The Party At My Own Grill

The first thing I noticed when I came through the side gate was the smell of my husband’s grill. Burgers, hickory chips, and that little scorch the left burner always makes when nobody turns it down.

The second thing I noticed was that I did not know most of the people sitting in my backyard.

There were about twenty of them at folding tables on the grass, eating off paper plates. Red and black balloon clusters were tied to stakes around the lawn, bobbing in the warm wind of a sunny May afternoon.

A man I had never seen before stood at Kyle’s black gas grill with a spatula, waving smoke out of his face. A flare-up was licking the edge of the patties on the left side.

And at the edge of the patio, in a black sundress, with her dark hair loose past her shoulders and sunglasses pushed up on her head, stood my husband’s sister, Tracie Pruett.

She saw me. She stopped moving. She did not say a word.

I had flown five thousand miles to stand in that gate. I had rehearsed a dozen things to say on the plane. In the end, I did not say any of them.

But I should start where it started, because the part in the backyard only makes sense if you know what came before it.

My name is Lindsey Waldron. I am thirty-eight years old, and I have been an Army wife for sixteen of those years.

My husband, Kyle, is a sergeant first class. He is forty, steady as a fence post, and the kind of man who reads the whole manual before he touches the tool.

Nine years ago we bought a three-bedroom ranch house on a cul-de-sac in a small Kansas town about twenty minutes east of Fort Riley. It had a big backyard, a brick-paver patio, and a kitchen window that looked out over all of it.

Kyle had been at Riley a long time by Army standards, with a deployment in the middle. We planted a redbud in the corner of that yard the first spring. We thought we might retire there.

Then, two summers ago, Kyle came home with orders. A permanent change of station to Germany, a three-year accompanied tour at Rose Barracks in Vilseck.

I cried for about ten minutes, and then I started making lists. That is how Army wives do it.

The house was the biggest item on the list. We could sell it, rent it through a property manager in Junction City, or rent it to someone we knew.

Our mortgage payment was $884 a month with taxes and insurance in escrow. A property manager would take ten percent and charge us to find a tenant. Kyle wanted somebody who would treat the place like a home.

That Thanksgiving, at Kyle’s mother’s table, his sister Tracie set down her fork and said she had an idea.

Tracie is three years older than Kyle. She had been going through a hard divorce from her husband, Rick, and she and her son, Dylan, were living in a two-bedroom apartment that smelled like the laundromat below it.