The Rank She Never Mentioned

Stationed Twenty Minutes From Home

The assignment that brought me back to Huntsville was, on paper, an ordinary logistics posting to a unit supporting Redstone Arsenal, the Army post that anchors half the economy in this part of Alabama. On the inside, it felt like landing back in the exact room where every old family argument had been left running the whole time I was gone.

I moved into a rental fifteen minutes from my parents’ place. I went to Sunday dinner most weeks, the same as always, and the same as always, dinner conversation orbited Chelsea. Chelsea’s new position at the firm. Chelsea’s new condo. Chelsea’s new relationship with a man named for the family that owned Ashford Precision, a machining and fabrication company that had spent two decades quietly becoming one of the more important subcontractors feeding parts into the programs run out of Redstone.

My father’s shop, Pruitt Metal Works, did some of the same kind of work at a much smaller scale, and had been fighting for three years to get onto Ashford Precision’s approved subcontractor list. A multi year agreement with Ashford would have meant steady work for his twelve employees instead of the feast and famine that had been slowly eating his business alive. He had been trying to get a meeting with the elder Ashford for longer than Chelsea had been dating his son.

None of that would have been my business at all, except that it explained a great deal about how my family behaved once the wedding date got set.