Blue Stars by Emily Gray Tedrowe Read Free Book Online Page B

good at this. She made a face at the malfunctioning mike, and stepped away from it, raising her voice naturally to carry throughout the hall. She talked about how hard it was the first time her husband was deployed, how it was her friends in the FRG who saved her. There was the night two girlfriends stayed over until 1:00 a.m. to help her glue two hundred sugar cubes onto a plastic bowl for her kid’s history project (igloos). The morning everything had gone wrong and she dropped her car keys into a nasty pool of watery mud, and just lost it, how she had called a mil-wife friend who let her vent and cry until it was time to roll up her sleeves and fish around in the sewer water, alone.
    “Now I’m sure some of you have seen that TV show,” she said, to laughter. “And whether it represents what our lives are like, I think I’ll just … reserve my comments on that. Find me over a glass of wine later, and we’ll talk.
    “But I will say that the show with that title has made me think. Am I just an ‘army wife’? Are you? What does that really mean in today’s world? I have a job, a life, kids … this isn’t my whole world, you know?” Women nodded, clapped.
    “And yet, I am an army wife. I’m proud of it. And I know you are too. So let’s be there for each other—army husbands too, I’m not forgetting you guys!—during this next year. God bless our troops, and God bless America.” Amid the cheers and applause, Lacey was surprised by tears, which she quickly blotted away with her napkin.
    “What’d you get?” she said to Otis, who was unwrapping a gift that had been passed out to all the kids at their table, and throughout the hall.
    He held it up. “Laaaaame.”
    It was a book called Daddy, Come Home! Helping Kids with Deployment. The cover featured a cartoon of a saluting dad in uniform with two kids looking up at him, smiling mom observing it all.
    Martine leaned over to Lacey and read in a whisper from the introduction, “‘Deployment can be hardest on parents left at home who are not only contending with their own anger, sadness and fear, but must deal with misbehavior issues stemming from their children’s anger, sadness and fear.’ Super. Really psyches you up, huh?”
    Her husband Greg raised a hand, a toddler on his lap. “Uh, did someone just say that deployment is hardest on the folks at home ?” A couple of guys laughed. Martine tossed a balled-up napkin at him. Eddie was looking elsewhere, scanning the room.
    Otis pulled the book away from his mom. He and another boy took turns reading aloud in a high, whining voice: “Daddy, I miss you!” “Let’s draw a picture together of the United States flag. Isn’t that a special symbol?” “Punching a pillow is a good idea to get your anger out. Punch, punch!” “But Daddy, I miss you!”
    “That’s enough,” Lacey said, taking Otis’s book away. “Knock it off. Go see if they put out the ice cream.”
    Another woman, a friend of Martine’s, said, “You guys’ll think I’m crazy, but I’m actually having one of those Deployment Dolls made for Tara. You seen those? Hug-a-Hero dolls?”
    “What are they?”
    “I can give you the Web site. You send in a photo of your soldier in uniform, and she prints the image on fabric and makes a stuffed doll out of it. It’s about a foot tall.”
    Lacey said nothing. The woman blushed. “Believe me, I thought it was creepy at first too. But my girlfriend is at Fort Hood, and she said it really helped her daughter with the stress of it all. She sleeps with it every night.”
    “What’s the Web site?” Martine asked. “They’re not just for girls, are they?”
    A doll wasn’t going to help Otis, though. Lacey watched him goof around with the other boys. A chubby kid with glasses, Otis resembled her more than his father, thank God. He had Lacey’s sandy-colored hair and dark blue eyes. The last time Eddie was away it hadn’t seemed to bother Otis that much—or maybe she hadn’t