Unremarried Widow by Artis Henderson Read Free Book Online Page B

barbed-wire fence, their coats ruffling in thebreeze. I was finally out west, as Psychic Suzanna had predicted the year before.
    Miles spent the days of our visit outside under the big Texas sky. He rode horses and worked the ranch with his father while I stayed inside with Terry. She showed me how to make her meat loaf and wrote the recipe for her sugar cookies on an index card for me to take to Fort Hood. She talked endlessly, hardly pausing for breath, as if she wasn’t used to having an audience and needed to unload the things she carried in her heart. Mostly she talked about Miles—about how long it took to conceive him, about the miscarriages that came after. She numbered her lost babies among her children. She talked about breast-feeding, sleepless nights, and Miles’s sweet baby smile. She cornered me once about the move to Texas, but before she could get to the sinful parts, Brad and Miles tromped into the kitchen.
    We stayed just a couple of days before heading south to Fort Hood. The night had only begun to give over to dawn when we left the panhandle. The sun sent up angry red fingers that turned the sky a mottled pink like a bruise. Blue filtered in as we drove southward, and by mid-afternoon the light had hardened, all sharp edges that made me wince as I stared through the windshield. By the time we hit I–20 the day had given way to pale twilight. A violet light split the air, smoky and flint-tipped like Indian arrowheads. I thought of ambushes in that vast and craggy country. We parked at a rest stop overlooking a valley fringed in red rock and sat beside each other in moody silence.
    â€œWhat’s the matter with you?” I said after a time.
    Miles scowled. “Me? What’s the matter with you ?”
    â€œI’m not the one in a bad mood.”
    â€œYou’ve been a pill all day. Ever since we left this morning.”
    I stared across the cliffs without answering, and the wind picked up and scattered the leaves at our feet.
    â€œI’m just worried,” I said.
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œThat Fort Hood will be like Fort Bragg. That I won’t be able to find a job, that I’ll be sitting there every day waiting for you to come home. That you’ll always be gone.”
    â€œDon’t make this my fault.”
    â€œI’m not saying it’s your fault.”
    â€œThen what are you saying?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    Miles stood. “Then how can I fix it?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said again. “But later, when this is all done, I want to have a say in what we do, in where we go.”
    â€œOf course. What do you think? That I’m not going to take what you want into consideration?”
    I turned the dirt with the toe of my shoe.
    â€œI’ve seen how some guys in the unit are. It doesn’t matter what their wives want.”
    â€œWell, that’s not me.”
    â€œI know, but I worry—”
    â€œStop worrying, babe. We’ll make it through Hood together. We’ll make it through the deployment. When I get back, we can talk about what base we want to go to next.”
    â€œBut what if all the bases are the same?”
----
    The city of Killeen crouched at the edge of Fort Hood the way Fayetteville loitered outside Fort Bragg. Its streets smelled of hot concrete and old grease, and the city was pocked with fast-food joints and pawnshops. Plastic bags blew through empty parking lots and roaches crawled across the sidewalks at night. Killeen had a high murder rate and hookers on the corner of Rancier and Second Avenue, where Miles and I found an apartment. It was cheap and convenientand already furnished. Anyway, we told ourselves, we’d only be there nine months. I found a job at an elementary school as a second-grade teaching assistant making less than eight hundred dollars a month. Every Monday I prayed my old Saturn would limp through anther week.
    Our first month at Fort Hood,