Unremarried Widow by Artis Henderson Read Free Book Online Page A

ask ourselves how we would ever survive the fifteen months he’d be gone to Iraq.
    â€œCan I get you something to eat?” I said.
    He leaned his head against the couch and closed his eyes.
    â€œThat would be wonderful,” he said.
----
    Miles told me over time some of what happened, bits and pieces that came out during dinner, late nights while we watched TV, on long drives across the state. But he never told me all of it. Just stories, brief peeks into the experience, like peering through a window covered by venetian blinds. A breeze would blow and a panel would shift to show what lay beneath, then the gust would die down, the blind would drop, and that part of Miles would seal off again. He told me they had been made to strip down when they first arrived at the POW camp and they were hosed off and forced to roll on the ground. Miles laughed when he talked about the cold water and biting gravel. They made him remove the laces from his boots and the chafing left raw welts on his heels. He went for days without food. Once he banged on the door to his cell and yelled until his throat went raw.
    â€œI want some peanuts,” he said, “and a Pepsi.”
    He yelled and banged until they brought him peanuts and a cup of soda.
    â€œI want some for the guy next to me too,” he said.
    They brought more peanuts and another cup of soda for the soldier next to him.
    Miles wanted me to believe it was one grand adventure, a three-week camping trip with the guys from work. But he told me later about a soldier from an earlier group who ran into one of the SERE instructors afterward. The soldier almost killed the instructor in the middle of a restaurant in Fayetteville, the effects of the course were that enduring. Miles just shrugged his shoulders and laughed. SERE C was no big deal.
    But in the night he would thrash in his sleep and I would have to lay a hand on his chest.
    â€œMiles,” I’d say.
    He would open his eyes and look at me and I would feel his confusion in the dark room. Then he would remember and relax back into sleep.
----
    By the time we settled into Fayetteville, it was time to move again. Only six months after we arrived, the unit received orders to Fort Hood, in Texas, to train for the coming deployment. Most of the soldiers would go to Hood alone, without their families. What was the alternative? Pull their kids out of school, uproot the lives they had built, only to do it all again in nine months? I was learning that there were no good options.
    Miles and I had a yard sale and sold most of what we owned for less than three hundred dollars. What remained we packed into boxes. A summer storm raged the night before we left and thunder cracked as Miles loaded the boxes into his truck. He came in soaked after each round, water coursing down his neck and collecting in the collar of his shirt, while I swept around his wet footprints, erasing any trace that we had ever lived there.

5
    The morning we left for Fort Hood dawned cool and gray, and we pulled out of town before the sun had a chance to burn off the clouds. We wound through the mountains of western North Carolina, along roads shaded by towering trees, with steep rock embankments that dropped to the green forest floor below. We cruised past Hickory and Asheville, through the Great Smoky Mountains and onto the sun-covered plains of Tennessee. We drove through Knoxville and Memphis before crossing the churning blue-gray waters of the Mississippi. Then it was west to Arkansas, humid and crowded with mosquitoes. We reached Oklahoma and continued through the pointing finger of the panhandle until we hit north Texas, where Miles’s family owned three hundred and twenty acres. We pulled off the highway on an afternoon in late July, the heat so intense it sucked the air out of my lungs. Acres of scrub brush stretched across the dry land, and a plume of dust rose behind the truck as we rattled over the dirt road. Cows grazed alongside a