Unremarried Widow

by Artis Henderson

  She smiled shyly into the hand mirror, and when the saleswoman asked if she’d like her to wrap up the makeup, Terry nodded. She was strangely tentative about the exchange, as if she wasn’t used to buying nice things for herself.

  The drive home was easier, and I imagined a time when Terry and I might be close.

  I quickly found out that the city of Fayetteville lived and breathed Fort Bragg. Most of the businesses in town catered to a military lifestyle. Barbers, laundromats, boot repair shops. Storage units where men locked away their lives while they headed overseas to fight in battles whose political under layers they could not always explain. Strip clubs with names like Victoria’s Cabaret and Bottom’s Up. There were used-car joints, too, where a hundred dollars gets you riding, and pawnshops for the end of the month when the money runs out. But on the base itself, none of this existed. No pawnshops, no titty bars, no used-car hucksters. Everything was neat and organized, the grass cut short, the streets clean. Even the soldiers themselves looked fresh with their trimmed hair and polished boots. There was such vitality about them, it was easy to forget they trade in war.

  Clouds covered the sky for days, and a smell like burning rubber or wet animal fur, unidentifiable and vaguely sinister, hung over Fayetteville. People said it came from the tire factory outside town. Others pointed to the chicken processing plant. Either way, the smell filled my nose and clung to my skin. I needed a job: my savings were running low and I was obstinate about splitting everything. Miles offered to pick up the rent, to pay for utilities, to cover groceries, but my mother had always warned me about depending on a man. I was afraid that if he paid my share, I would owe more than I wanted to give.

  At an interview at a call center for a major cell phone company, more than twenty of us looked to fill a handful of spots. A woman thumbed my résumé and asked, “Don’t you think you’re a little overqualified for this job?”

  I looked at her squarely.

  “Are you hiring for other positions?” I said. “Because I didn’t see any advertised.”

  Most jobs in Fayetteville didn’t require a college degree. I applied to be a secretary, a bank teller, a receptionist—but it was always the same response. My savings disappeared, and when I saw an ad in the paper for a waitress at a nightclub, I slipped on my Parisian boots and headed to the seedy downtown district. The club appeared stark and dingy in the daylight as I waited for my turn to speak to the manager. He looked me over as we sat on a pair of low chairs in the bar.

  “Do you have a problem working in an all-black nightclub?” he asked.

  “Do you have a problem hiring me?” I said.

  The manager smiled, stood, and shook my hand. I never heard back, which was all the answer I needed.

  I spent my mornings in bed and my afternoons at the public library. I checked out books and drove home to read on the back porch until the light faded into evening. I began to worry about what it would mean to be tied to the military. How would I navigate this life for the long haul? Where would my own dreams and ambitions fit in? When the brightness had disappeared from the day, I turned on the porch light and sat in the yellow glow, waiting for Miles to come home.

  On a Saturday afternoon Miles and I drove across town, up Bragg Boulevard and out the other side to the small communities that bordered the base. We pulled off the main road into a subdivision tucked behind a copse of pines.

  “We’re here to see the Priestmans,” Miles said to the guard at the gate.

  The guard flipped through a sheaf of papers tacked to his clipboard.

  “The Priestners?”

  Miles knitted his eyebrows together, considering. “It could be the Priestners.”

  The guard waved us through.

  “Follow the road around the lake to your left,” he said. “Take the first road on your right.”

  We pulled past the guardhouse and onto the road that wound toward the water.

  “The Priestmans?” I said.

  Miles laughed. “I thought it was Priestman.”

  “Who is this guy?”

  “Another pilot. A CW4. His wife’s Alpha Company’s FRG leader.”

  FRG: family readiness group. For the wives of the soldiers in the unit—not for the girlfriends like me. When we’d first gotten to Bragg, Miles had handed me a sheet of paper with the emergency contact information for the wives.

  “In case something happens,” he said.

  I looked over the printout. “Would you mind giving whoever’s in charge of this list my number?”

  Miles said he would. But later he told me the FRG refused to add me to the list, even as a courtesy. Unless we were married, I was discovering, I had no status in the unit.

  We followed the lake into the subdivision. Wood frame houses lined the street and leafless dogwoods waited for spring in yards laid with pale yellow grass. In the driveway at the end of a cul-de-sac, Miles nosed his truck between the pickups already parked alongside the road. When we rang the doorbell we heard the scratching of nails from the other side and an excited yipping.

  “You get back,” a woman’s voice called.

  Miles and I looked at each other. The door opened and a woman shooed away a miniature collie.

  “That’s Captain,” she said. “Don’t worry about him. He’s just happy to see you. Aren’t you, Cappy?”

  The dog pranced in the doorway, looking from the woman to me to Miles.

  “I’m Teresa.” She stuck out a hand. “John’s wife.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Miles said.

  “John’s told me all about you. The new CW2.”

  “That’s right. Straight out of Fort Rucker. Trying to get the hang of things.”

  “Don’t worry. John will show you the ropes,” Teresa said. “Come on downstairs. Everyone’s around the pool table.”

  We followed her to the first floor where sliding glass doors looked out on the lake.

  “Glad you guys could make it,” John said.

  He pulled two beers out of the fridge behind the bar and handed one to each of us. To me, Teresa pointed out the men in the unit and introduced me to their wives. I shook their hands and smiled politely, but as I tried to follow the conversation I realized I did not have the vocabulary for this language of Army wives.

  “They’ll be going to Hood in July.”

  “I heard August.”

  “Who’d you hear that from?”

  “A wife in Bravo Company.”

  “The commander’s wife? I thought they got divorced.”

  “Didn’t you hear—”

  “I saw them at the commissary—”

  At the pool table, the men talked about flying. Miles ate guacamole out of a bowl and followed the conversation with his eyes. Our knees bumped and he looked at me and we gave each other half smiles. Teresa was talking about the military bases where John had been stationed, the cross-country drives she made alone, and how many months he’d been gone on his two previous deployments. It struck me how lonely that life must have been for her. She talked about their two daughters, their seventeenth wedding anniversary in January, and their plans for John’s retirement.

  “We’re going to buy a boat,” John said. “Bigger than the one we have now.”

  He traced the route on an imaginary map while Teresa stood beside him and nodded.

  “We’ll cruise down the Mississippi. Go across the Gulf of Mexico. Head back up the Atlantic.”

  “The girls will be old enough to take care of themselves by then,” Teresa said. “But we’ll bring Captain. Or our next dog.”

  I sipped my beer and thought of days spent on the water, the sun beating down, a succession of collies nosing into the wind.

  Spring gave way to early summer. The clouds disappeared but the humidity stayed so that Fayetteville was suddenly hot and muggy like the inside of a mouth. Our neighbor sent over bags of cucumbers and tomatoes from her garden and I baked loaves of zucchini bread that Miles ate standing up in the kitchen, still in his uniform. He
told me about the guys in the unit and the funny things they said during the day. One of them claimed that seventy-five percent of all warrant officers have two of three things: a pickup, a boat, and an ex-wife. We laughed and ran through the pilots in the unit and, sure enough, the statistic held true. We agreed that the military must be hell on marriage.

  That summer theaters showed Tom Cruise’s War of the Worlds, every radio seemed to be playing “Mr. Brightside,” and the cover of Time explained “Why we’re going gaga over real estate.” I was hired in the marketing department at the local sports arena and they gave me free tickets to hockey games and dirt bike shows. I decided to close my bank account in France. Miles and I were invited to pool parties and backyard barbecues with the other families in the unit, and I finally met Scott Delancey, the company commander.

  “Captain Delancey!” Miles yelled when the captain showed up.

  Everyone looked to the far end of the deck where the captain stood. He was tall and broad shouldered, a bear of a man. Recently divorced, I’d heard. From the way Miles talked about him, I could tell he genuinely liked and respected him.

  “I want you to meet my girlfriend,” Miles said.

  I stuck out a hand as the captain walked over.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  The captain took my hand briefly, but he was already turning away to clap Miles on the shoulder.

  “Let’s get you another beer,” he said.

  Miles put in an application for SERE C, a three-week survival and evasion course staged on the outer reaches of Fort Bragg. The one-week intro version, SERE B, had been required in flight school in Alabama. The soldiers killed rabbits and navigated by compass, went without food and forded a lake at night. The experience left Miles thin and hollow, and he didn’t speak much about what happened during those hungry nights in the woods. SERE C was the next level. Three weeks of survivalist conditions, an evasive maneuver where the soldiers always got caught, and time in a simulated POW camp. The physical abuse, he was told, would not be simulated.

  “Why did you apply for this course?” I asked Miles before he left.

  “I want to be ready,” he said, “in case we go down.”

  I knew that the survival rate of an Apache crash is very low.

  “Ready for what?”

  “Just ready.”

  Miles’s application was approved at the beginning of May, and he packed his gear and prepared to set out for the North Carolina woods. On the morning he was scheduled to leave, he called me at work.

  “Can I take you out to lunch?” he said. “Our departure got pushed back to this afternoon.”

  I met him at a restaurant near the arena. Miles was ashen over lunch and we tried not to talk about the rough days ahead.

  “Make sure you keep the doors locked when you’re at home,” he said as we walked to the parking lot. “Don’t let anyone in.”

  “I won’t,” I promised.

  We stopped and I leaned against my car. The sun was bright overhead and heat rolled off the asphalt. I could see fine beads of sweat spread across Miles’s forehead and I reached out to touch his cheek. I wanted to hold on to the moment but already it was slipping away, running like sand through my fingers.

  “And you have plans?” Miles was saying. “You’ll stay busy on the weekends?”

  I nodded and squeezed his hand. He kissed me the way he used to kiss me at the end of his visits to Tallahassee.

  “Be safe,” I said.

  “I’ll see you in three weeks.”

  For the next twenty-one days, I worked during the day and read in the evenings. Sometimes I rented a movie. I drove to Greensboro one Saturday and to the coast to visit family the next. Time opened up, wide and empty as an airfield, and the weeks that stretched in front of me were airless and oppressive, time spent holding my breath.

  The day Miles was scheduled to return, I heard the front door open while I was in the shower. I wrapped myself in a towel and stepped out of the bathroom. He stood in the living room with his rucksack at his feet, thin and pale, bruised in places, but wholly himself. He sat on the couch and I sat beside him touching his face, his hands, his knees. I ran my fingers over the fabric of his uniform, still cool from the morning air, and traced his jaw and the tops of his cheeks. I imagined this was how he would look returning from war, and for a moment I let myself consider that distant future date when he would deploy. The three-week stint had felt like an eternity. Later we would ask ourselves how we would ever survive the fifteen months he’d be gone to Iraq.

  “Can I get you something to eat?” I said.

  He leaned his head against the couch and closed his eyes.

  “That would be wonderful,” he said.

  * * *

  Miles told me over time some of what happened, bits and pieces that came out during dinner, late nights while we watched TV, on long drives across the state. But he never told me all of it. Just stories, brief peeks into the experience, like peering through a window covered by venetian blinds. A breeze would blow and a panel would shift to show what lay beneath, then the gust would die down, the blind would drop, and that part of Miles would seal off again. He told me they had been made to strip down when they first arrived at the POW camp and they were hosed off and forced to roll on the ground. Miles laughed when he talked about the cold water and biting gravel. They made him remove the laces from his boots and the chafing left raw welts on his heels. He went for days without food. Once he banged on the door to his cell and yelled until his throat went raw.

  “I want some peanuts,” he said, “and a Pepsi.”

  He yelled and banged until they brought him peanuts and a cup of soda.

  “I want some for the guy next to me too,” he said.

  They brought more peanuts and another cup of soda for the soldier next to him.

  Miles wanted me to believe it was one grand adventure, a three-week camping trip with the guys from work. But he told me later about a soldier from an earlier group who ran into one of the SERE instructors afterward. The soldier almost killed the instructor in the middle of a restaurant in Fayetteville, the effects of the course were that enduring. Miles just shrugged his shoulders and laughed. SERE C was no big deal.

  But in the night he would thrash in his sleep and I would have to lay a hand on his chest.

  “Miles,” I’d say.

  He would open his eyes and look at me and I would feel his confusion in the dark room. Then he would remember and relax back into sleep.

  * * *

  By the time we settled into Fayetteville, it was time to move again. Only six months after we arrived, the unit received orders to Fort Hood, in Texas, to train for the coming deployment. Most of the soldiers would go to Hood alone, without their families. What was the alternative? Pull their kids out of school, uproot the lives they had built, only to do it all again in nine months? I was learning that there were no good options.

  Miles and I had a yard sale and sold most of what we owned for less than three hundred dollars. What remained we packed into boxes. A summer storm raged the night before we left and thunder cracked as Miles loaded the boxes into his truck. He came in soaked after each round, water coursing down his neck and collecting in the collar of his shirt, while I swept around his wet footprints, erasing any trace that we had ever lived there.

  5

  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 pa
nhandle 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.”