One September Morning by Rosalind Noonan Read Free Book Online

didn’t, but Suz can’t stand to let it go.
    “I told you he’d give it back, Ziggy,” Madison says, turning to Suz. “We knew he was exaggerating.”
    “I wouldn’t be so sure.” Suz lifts her protest sign, spots Mount Rainier in the distance, and faces north toward Seattle. Come December, she’ll be out of here.
    She started her day looking for a sign, and dammit, she found one.

Chapter 5
     
    Fort Lewis Sharice
     
    Y ou can always learn something new. Sharice Stanton likes the style of the new chaplain, a young man who is trying to lecture on the ways to ease into reunion after your spouse has been assigned overseas for so many months. After a lifetime in the military, first as an army brat and now as an army wife, Sharice has weathered her fair share of reunions. As a girl, she waited for her father to return from exotic-sounding places like Vietnam, Germany, Guam, Korea, and Thailand. How the days would stretch out into plodding weeks, and when at last he returned, the reunion was over so fast. A kiss and a toy doll or necklace, and then he was just a boring normal father again, going to work, sitting at the head of the dinner table, taking care of small projects in the house or yard.
    Still, a childhood in the army made her the perfect wife for Jim, who was a career man, a graduate of West Point. When he proposed to her on one knee one spring day at Fort Drum, he warned her that, as a lifetime soldier, he couldn’t promise her a settled home in one place. And she said that was good, because she got bored being in one place for too long.
    She smiles, thinking of how they’d laughed at that…laughed so hard that one of the MPs had come out of the guard booth to make sure they were okay. Yes, she and Jim had lots of laughs over the years…and many trying yet fulfilling reunions when he returned from overseas assignments.
    Of course, her husband has been a fixture at the training academy here for so long, she doubts he’ll be deployed again, but both her two sons, Noah and John, are currently in Iraq, and she wants to be on her game to help them ease back into life stateside when they return.
    The new chaplain asked them to take the chairs out of rows and put them in one big circle, and Sharice liked the approach, which allowed her a chance to see the adorable baby boy who had been wailing in his mother’s lap in the row behind her. Sometimes it seems like minutes ago that she was holding a baby of her own, little John with a full head of dense black hair, and Noah, whose bald head had made him resemble an old man until wispy brown hair started sprouting at eight months. And then, years later, her surprise baby whom Jim called “Oops!”, sweet Madison with downy hair so pale she could have been mistaken for an Easter chick. Now Maddie’s in high school and her baby boys are in their twenties, soldiers, grown men, one with a wife.
    “They grow up so fast,” she whispers to the young mother, who is now burping the baby over one shoulder.
    “Not fast enough when they’re crying,” the mother answers wryly, and they exchange a smile.
    From this spot in the room Sharice is one of the first to notice when the door opens and two uniformed officers enter. One of the men is Lt. Col. Mitch Preston, a chaplain Sharice has known for years, the minister who baptized her youngest, Madison.
    The other officer, a captain, appears exceedingly nervous, beads of sweat on his brow and a pinched look around the mouth. Together, the two men have the look of a CAO—casualty assistance officer—the team that notifies family members when a soldier has been killed or wounded. Since the war in Iraq began, Sharice has been part of many a CAO team. Usually, wives from the Family Readiness Group wait in the car while the officers make the notification. Then the women approach the home to offer support. After that, any number of scenarios might follow, usually involving tears, hugs, phone calls, stories, and covered casserole