“You’re on.”
The croupier spun. The background noise seemed to die away, the electronic music and murmured conversations and a distant vacuum cleaner all gave way to the resonant click, click, click as the wheel slowed. Click, red. Click, black. Click…
He loved his job. He loved his wife. Life had never been better.
Leaving the warm gymnasium behind him, he stepped out onto the blacktop in the endless, freezing-cold darkness.
Epilogue
Tara shifted from foot to foot, trying and failing not to inventory the outfits of the wives waiting alongside her in the echoing, stars-and-stripes-bedecked gymnasium. It was unseasonably warm for mid-May and she’d opted for a short, breezy baby-blue sundress and flip-flops. As she looked around she realized she was the only one not wearing heels—and the only one with a hem above her knees.
Not that it mattered, she reminded herself sternly. By now she knew most of these women, and they were all so kind and welcoming that she’d long given up wondering whether they whispered about her behind her back.
In fact it was Chance’s commanding officer’s wife who’d pointed her toward the community college in Meridian, where she’d just finished the first semester in her nursing degree. She’d taken to it much more quickly than she expected, and was most surprised by her instructors’ praise for her fledging bedside manner. Turned out that more than ten years serving belligerent drunks made even the most irritable patients seem impeccably genteel.
Just last week she’d handed in her notice at the bar downtown, and yesterday was her final shift. Now she had two weeks until she started her new job as an administrative coordinator for Mia’s PTSD-therapy program at Fort Preston, which had recently won an eighteen-month grant.
Tara smiled as she thought about the housewarming dinner Mia and Ethan had hosted two nights ago. Laurel had turned up wearing a brand-new diamond engagement ring, but whenever Tara tried to ask about the wedding planning she shrugged it off, turning the conversation to Chance’s imminent return.
“Wedding planning will take the rest of the year, but your husband will only come home once. You must be so excited,” Laurel had exclaimed. “What time does he land?”
“They’re supposed to get to post at ten o’clock on Monday night, but in army time that could be midnight or later.”
“We’re all counting on you to convince him to stay put for at least the next year.” Ethan gave her one of his characteristically quiet, encouraging smiles.
She grinned. “I barely had to say a thing. He’s already talking to the chain of command about starting a pre-med degree. It’ll probably take a while, but one of these days we may be addressing him as Dr. McKinley.”
“God help us.” Grady’s wink undermined his words.
“Remind him to speak to me when he decides to pick an orthopedic specialty,” Laurel joked.
“Or psychiatric,” Mia added.
Grady and Ethan locked eyes across the table, then dissolved into uncontrollable laughter.
“What’s so funny?” Tara asked when they finally got hold of themselves.
“The idea of that crazy son of bitch helping people achieve mental stability,” Grady managed, wiping a tear from his eye.
“He’d prescribe every patient an army contract,” Ethan said, and the two of them were gone again.
She smiled to herself in the gymnasium. These last six months of Chance’s deployment had been some of the hardest in her life, but they would’ve been impossible without the support of this new group of friends.
Not that they hadn’t been without their share of ugly, breathtakingly painful moments. Like her lonely decision to accept her aunt’s invitation to visit over the holidays, which she regretted less than ten minutes into the drive to Arkansas. She spent hours enduring her cousins’ skeptical glances, her uncle’s diatribe on the evils of the military-industrial complex, and her father’s increasingly slurred barbs until she stood up from her post-meal position on the sofa and volunteered to drive him home. He didn’t stop talking through that twenty-minute journey, accusing her of abandoning him, demanding she help pay for his groceries and utilities, finally dissolving into barely comprehensible whimpers about how much he’d always loved her. She dropped him off in front of the trailer and hightailed it to a motel, where she spent Christmas Eve watching TV and twisting the wedding ring on her finger.
Or like the time a strange number came up on her phone and she had to leave the bar to take the call. She frowned at the sidewalk on Main Street as Chance’s captain explained that a patrol had been ambushed and he was one of three soldiers still unaccounted for. She moved through the rest of her shift like a zombie, refusing her boss’s offer to go home early, shaking cocktails and pulling draught beers and handing them over with a smile while her mind was thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, praying her husband was alive. When she couldn’t work any later she went home, where she paced and cried and wrung her hands until her phone rang again, and she answered with her heart not daring to beat. It was the captain again, breathlessly relaying how Chance had turned up to the outpost wall, hypothermic, his radio crushed, hauling another soldier over his shoulders. She sobbed with relief, barely able to thank the officer for his call, and when her phone rang two hours later it was Chance’s Gulf-Coast drawl on the other end, the first thing out of his mouth a joke about how the army would probably charge him for the broken radio.
There had been mornings she’d skipped class and called in sick to work, too depressed to get up, dozing until midafternoon and then hating herself for being weak and wasting the day. There had been nights she couldn’t get to sleep, certain she heard an intruder creeping through the grass, jumping at every subsequent creak and shift in the old house until she gave up and switched on the light, reading book after book until dawn. There had been moments she was certain she couldn’t survive another hour without him, times she wanted to call some imaginary army headquarters and say she gave up, she couldn’t do it anymore and they had to bring him home.
But she endured. She treasured every second of their phone and Skype calls, and found ways to keep breathing through the hours between them. The six months never really got easier, but they did get shorter. And now here she was, only minutes from the end.
“I see a bus!” someone shouted near the entrance. An excited hush fell over the room as people gathered wandering children, unfolded handmade signs, readied cameras and gave their makeup a final onceover. Tara backed up against the nearest bleacher, afraid her legs wouldn’t hold her if she tried to scramble onto one of the higher ones for a better view.
People started to cheer as the sound of a bus hissing to a halt was audible from outside. So many of the wives seemed to have brought friends or family members to take photos, and she briefly wondered whether she should’ve asked Laurel or Mia to be here with her.
She discarded that idea almost as soon as she’d had it. She and Chance had spent their lives facing off against the world. Now they had each other, and they didn’t need anyone else.
Suddenly the double doors on the far well banged open and the cheering escalated to a fever pitch as the 13th Infantry’s Alpha Company marched in, then halted in formation.
Tara’s heart beat so loudly in her ears that she could hardly make out what the commander said in his brief speech. She caught something about service and bravery but she was busy scanning the group of people in identical camouflage uniforms, searching for the one who was coming home to her.
“And we remember those still in harm’s way, and pray for their safe return.” The commander stood back from the podium as the first notes of the Star-Spangled Banner came over the loudspeaker.
She saw him.
The next few minutes sped by so quickly she could barely process what happened. The song finished, the troops were released from duty, and the room became a melee of bodies looking and finding and colliding in reunion. She lost sight of Chance behind a big family and when she rounded them he was gone. She drifted aimlessly through the crowd, craning her neck, furrowing her brow, worried he’d gone out to the parking lot when he couldn’t find her when a hand touched her shoulder.
“Hey, sugar, you want to make a bet?”
She turned around and burst into tears. He was gaunt and pale and alive and she threw her arms around his neck, squeezing so hard, not sure she could ever bring herself to let go. He hoisted her up off her feet and she wrapped her legs around his waist, not caring what the other wives thought, not caring how her skirt rode up her thighs, losing herself in the heat of his body and the bony hardness of his shoulders and the irrepressible scent of honeysuckle slicing through the old-rubber smell of the gymnasium.
“You’re here,” she gasped when she could pull enough air into her lungs to speak. “You’re home.”
“Of course I am, sugar. This soldier’s life means I’ll never stop leaving, but I promise I’ll always come home to you.”
“And I’ll always be here waiting.”
As Tara took in his devil-may-care grin, his mischievous green eyes, the absolute commitment she knew sat safe and stalwart in his heart, she realized just how much she’d won when the roulette ball hit on green. She had a man who understood her, who cherished her, who blazed through life with her same ferocious heat and loved her for it. And she knew without a doubt that no matter what tried to pull them apart, from money to family to wars on foreign soil, they would always snap back, staggering toward each other, collapsing together. Two sticks blackening and fusing in a bonfire, the flame roaring up into the sky.
