Unremarried Widow

by Artis Henderson

  Miles followed my finger to the sign, to the path that turned off the main highway, and to the low hills beyond.

  “Let’s do it,” he said.

  He put on his blinker and we watched for cardboard arrows planted in the ground.

  “This it?” he said in front of a leaning mailbox.

  I craned my neck to read the sign staked into the ground.

  “I think so.”

  The driveway sloped upward to a small house at the top of the hill. I say house loosely. It was a trailer. A double-wide, but still. Pale grasshoppers skittered from beneath my feet as I stepped out of the car and a breeze combed through the knee-high weeds. The property was nothing special—open space and untamed grass buffeted by wind and sun—but it possessed a certain quality that brought to mind the word homestead. For a brief moment we let ourselves believe in the possibility of a settled life. Miles looked toward the base of the property and the road we drove in on. His sunglasses hid his eyes, but I guessed what he was thinking. I was thinking the same.

  “We could live here,” he said.

  I surveyed the property, nodding. “We could.”

  On the front porch I pressed my face against the dusty sliding glass door. Inside, the trailer was empty. Thin carpet covered the floors and a fan sagged from the ceiling. I could see straight through to the back window that looked out on the hills beyond. The wooden planks of the porch creaked with our steps as we jumped down and pushed a path through the grass before circling around to the car.

  “Do you think we should call the number on the sign?” he said.

  “Let’s give it a try.”

  Miles called the real estate agent but got the agent’s voice mail instead. He left a message before we drove back to Killeen. We both had work on Monday, and then it was the middle of the week, and soon it was the next weekend. The agent never called back. In the weeks that followed I would find grass seeds stuck to the clothes we wore that day. Sometimes Miles would mention the place. But over time we forgot.

  Much later—in the wake of the war—I would dream of that house. Flat plains stretched behind the property, wide-open and empty, and in the distance sand hills rose up like dunes. In the dream I was lost. I tried to find my way through that vast stretch of sameness, a land without discernible pathways, and all the while I felt the house pressing at my back, its solidness there just over the rise.

  2006

  7

  In early March, Miles and I phoned home, first to my mother, then to Miles’s parents. I sat at the breakfast counter with my arms folded nervously in my lap and watched Miles as he spoke.

  “Hello, Dad,” Miles said. “Is Mom there?”

  He stood beside my chair and reached a hand over to touch my arm.

  “Good, good,” he said. “Glad I got both of you there.”

  I gave him a small smile.

  “Listen, we wanted to call and see if it would be all right if—if we—if we went ahead and got married. Before the wedding, I mean.”

  There was a long silence and I reached out to Miles.

  “We were thinking, you know, to go ahead and get the administrative details out of the way. Get Artis her military ID. Get her on Tricare. We don’t want to have to mess with all that while I’m deployed.”

  I ran my thumb over the rough skin around his fingernail and inspected the folds of his knuckle. I was afraid to look at his face. But when he started to talk again, I could hear the smile in his voice. I looked up and he nodded his head.

  “Sure, sure,” he said. “She’s right here. I’ll put her on.”

  I covered the mouthpiece with my hand. “Is everything okay?”

  “No worries,” he said.

  I held the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

  Terry was on the other end.

  “Hey, girl,” she said. “This is great news. We’re so happy for you.”

  “Really?” I said. “You guys are okay with this?”

  “Sweetie, we just want you married.”

  Three months before our real wedding, Miles and I drove to the courthouse in Killeen, a squat building in red brick that was bland in the way of government offices everywhere. Miles came straight from the base, still in his uniform, and I wore jeans and my cowboy boots. When we approached the administrative window, the clerk behind the glass slid out a paper form.

  “You’ll both need to sign this,” she said. “We’ll need thirty-two dollars for the ceremony and sixty-seven for the marriage license. No personal checks.”

  I looked over the form and signed with a pen tethered to the counter. I passed the page to Miles and he placed his signature next to mine. He slid the paper through the slot along with a money order. The clerk ran her eyes over the page.

  “Have a seat,” she said.

  We sat in plastic chairs bolted to the floor as the lights overhead reflected off the linoleum that ran the length of the hallway. After a time a door opened to the judicial office and a secretary in a pink sweater stepped out.

  “Henderson?” she said.

  Miles looked at me. I gave him a nervous smile.

  “That’s us,” he said.

  “You all can follow me back.”

  We walked through the lobby with its Texas seal on the wall, over beige carpeting that absorbed the sound of our footsteps. I hooked a finger in the collar of my shirt and pulled, trying to vent my neck as the secretary led us into the courtroom chambers.

  “The judge will be right in,” she said.

  I leaned into Miles and he placed his hand on the small of my back the way he did when I was scared. The judge stepped into the room. He had traded his judicial robes for a pair of stonewashed jeans and low-heeled cowboy boots. He was a large man with round cheeks that were red, as if someone had just pinched them. I could see the appeal. He had a thick drawl and I imagined he kept a Stetson hanging on the back of his office door.

  “How you all doing?” he said. “Ready to get this done?”

  We nodded.

  “Good. I can see you all are holding hands. That’s a good sign. Sometimes we get people in here and one of them looks like they might bolt out the door. It’s good to hold on to each other. Keeps you both here.”

  Miles gave my hand a squeeze.

  “You all want to go ahead and face one another,” the judge said. “I’m going to run through this. It’ll be quick. You got rings?”

  “No, sir,” Miles said.

  “That’s all right. Don’t need them anyhow.”

  The judge covered all the bases and asked if we agreed to the terms.

  “Yes,” I said in a tight voice.

  “Yes,” Miles echoed.

  “Then by the power vested in me by the state of Texas, I now pronounce you husband and wife. Go on and kiss now.”

  We gave each other a chaste peck and the judge shook both our hands. We walked out the way we had come in and the secretary handed us our marriage certificate. We left the carpeted office and followed the linoleum back to the front entrance, walking without speaking, dazed as if we had just survived a wreck. On the steps to the courthouse we stopped and looked at each other.

  “Holy shit,” I said. “We’re married.”

  Miles pulled a camera out of his uniform pocket and stopped a man walking into the building.

  “Would you mind taking a picture for us?”

  We stood together in front of the courthouse wall and the man took a close-up shot as we smiled big brave smiles into the camera. When the newspapers ask for a photo of Miles, this is the one I send. They crop me out so that Miles is alone, looking unaccountably happy on the courthouse steps.

  * * *

  Spring gave way to early summer and we were suddenly, finally done with Fort Hood. We loaded Miles’s truck and hitched my car to the back in a drill we were starting to perfect. I sat beside Miles in the cab of the pickup and we both felt free. Free of Killeen, free of Fort Hood. Yes, we were headed back to Fort Bragg and all the coarseness of that place, but
in the interim—in the liminal space between one base and the next where the future was stacked with limitless possibilities—we were free. Or I was free. And Miles beside me with his uncomplicated air and easy laugh, I think he was free too.

  Our second time at Fort Bragg, we stayed out of Fayetteville. We rented a trailer north of the base off a dirt road that ran beside a cornfield. The earth had been newly planted when we arrived and young seedlings pushed out of the dirt in neat rows. Insects hummed in the fields during the early afternoons when the heat set in and the trailer baked beneath the sun. Our place had brown carpet that had once been plush, old furniture that had seen generations of tenants, and pink toilet seat covers that made me think somebody’s grandma had once lived there. We unloaded the boxes we had packed in Killeen; the Crock-Pot made its way onto the counter and the dish towels went into a side drawer. I pulled out my rolling pin, our salt and pepper shakers, the green ceramic mugs. Miles carted armloads into the spare bedroom: his extra uniforms, a second set of desert boots, the Gore-Tex jacket in green camo. In that way we set up house—again.

  There was a sweetness to the time Miles and I spent in the trailer next to the cornfield, even as the deployment loomed. The unit was scheduled to ship out in three months, in late July, but we pretended not to notice. The air was soft and clear as if all the turbulence of the previous season had blown over. Miles and I slept in the back bedroom in a white-framed double bed. We held hands in the night. One morning I woke with my nose pressed against his neck, my face tucked into the space beneath his chin, and blinked in the feathered light of early day.

  “You’re sweaty,” I said.

  “You’re sweaty.”

  I pulled away from his pillow and rolled onto my back, and he rolled onto his and reached across the bed for my sweaty hand.

  Once a storm blew through in the night and I woke with an inexplicable fear inside me. Rain roared against the walls of the trailer and wind shook the oaks in the front yard. Their branches dragged across the roof like the tines of a rake, and I lay beside Miles filled with a nameless dread. In the morning we walked the rutted dirt road that ran beside the trailer. Stalks of corn shot into the sky, hopped up on rain and fertilizer. The gravel that pocked the road crunched under Miles’s boots as we debated the question that hung over everything: what to do with me while he was gone.

  “You could go to my folks’ place in Texas,” Miles said. He walked with his hands shoved down in the front pockets of his jeans.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know. To be close to family.”

  “My mom is my family.”

  “Maybe you should go home to live with your mom, then.”

  We continued in silence for a bit, both of us turning over the idea.

  “I could go back overseas,” I said unconvincingly. “Teach English somewhere.”

  I had already given up on the idea of that life, but it felt wrong not to say it, to pretend like it wasn’t even an option. But Miles shook his head.

  “You don’t want to be that far away. Not while I’m gone. Not in case something happens.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” I said. “But if I lived with my mom, we could save some money. You’ll be earning hazard pay and I’ll get a job. We could put a lot of money in the bank and maybe when you get back we could buy a house.”

  “It would be nice to have a place of our own,” Miles said.

  “Plus my friends are in Florida. It might be okay to be back there.”

  “It might.” He smiled slyly. “You could always stay here.”

  I gave him a push with my elbow. “What would I do here?”

  “Hang out with the other wives. Get tangled up in the FRG drama.”

  “That’s my worst nightmare,” I said. I shook my head as I imagined the infighting, the backstabbing, the rampant gossip. It never occurred to me that those women might be a source of support while Miles was gone, that they might comfort me if the worst happened.

  “No, send me home,” I said. “Get me away from the military. Let me live with my mom. That way, when you get back, we can buy our own place.”

  “And if something happens—”

  “Nothing’s going to happen.”

  “But if something happens,” he said, “you’ll have everybody there.”

  On the first day of July, three weeks before Miles deployed, we held our wedding at my mother’s beach house in Florida. My best friends were there, Heather and Annabelle and Stacy, young women I had known all my life. They joined me in my bedroom as I nervously dressed and fixed my makeup. My mother stepped into the bathroom, tugging at her hair. She still wore it long and parted down the middle, like the day she met my father. Like the day he died. Though her hair had gone gray in places, its weighty power remained unchanged.

  “How do I look?” she said to Annabelle.

  “You look nice,” Annabelle said, moving into the bathroom to look her over. “Maybe a flower?”

  She chose a rose from a stack on the bathroom counter, snapped off the stem, and worked the bud into the long loop of hair my mother had pulled over her right shoulder.

  “That looks better,” Annabelle said.

  My mother eyed herself in the mirror as I leaned forward to dab gloss on my lips.

  “You look beautiful, Mommy,” I said.

  “Really?”

  I twisted the cap back on the tube and looked at my mother. People say I look like her but mostly they are talking about our hair. Mine is long too. It never feels long enough. I smiled and she dabbed at her eyes with a balled-up piece of toilet paper.

  “I’m so happy for you,” she said.

  The tip of my nose went red and I wiped at my eyes with my fingers.

  “Don’t get me started,” I said. “I’m already a mess.”

  My mother checked herself over one last time before heading downstairs.

  “Five minutes,” Annabelle said.

  “Shit,” I said. “I’m not ready.”

  I smoothed my dress to my body. It was floor-length silk, off-white, bought at J.Crew. I didn’t wear shoes. A pearl on a silver chain hung around my neck and small diamond earrings dangled from my ears, both gifts from Miles. Somewhere downstairs he waited in a blue button-up oxford shirt from the Gap and green chinos he had rolled to his ankles. He wore flip-flops. When we decided to get married, I said I didn’t want tulle or a reception hall or plates of salmon served by waiters in black ties. I wanted a moment where our friends and family could eat good food—we had arroz con pollo, black beans and rice, sweet plantains—and dance to my favorite songs. If people told me I was glowing, I didn’t want it to be because I had my hair done at a salon or makeup spray painted over my skin, but because I was young and happy and in love.

  I turned to Heather and Stacy, who sat on the bed, and it struck me what beautiful young women my friends had become. They were all three lithe and long-haired, well-spoken and well-read; they had good jobs and stable lives.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  Heather stretched her feet to the floor, hopped off the bed, and fitted her toes into her high heels. “I think it’s time to go. Let’s get this party started.”

  The day had been clear and hot, the Gulf green and flat, but a storm rolled in as Miles and I said our vows. The water went gray and the petals in my hair trembled. The storm broke after the kiss and people dashed for cover as rain came down in fat warm drops. After dinner and cake, people made their way to the dance floor. The Priestners had driven in from Fort Bragg and Captain Scott Delancey came too. In the half-light of torches stuck in the sand, Miles and I watched John and Teresa sway to Marvin Gaye.

  “Check out the captain,” he said.

  In a dark corner, Captain Delancey danced close to Heather.

  I laughed. “Same old, same old.”

  The rain had left standing puddles of water that caught the light from the torches, and the damp air soaked up the scent of lilies from the side yard. I
could hardly make out Miles’s face in the dark, but I could feel him there beside me. My worries from the last few months seemed small and distant and a tender gratitude welled in me. I felt a sense of homecoming not because of the salt air or the pounding tides but because of Miles, a man of gentleness and courage whose goodness emanated from him like heat. His strength would protect us, I was sure, and I let myself believe we were safe.

  8

  The night before Miles left for Iraq, two tough bins sat open on our living room floor. I watched Miles race around the trailer, pulling clothes out of closets, sorting through important papers.

  “Don’t worry,” I said from the couch. “You’ll get everything.”

  He stopped long enough to give me a look.

  I laughed. “Maybe we should have done this a week ago.”

  When Miles moved into the bedroom around midnight, I followed. I climbed into bed and opened a book in my lap while he pulled another shirt out of the closet and threw it in a pile on the floor.

  “That’s for R & R,” he said. “You’ll keep them at your mom’s place?”

  “I’ll have them waiting for you.”

  He picked up his bottle of cologne and set it in the R & R pile. “This too.”

  My eyelids were heavy as I sat on the bed, and when Miles left the room they drifted shut. I lifted them when he walked back in.

  “You’re going to feel bad if something happens to me over there and you spent our last night together sleeping.”

  “I know,” I said and fell asleep.

  The next morning we were both up early. I lay in bed while Miles showered and talked to him as he moved through the room. He dressed in his uniform and laced up his boots. Outside, the damp heat of July was already building and pressing against the sides of the trailer. I wished that a breeze might sweep down and blow the cornstalks in the fields, that a wind might stir the leaves and send up clouds of black dirt. But the air remained without moving, saturated and suffocating, hard to breathe.

  I showered and dressed in time to hear Miles’s parents pull into the driveway. The four of us hugged, spoke some, then stood in the front yard to snap photos. The ground was uneven and the roots of the old oaks rose up and fell back under the soil in waves. We balanced the camera on the back of Miles’s truck so we could take a picture of the four of us together. When we finished, Miles and I climbed into his pickup. He cranked the engine and we rumbled up the driveway, rolling over the knobby roots, driving past the corn standing stiff in the fields. Miles stuck a hand out his window and his parents raised theirs in return.