The Chief My Father Called a Disgrace

One of those secret visits happened during the hardest stretch of my whole career, a long deployment where I missed our daughter’s first day of kindergarten and Dessalene was running on fumes at a base three thousand miles from any family. My mother found out somehow, she always seemed to, and she drove eleven hours alone to spend four days helping Dessalene get the house in order and walk our daughter to the bus stop, all of it timed so she’d be back on the farm before my father noticed the truck was gone longer than a church errand should take. Dessalene told me about it over a crackling phone line from the ship, and I stood on that deck a grown man with a chief’s anchor coming, crying like the sixteen year old who’d once sat on a curb outside a feed store.

She got sick in the spring, quietly, the way strong women from farm country tend to get sick, not wanting to trouble anybody with it until there was no more hiding it. I flew home on emergency leave twice to sit with her, and both times my father found reasons to be out in the barn or up at the co-op, reasons that took hours. The third time I came home, it was for her funeral, and this time he couldn’t avoid the room.