my arm.

“Don't let this happen to you,” she said.

A new soldier came to
the unit—Troy, a CW2 straight out of Rucker—and he brought his wife, Crystal. She had black curly hair and beautiful skin and she peppered her conversation with Spanish words from her Panamanian mother. We were the same age, neither of us had children, and Crystal knew less about the unit than I did. In the ways that counted in Army life, we were practically the same person.

When the unit went into the field and Miles and Troy were gone for weeks, I called Crystal on the weekends and we drove down to Austin together. Sometimes we played tennis at the courts on base. When Crystal sprained her ankle, I was the one who drove her to the emergency room. When my car broke down, she was the one I called for a lift to the mechanic. We took a country-western dance class together at the local community college and Crystal turned out to be a graceful dancer. She picked up the two-step in one night, and because the class was always short of men, sometimes the teacher paired us together. She led and I followed, spinning around the dance floor, both of us laughing. I thought of the other wives from the unit, the ones who had stayed at Bragg, and I realized why they were so close. With the men gone, we would only have each other to rely on.

On a Friday evening I
sat on the bed in our apartment, still in the house clothes I'd changed into after work.

“I don't see why we have to go,” I said. “They can't tell you what to do when you're not on the clock.”

Miles slipped the top half of his BDUs over his head and started unbuttoning his pants.

“You don't have to go,” he said. “But I do.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “They can order you to go to a bar?”

He stepped into the bathroom and I could hear the faucet on the shower crank on.

“It's mandatory fun,” he said over the pounding of the water.

I followed him into the bathroom and lowered the seat on the toilet. I raised my voice to be heard over the shower.

“But I'm tired, babe,” I said. “I was hoping we could just go to dinner. Maybe that Thai place? Or the good Mexican restaurant you were talking about?”

Miles pulled back the edge of the curtain to look at me, and steam billowed over his head.

“I'm tired, too,” he said. “You think I don't want to stay home? Look, this is how it is. I have to go. If you want to come, you need to hurry up.”

I almost managed to wipe
the sour expression off my face by the time we made it to the officers' club on base. The inside felt like any bar—varnished tabletops, two pool tables in the back, a dartboard by the door—except that there were almost no women. Not that anyone at the O club seemed to mind. The soldiers drank and joked, and you'd have thought this was the way things ought to be. The way they'd like them to be, anyway. I followed Miles out the back door to the fenced-in patio where the guys from Alpha Company sat on plastic chairs. They yelled out a greeting to Miles and he grinned. Captain Delancey came around with a pitcher of beer.

“Where's your glass?” he said to Miles.

“Just got here, sir.”

“Well, don't fucking stand there. Find a glass.”

Miles looked at me and smiled sheepishly.

“I'll grab us some chairs,” I said.

I saw Crystal across the patio and pulled an empty chair beside her.

“Friday night at the O club,” I said.

“I know, right?”

She stuck out her lips in this funny, pouty way she had.

“Think we'll go out later?” I said.

“I heard some of the guys were talking about going to Wild Country.”

“That place is so trashy.”

“I know.”

When she stood up to find the bathroom a little later, one of the soldiers from the unit—a guy Miles didn't particularly like—came and sat beside me.

“How's it going?” he said. “Miles dragged you to this thing?”

I rolled my eyes. “Didn't have much of a choice.”

We sat there talking while Miles made the rounds. By the time he came out, he was on his third glass of beer.

“Here's your chair, man,” the guy said, standing.

“No, stay,” Miles said. “I'm going to say hello to the captain.”

I watched him walk across the terrace and give Captain Delancey a light punch on the arm. The captain turned and draped one of his big arms across Miles's shoulders.