Unremarried Widow (7 page)

“Finish that beer,” the captain said.

Miles raised the glass to his mouth and downed the beer in one long swallow. The captain refilled his cup and Miles made his way back to drop into the empty chair beside me.

“Having fun?” I said.

He closed his eyes and a smile spread across his face.

“This is great,” he said.

On the far side of the patio, the colonel stood to speak. When the chatter didn't die down, he said in a loud voice, “All the wives out there, shut the fuck up.”

Everyone laughed. He said it every week.

The drinking picked up as the sun slipped from the sky. A gray twilight fell and lingered. Someone brought out a guitar, and a drunken camaraderie settled over the bar. Miles left to play a round of pool, but not long afterward one of the guys from the unit found me on the patio.

“I think Miles needs to go home,” he said, laughing.

I looked at my watch. It wasn't even ten o'clock.

“Is he that bad?” I said.

“He's puking in the bushes out front.”

By the time I got to the door, three of the soldiers had wrangled Miles into the parking lot. He laughed and tried to fight them off.

“I'm not going to take him home like that,” I said.

One of the soldiers stepped back and looked at me.

“You have to.”

“Not like that.”

“He's your responsibility.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and we glared at each other.

“Well, help me get him in the truck,” I said.

I climbed behind the wheel and one of the guys pulled Miles into the truck. The soldier sat beside me and cinched his arms around Miles's waist. I locked the three of us in. Miles kicked at the window until his shoe slipped off and then he kicked again and left a dirty footprint on the glass.

“Dammit, Miles,” I said. “Stop it.”

He laughed and kicked the window again.

“I'm serious. Cut that shit out.”

“Just drive,” the soldier said.

I backed the truck out of the parking space while Miles flailed. At a
stoplight he tried to wrench the door open, but the soldier grabbed his arm and held it tight.

“Jesus Christ, Miles,” I yelled. “Stop it!”

“Hurry up,” the soldier said.

At our apartment building I angled into a space. I ran ahead to unlock the door and the soldier dragged Miles out of the truck. They maneuvered together through the front door and all of the fight seemed to fade out of him. Miles slumped against the soldier's shoulder and half walked, half fell into the bedroom. The soldier laid him on the bed, closed the door, and stepped into the living room, where I waited.

“What the fuck?” I said.

“Don't get mad,” the soldier said. “He's just blowing off steam. Everybody's pretty stressed-out right now.”

“But he's never like this. He was out of control tonight.”

“Well, maybe if you hadn't been flirting, he wouldn't have gotten so drunk.”

“Flirting?” I said. “With who?”

He said the name of the soldier Miles didn't like.

“Wait,” I said. “You're saying this is my fault?”

“I'm just saying maybe you shouldn't have been flirting.”

“We had a fucking conversation.”

“That's not what it looked like.”

“This is unbelievable.”

The soldier shrugged and walked out the door.

The ghostly outline of Miles's
foot was still on the window of the truck when we went out to dinner with a group of pilots from the unit not long afterward. On the way to the parking lot at the end of the evening, they talked about dust-offs and night landings and the flying conditions
in Iraq. I must have stiffened or a look must have shadowed my face, because one of the pilots called out to me as he unlocked his pickup, “Don't worry, we'll bring your boy home.”

“You better,” I called back.

In Miles's truck, the two of us looked at the clock on the dash. It was still early.

“What should we do now?” Miles asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “It's too late for a movie. Too soon to go home.”

Miles gave me a sly look. “Want to go parking?”

I giggled. “Where?”

“I'm sure we can find something around here,” Miles said as he put the truck in reverse.

We found a deserted construction site on a strip of back road where the streetlights did not reach. Miles cut the engine and we faced out on a rare bit of darkness. In the distance, lights cut the horizon in two, a line drawn between the earth and night sky. Overhead, the stars glowed faintly and cast their light over the stalled front loaders and bulldozers. We scooted to the middle of the seat and Miles reached over to take my hand. We did not speak for a time, just let the place where our sides touched warm each other in the cooling cab of the truck.

“I'm sorry about the other night,” Miles said when a long space of silence had passed.

I shrugged. “It was no big deal.”

“It won't happen again.”

“I know.”

I laid my head against his shoulder and looked out over the black expanse, conscious of the world's impartial turning and how we can be terrifyingly alone in it all. But Miles was there beside me, and I was not afraid.

At school on Monday I
climbed the outdoor ramp to Mr. Ball's portable classroom. His students were in the music room, but I knew he'd let me stay to staple artwork to the bulletin board or organize his bookshelves.

“How are you doing, Mr. Ball?” I said.

He sat behind his desk with a stack of homework assignments at hand, leafing through the pages and making marks with a red pen.

“Doing okay,” he said.

He set the packet on the corrected pile and picked up the next in the stack.

“Can I help you with anything?” I asked.

“You can look over that pile of geography assignments. The answer key's on top.”

I grabbed the worksheets and sat behind the low horseshoe table pushed against the side wall. Mr. Ball had the radio going and we listened to the music for a few minutes without talking.

“How's your baby doing?” I said.

He looked up and laughed.

“He never sleeps. Sometimes I'm like, ‘Kid, take it easy.' ”

He shook his head.

“And these little people in here. Daniel's been giving me crap all week.”

I skimmed the page in front of me for wrong answers.

“Did you have to ride him?”

“I sat on him all morning,” he joked.

I marked a red
X
through Australia, mistakenly labeled as Antarctica.

“Did you know his dad's in Iraq?” Mr. Ball said. “I think that's part of his problem. Why he's acting out. Sometimes when I take him aside—not to yell at him, but just to talk—he gets all teary-eyed. Like he just needs a man to talk to him.”

I nodded. “I can see that.”

On the radio the music switched from a rock song to a car dealership
commercial and I looked at the clock on the wall. Ten minutes before I had to head to PE.

“Let me ask you something,” Mr. Ball said.

I scanned the map of the world printed on the worksheet in front of me.

“Sure.”

“Did you go to college?

“I did.”

“Where'd you go?”

“Penn.”

“That's a good school.”

“It's not bad.”

“So tell me something.”

I looked up from the page in my hand and saw that Mr. Ball had stopped marking the paper on his desk and leaned forward, as if to make sure he heard my answer. I raised my eyebrows.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

I started to laugh but I realized he was serious. I thought for a second to tell him about Miles—the way he spoke, the way he listened, the way I felt around him—but I stopped myself. How could I tell him that Miles was what I had been looking for my entire life? That the great lonely space inside me, deep and wide as a canyon, shrank to nothing when Miles stepped into the room? That even in that shitty job in that god-awful town, I still considered myself a lucky, lucky girl? Instead I shrugged my shoulders.

“I ask myself that every day,” I said.

I try to imagine the
sacrifices my mother made to mold her life to my father's. I think of her days in the mountains of north Georgia, where clouds covered the sun much of the time, and the winters—nothing like blue-skied south Florida winters—hung heavy and gray for months. I know she quit teaching when they left Miami and I try to understand how she filled her time on the farm. She must have cooked for my father. I remember the table set with pork chops, okra, and collard greens. She must have washed his jeans and folded his shirts, even the white ones that had yellowed under the arms. She must have stripped the sheets from the bed and thrown them in the wash with the other dirty laundry, the unsaid things. She must have lived this life and still loved my father, because after he died she never remarried.

“What's that old saying?” she said. “ ‘If you've had the best, you know you never can replace that'?”

Cavender's Boot City is in
Temple, Texas, twenty-seven miles outside Fort Hood and thirty-six miles from Waco, where David Koresh and his Branch Davidians once lived. I wanted to point this out to Miles on the drive there, to take a jab at that land of holy-rolling crazies, but he was a fiercely proud Texan, the kind who lived by the slogan “American by birth, Texan by the grace of God.” So I let it pass.

In the store I followed him to the back, to the shelves of simple work boots, the strong Texan boots, not the showy versions tourists bought in Austin to take back to New York.

“Dime-store cowboys,” he called them.

On a shelf in the back half of the store I found a pair of riding boots in rich sorrel leather. They were hand-worked with stitching running up the shaft, and I traced the thread with one finger, following the dips and knots the color of straw. They were undeniably beautiful but I worried if they were right for me.

For that matter, was Miles? Here was a man who voted Republican, who drove a pickup and owned a shotgun, who could ride a horse and rope a cow. He went to church most Sundays, with or without me. More without than with as time went on. He tithed from every paycheck. He prayed before meals, even in restaurants, and we became the sort of couple—hands held, heads bowed over our plates in public—that used to dismay me. When my roommate in Tallahassee said in the first month Miles and I were dating “You two are going to get married,” I laughed.

“No way,” I said. “He's way too country for me.”

But one day, after a game of tennis on the cracked courts of Fort Rucker, Miles looked across the bed of his truck and said, “When I'm with you, no matter what we're doing—tennis or whatever—I want it to go on forever.” Until that moment I had always said I would never get married because I could not imagine loving someone enough to be with them forever. But really I could not imagine someone loving me that much.

In Cavender's I handed Miles the boots.

“What do you think?”

He turned them over to inspect the heel and ran his fingers down the leather shaft.

“Looks good,” he said.

I sat on a wooden bench and slipped the leg of my jeans up to my knee. I stuck one foot down into the boot and worked the heel until my ankle slipped in.

“Try walking around,” Miles said. “How do they feel?”

“They feel good.”

“A little tight?”

“A little. In the ankles.”

“That'll stretch out.”

I walked the length of the store while Miles watched from the bench. When I sat down beside him, he leaned over to whisper in my ear.

“Those boots look good on you,” he said.

I extended one foot and tilted the boot to both sides.

Did they?

I called my mother on
a weekend afternoon while Miles was in the field. The day was overcast and humid, brooding weather.

“I don't know what I'm doing here,” I said when she picked up. “I feel like I'm wasting my life.”

My mother was quiet on her end of the phone.

“I have a crappy job,” I said. “We live in this shitty apartment. My car's on its last leg. I don't know what to do.”

The weak sun cast a pale light through the kitchen window. People passed in front of the door on their way to the laundry room, and their shadows cut the light that seeped under the frame.

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked, and when my mother was silent: “Should I leave?”

“I don't think that's the solution,” she said.

I sat at the breakfast bar and looked over our tiny kitchen—at the loaf of bread stacked on top of the refrigerator, the yellow box of off-brand cookies on the counter.

“Then what do I do?”

My mother breathed a long slow breath. “Do you love him?”

I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them I took in the pot holders by the stove, the calendar tacked to the wall, the weekly menu I'd written. A shopping list was pinned to the corkboard beside a note in Miles's handwriting. I saw how all those bits of domesticity formed the working fabric of our relationship and I realized that this was how people built a life together. Not in the plans or schemes or worries or fears but in the day-to-day. The dish soap, the spoon rest, the coupons.

“I love him more than anything,” I said.

Perhaps my mother considered her own life then. The mountains of north Georgia, the red earth and the daffodils in spring, my father on his tractor waving at the house.

“Then you stay,” she said.

In late November Miles and
I drove to Austin for the weekend. He booked us a room in a fancy hotel and we ate venison and wild boar at an expensive restaurant. I wore my good dress. When we came back to the room, Miles got down on one knee. I cried and he cried and the next thing I knew, he was slipping a ring on my finger.