The Duty Roster That Ended Two Lies

The Call I Made From the Curb

I typed back two words. As you wish. Not because I agreed with a single line of what she’d sent me. Because I was not going to give her the reaction she clearly wanted, not standing in a parking lot surrounded by two hundred other families having the homecoming I’d pictured every single night for nine months.

I walked past the buses, past a line of rental cars nobody in my unit could afford, and I sat down on the curb outside the hangar where the air smelled like jet fuel and cut grass. Then I made one phone call.

Not to a lawyer. Not to my mother, three states away and already worried sick from a phone call I hadn’t made yet. I called a man named Bernard, a retired First Sergeant who lives about fifteen minutes off post in Oak Grove and who has known me since I was a twenty two year old private who didn’t know how to fold a fitted sheet, let alone hold a marriage together.

“Don’t go home,” Bernard said, before I’d even finished the sentence. “Come here. Martha’s got a pot of something on the stove and there’s a room made up.”

I told him I didn’t want to make a scene.

“Making a scene,” Bernard said, “is exactly what she’s counting on. Come sit on my porch and be smart instead.”

I didn’t go home. That’s the part that looked heartless from the outside, and I know it did, because two different people told me so before the week was out. A soldier is supposed to walk through his own front door after a deployment. Instead I called a cab from the airfield, watched Oak Grove go by out the window, the gas stations and the feed store and the little diner with the flag mural painted on the side, and I let a retired NCO’s porch be my first stop instead of my own house.

I didn’t know yet how much that decision was going to matter. I only knew that whatever Roxanne had built, she had built it to work fast, and the only way to beat something built for speed is to refuse to run.

Bernard and Martha’s Porch

Martha met me at the door with a hug that lasted about four seconds too long, which told me she already knew more than I did. She’s the kind of Army wife who has sat with more families through more deployments than most chaplains, and she has a way of looking at you that tells you the bad news is coming whether you’re ready or not.

“Sit down, Dan,” she said. “Eat something first.”

I ate a plate of her pot roast without tasting a bite of it while Bernard pulled a chair around so he was sitting across from me instead of beside me, which is how he always does it when he’s about to say something I’m not going to want to hear.

“You need to know what this town has been watching for the last four months,” he said.