Unremarried Widow (8 page)

But in the night I got up to use the bathroom and stood for a long time in front of the mirror. People say we always think we look like
ourselves, even as we age, even as we put on weight, even as we're cratered with uncertainty. I turned my face from side to side, trying to determine if I resembled the woman I had once been.

At school on Monday the
other aides fussed over my ring. I blushed as I held out my hand and the diamonds glinted in the glare from the fluorescent lights. Later in the week Ms. Walker stopped me in the hallway.

“You coming to the party tonight?” she said.

Her second-grade class trailed after her in a line and slumped against the wall as we talked.

“Is that tonight?” I said.

“You got other plans?”

“Miles is in the field.”

“Then come over.”

I pulled into her driveway a little after eight, and when I knocked on the front door a woman answered. She was curved like Ms. Walker—not heavy exactly but full-figured. Pretty with good hair.

“Come on in,” she said.

I followed her through the coatroom and into the living room, where people milled. Some of the teachers from school were there but mostly it was women I didn't know. I saw a plate of cheese cubes on a side table next to a bowl of spinach dip and I headed there.

“Girl, there you are.” Ms. Walker gave me a hug. “Glad you could come.”

“You look great,” I said.

She did. She had on dark red lip gloss and tight brown pants.

“Let me get you something to drink,” she said. “Can I get you some wine?”

“Wine would be great.”

She filled a glass with chardonnay from a gallon-size bottle, the
kind you buy at Walmart for $8.99. The doorbell rang and she handed me the glass.

“Let me go get that,” she said.

I took a sip and started in on the cheese. I ate cube after cube of orange squares. When women began moving to the couch, I filled a paper plate and followed them to the sectional. The cushions sank as I sat. Ms. Walker flipped on the big flat-screen TV at the center of the room and scanned the channels until she found an Oprah rerun.

“Did you see the episode where she—”

“And that time when she—”

“That outfit she wore when—”

I sipped my chardonnay and shifted on the couch. If someone looked in my direction, I smiled.

“Let's play that game,” the friend who had answered the door said. “The game with the questions.”

Ms. Walker turned from the kitchen counter.

“The paper's right there on the table.”

The friend picked up squares of blank paper and a handful of pens.

“Pay attention now,” she said.

The hum of conversation died down.

“We thought we'd play a little game so everybody can get to know one another,” she said. “Here's how this is going to work. I'm going to hand out these pieces of paper. You write down a question for the group—don't put your name on it—and fold it up and put it in this jar I'm going to pass around.”

The conversations started up again, louder.

The woman on my left turned to me. “We put our name on it?”

I shook my head. “Just your question.”

A woman standing in the kitchen raised her hand. “I've got a question.”

“Girl, we're not in school,” the pretty friend said. “You don't have to raise your hand.”

“Well, what kind of question are we asking?”

“Anything you want.”

I looked at the blank scrap of paper in my hand. Anything? I thought about something dirty, something funny, something crazy. But I didn't know these women or how it would go over. Something I already knew the answer to? The women on either side of me scrawled on the paper they pressed against their thighs. The pretty friend folded up her piece of paper and dropped it into a ceramic jar on the table next to the cheese.

“I'm going to start passing this around,” she said. “Just drop your question in.”

Should I ask about sex? About school? About books? I discarded every question that came to mind while the jar worked its way around the couch.

“You want us to fold it up?” a woman three cushions over asked. She balanced the jar on her round knees. “Or just drop it in?”

“Do whatever you want,” the friend said.

The woman crumpled the paper into a ball the size of a marble. I needed a question. Any question. So I wrote what I worried about every day. I wrote the question that I thought about when I woke up in the morning and that pressed me into sleep at night.

What if you love someone with all your heart but you're afraid that being with him means giving up the life you imagined for yourself?

I folded the slip of paper just as the jar reached me and dropped my question in. The container finished making its way around the room and already the pockets of conversation were starting up again. I clutched my paper plate in my hand, crimping the cardboard edges.

Please don't pick mine,
I thought.
Please pick another question.

The pretty friend held the jar over her head.

“I'm going to choose now,” she said.

The room grew quieter but not quiet. Ms. Walker leaned against
the counter and talked to another teacher. Three women at the far end of the couch ate tiny meatballs and talked in low voices. One burst out with a loud laugh.

“Hush,” Ms. Walker's friend said.

The woman with the meatballs covered her mouth with her hand and one of the other women slapped her knee. They all three laughed.

The pretty friend stirred the jar dramatically.

“Come on, pick one!” Ms. Walker shouted from the kitchen.

“I'm getting there,” the friend said. She gave her hand a final swirl and then with her perfectly manicured nails lifted a folded slip of paper.

Not mine,
I prayed.

She unfolded the paper and skimmed the question. She cleared her throat and the room waited.

“What if you love someone,” she paraphrased, “but being with them means giving up your own life?”

There was a lull as people considered the question. I looked at the floor. The meatball women started talking again in low voices, their feet pushed close together.

“And I said, ‘If you're not going to bother to treat me like a lady, then don't bother—' ”

The woman next to her nodded vigorously. A woman at the end of the couch stood up to fix herself another plate of cheese, and I thought the moment might pass. But Ms. Walker stepped out of the kitchen and leaned over her friend's shoulder to read the paper. She looked pointedly in my direction.

“You figure out how to make it work,” she said. “That's what marriage is.”

On a clear day at
the end of the year, Miles and I drove through the hills that surround Killeen. The day was cool enough that we rolled down the windows and let the dry air blow into the car. Thistle bushes grew beside the road and mesquite trees crouched back from the shoulder. Sunlight filtered through the open sunroof and the wind flowed into the car and back out, taking with it the air we exhaled and the evaporating sweat from our bodies. We drove until we spotted a vegetable stand beside the highway.

“Should we stop?” Miles asked.

“Sure,” I said.

Inside the wood frame of the market stall, heat radiated from the corrugated tin roof. Rays of sunlight angled into the shed and illuminated the motes of dust that rose in our wake. Miles pointed to the clear plastic bags of water hanging from the rafters.

“Keeps the flies off,” the man behind the counter said.

He laughed a dry, old man's laugh.

“You in the military?” he asked Miles.

“Yes, sir.”

“Thought so. Always can tell by the hair.”

He leaned back and propped his hands on the wooden countertop.

“Used to be in the military myself.”

I worked my way around the stand while the man talked to Miles about the Army, bases they both knew, tours overseas. I put a jar of honey on the counter beside a pound of tomatoes. The man poked at the keys of a large cash register while he talked, and Miles pulled bills from his wallet and passed them across the counter.

“You all take care,” the man said as we walked back to the car, and to Miles: “Watch out for yourself over there.”

“I will,” Miles said.

The tires kicked up dust as we pulled back onto the asphalt and the low hum of the road worked its way through the undercarriage.

“Are you going to sell vegetables out of the back of your pickup when you get done with the Army?”

Miles laughed.

“Nah,” he said. “I think I'll be a teacher. Maybe coach football.”

I looked through the windshield and nodded thoughtfully.

“They have this Troops to Teachers program,” he said. “The Army'll pay for you to go back to college and get your degree. When you're done, you teach in a public school somewhere.”

“That sounds all right,” I said.

Miles looked at me. “Yeah?”

I took his hand and held it over the console.

“Yeah.”

He drove for a few minutes without speaking, then asked, “How about you? What do you want to do when this Army business is over?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I don't know.”

Miles squeezed my hand.

“Seriously,” he said. “What do you want?”

“Anything?”

“Anything.”

“I want to be a writer.”

Miles held the steering wheel and I could feel him considering.

“What would you write? Books?”

“Books, articles—I don't know. I'd like to travel too. To write from overseas.”

Miles was quiet for a time. Finally he said, “I like that idea.”

“You do?”

“It feels right.”

I smiled to myself and watched the road wind through the hills. Anything seemed possible in that land bare of everything but rye grass and barbed wire, and it was easy to imagine a future where our plans would come to pass. We followed the dashed line dividing the
asphalt until the road spit us out at the foot of a rise where a stoplight blinked. Miles slowed and I pointed to a hand-lettered sign in the grass.

“ ‘House for Sale,' ” I read. “Want to give it a try?”

Miles followed my finger to the sign, to the path that turned off the main highway, and to the low hills beyond.

“Let's do it,” he said.

He put on his blinker and we watched for cardboard arrows planted in the ground.

“This it?” he said in front of a leaning mailbox.

I craned my neck to read the sign staked into the ground.

“I think so.”

The driveway sloped upward to a small house at the top of the hill. I say
house
loosely. It was a trailer. A double-wide, but still. Pale grasshoppers skittered from beneath my feet as I stepped out of the car and a breeze combed through the knee-high weeds. The property was nothing special—open space and untamed grass buffeted by wind and sun—but it possessed a certain quality that brought to mind the word
homestead.
For a brief moment we let ourselves believe in the possibility of a settled life. Miles looked toward the base of the property and the road we drove in on. His sunglasses hid his eyes, but I guessed what he was thinking. I was thinking the same.

“We could live here,” he said.

I surveyed the property, nodding. “We could.”

On the front porch I pressed my face against the dusty sliding glass door. Inside, the trailer was empty. Thin carpet covered the floors and a fan sagged from the ceiling. I could see straight through to the back window that looked out on the hills beyond. The wooden planks of the porch creaked with our steps as we jumped down and pushed a path through the grass before circling around to the car.

“Do you think we should call the number on the sign?” he said.

“Let's give it a try.”

Miles called the real estate agent but got the agent's voice mail instead. He left a message before we drove back to Killeen. We both had work on Monday, and then it was the middle of the week, and soon it was the next weekend. The agent never called back. In the weeks that followed I would find grass seeds stuck to the clothes we wore that day. Sometimes Miles would mention the place. But over time we forgot.

Much later—in the wake of the war—I would dream of that house. Flat plains stretched behind the property, wide-open and empty, and in the distance sand hills rose up like dunes. In the dream I was lost. I tried to find my way through that vast stretch of sameness, a land without discernible pathways, and all the while I felt the house pressing at my back, its solidness there just over the rise.

In early March, Miles and
I phoned home, first to my mother, then to Miles's parents. I sat at the breakfast counter with my arms folded nervously in my lap and watched Miles as he spoke.

“Hello, Dad,” Miles said. “Is Mom there?”

He stood beside my chair and reached a hand over to touch my arm.

“Good, good,” he said. “Glad I got both of you there.”

I gave him a small smile.

“Listen, we wanted to call and see if it would be all right if—if we—if we went ahead and got married. Before the wedding, I mean.”

There was a long silence and I reached out to Miles.

“We were thinking, you know, to go ahead and get the administrative details out of the way. Get Artis her military ID. Get her on Tricare. We don't want to have to mess with all that while I'm deployed.”

I ran my thumb over the rough skin around his fingernail and inspected the folds of his knuckle. I was afraid to look at his face. But
when he started to talk again, I could hear the smile in his voice. I looked up and he nodded his head.

“Sure, sure,” he said. “She's right here. I'll put her on.”