"Yeah. She's cool like that." He glanced at his watch. "But she's picking me up in a little bit."
"Well shit, there goes my plan to get you well and truly shit-faced." Tommy held up his beer. "Hey, listen up!" His accent was thicker now that the liquor was slowly pulling him under. "My buddy Sam here is heading back to Iraq tomorrow. Fighting for all you fucking pussies’ freedom. So buy his sorry ass a beer and thank him for his goddamned service."
Tommy's words sounded like fahkin pousies. Sam had never realized how much thicker Tommy's accent seemed now that Sam didn't live here anymore. He wondered if that was how he sounded to the guys back in Iraq.
The people in the bar collapsed around him while the storm unleashed hell on the suspect roof. Everything sounded far away.
His hands moved in slow motion as he lifted the beer to his lips. The bottle was cold and smooth against his bottom lip. He no longer felt the beer as it slid down his throat. He looked down, fully expecting to see his legs somewhere other than attached to his body.
He hiccupped and burped into his hand as the wave of slapping hands and saluting his service continued far too long. Sam looked into his beer, hiding his resentment. These people slapped him on the back, said “Thank you for your service”, and went back to turning off the news because it was too upsetting to watch. Nobody gave a shit about the war. Not unless they had someone over there.
Everyone wanted to cheer the soldier on.
No one wanted to actually be the soldier.
His cell phone vibrated in his back pocket. He slapped Tommy on the shoulder and motioned toward the door. "Time to go."
"You're an old married man and you're not even married yet," Tommy said. "I'm never getting tied down."
Not much had changed with Tommy in the ten years since they'd stumbled, partly high and mostly hungover, across the stage at their high school graduation at Penquitomis Community High School. Come to think of it, not much ever changed at home. Except when they tore down the old Mason’s building to make room for the Rite Aid in the middle of town. That had been a big change.
But the same people were still pumping gas at the Irving. Maybe they weren't the same people, but it felt like it.
He slung his arm around Tommy's neck as they stumbled toward the door. The rain fell in huge splats as they stepped into the piercing darkness, illuminated only by occasional too-bright headlights and distant flashes of lightning in the hazy black sky.
"You know what, Tommy." Sam's words slurred together. "I missed you. When I was over there, I used to think about skipping school and going fishing out at Hartland Pond."
They staggered into the rain and splashed toward Faith's waiting Subaru. Sam stepped too hard into a puddle. Water sloshed over the toes of his shoes and sank into the fabric, cold and wet. His shoes squished as he walked. He yanked the door of her car open. Relief unclenched in his guts when he saw her face, smiling. She wasn't pissed. At least not yet.
God, what would he do without Faith? He leaned over and kissed her cheek. She slapped at him playfully, her blond hair clinging to her face from the wet he brought into the dim interior with him. But she wasn't pissed.
Tommy leaned into the car and slung his arm around the seat. He leaned across Sam. "Take care of him. He's one of the good ones."
Faith offered a long-suffering smile. "I will, Tommy."
Tommy leaned dangerously into the car and stuck his finger up in Sam's face. "No, I mean it, Faith. Forever. You need to take care of him." Tommy gripped Sam's neck, the finger dangerously close to Sam's nose. "Don't get blown up or shot or anything."
"I won't, Tommy." A lie. Or at least a futile promise. "I'll see you around, Tommy."
Tommy slammed the door shut and staggered back to the bar. Sam wished he didn't see his friend’s head dip or his shoulders slump. The door opened and Tommy disappeared into the smoke and haze of the Elks' Lodge. Back to his normal Friday night out.
"You okay?" Faith asked as she pulled out onto the main road, back toward their place.
"Yeah." He looked at her and offered a weak smile. "Just really, really intoxicated."
She laughed quietly and shook her head. That was his Faith for you. Just quiet patience. No railing lectures. No freaking out over some things.
He didn't feel sad driving away from Tommy and the bar. He felt…something…but he couldn’t really put his finger on it so he let it slide. The only sound in Faith’s old Subaru was the swish-click of the wipers and the blast of the defroster on the windshield.
He leaned the seat back with a click and closed his eyes, trusting Faith to take him home. Their home. He hoped it would feel like that again some day. Maybe after the war. Maybe then.
He floated on a tequila cloud. Around the bend and across the river and down the muddy dirt road. Click, swoosh. Click, swoosh. The silence was comforting. Not the silence of anticipation of the next explosion or the ball-clenching fear of being out of ammo.
Just silence. Simple silence.
And then it ended.
3
"I'll help you inside." Faith's voice was a whisper on the silence. Not a note of condemnation in her words. Nothing but what she said. Straight shooter. That's what his Faith was.
He thought he said something about being fine, but the sound came out garbled even to his ears. She said nothing, stepping into the dark rain and sloshing around the car. Her boots squished in the mud. He should have put down more gravel in the driveway while he was home. Mud season was going to be a bitch come springtime.
He'd be home again in seven months. He'd fix it then. He didn't want Faith dragging the mud into their home. Even if their home was a worn-down old farmhouse that cost more to heat than he made in a month, it was still her home that she tried to make his whenever he could get enough time to come up to Maine from Georgia. It would be her home until he came back and took her away to a military base in some far-off state like Georgia or Texas or Washington.
He wondered how Faith would like living in the South. He should probably ask her, if she planned on being his wife. The Northeast had a shortage of military bases, which meant that when she'd said yes all those months ago, she'd essentially signed up to live in the South. He should probably ask her again.
Too bad he couldn’t convince her to marry him before he went back. But she had some screwed up ideas about how people would look at her for marrying him right before he deployed.
They’d called her a slut in high school because her clothes had been too tight and her mascara too black.
Guess those wounds still hurt, because she was still worried about what people thought.
Which didn’t make a damn bit of sense. How could being a single parent be less bad than being his wife?
But that didn't matter. She was set. She’d marry him when he came home and not a minute sooner because she wasn’t going to be the girl that married the soldier before he went off to war. Right now, the driveway was muddy and Faith was standing in a puddle, waiting for him to heave his drunk ass out of the car.
Maybe he'd ask Tommy to fix the driveway while he was gone.
His hands and legs weren't working right. He looked up at her. Her hair ran down her face. Her breath froze in the air in front of her. A cold front was chasing the storm across the state. He needed to get her out of the rain before she got sick.
Couldn't have her sick. Not with their baby growing inside her.
The lights flooded the porch, casting their shadows on the old steps. And still he didn’t move.
It was a miracle that he was able to stand without staggering into her. She slipped her arm around his waist and helped him as he walked—if you could call it that—toward the house.
Maggie waited at the top of the stairs, her tail thumping slowly on the old wood floor.
Sam hesitated. Waited for her to bare her teeth. Or bolt down the stairs at him.
Then the moment passed and Maggie was all yellow lab and happy tongue and wagging tail again. She was two, ju
st past the age of complete asshole for labs, and right now, she was really fucking happy to see him. She jumped on his shoulders as he bent over to yank off his shoes. The damn mutt knew she wasn't supposed to jump. The weight of the dog combined with the booze knocked him off balance and he went down, in a puddle of wet man and happy dog.
He pushed her off. At least, he tried to.
"Maggie!" There was Faith, yanking the dog back. Forcing her to sit when she wanted to jump. Maggie's entire body trembled with the effort of listening to Faith. She tried to be a good dog, she really did.
He hoped she calmed down before the baby came.
Sam sat up and kicked off his shoes. "Aw Mags, why'd you do that?" His voice sent her into a frenzy again. She wriggled her seventy pounds into his lap and licked his face.
Faith held out her hand. "Come on, soldier boy. Let's get you to bed."
Sam looked up at her. Her face was shrouded in a halo from the hallway light, but he knew what he'd see if he could see her clearly. Perfection. Everything about her was better than he deserved. Her body was curvier than it had been in high school. Less perfect than it was now.
She said she was the luckiest girl in the world the day he flew back home to see her after months of email. He wanted to kiss the random-ass spammer who’d hacked his email account and had caused her to email him to tell him that no, she did not want to see his dick, thank you very much.
Somehow, he’d managed to convince her that no, he really hadn’t sent that email. His dick wasn’t all that impressive to be emailing it around the world. It was a humble dick. Functional and all that, in the way that dicks were.
And somehow, she’d emailed him back.
She'd picked him, despite his being gone to war and his failure to promise he would come home and sometimes not being able to call home. Despite missing her birthday three years in a row and only making a video call for one Christmas.
She was coming to Fort Benning with him when he came home this time. She'd finally agreed to be his wife once she could be sure that marrying him wasn’t a death sentence for him. She’d gotten it into her head that if she said yes before his deployment, he would die over there.
Saying no was her way of controlling the universe.
But he couldn’t promise her he’d come home. He couldn’t make that promise – whether he survived this deployment wasn’t up to him. If he did somehow make it home, he’d get a twofer out of the deal: a wife and a baby.
He lurched to his knees and wrapped his arms around her waist. Her belly was a firm mound beneath his cheek. He kissed the lump. "Hey, Peanut. You being good for Mommy?" he asked.
Faith laughed, one hand resting on his wet head. "I think Peanut has enough sense to be asleep at this hour." A shudder ran through her.
He hoped to hell that wasn’t her hiding crying. He hated seeing her cry.
Sam stood. "Go get warm. I need some water and I'll be up."
She tipped her chin, not convinced.
He shooed her toward the stairs. "Go. Shower."
She called Maggie to follow her, padding up the stairs, which were covered with secondhand stair treads she'd picked up from the Methodist Church yard sale. Sam listened to the thump of her feet across the floor above his head. The old house was full of sound. Creaks and groans. The pipes squealed when she turned on the shower. The sounds of home were so much better than the sounds of war.
Sam made his way to the kitchen. The counter was lined with food for his flight the day after tomorrow. The red and brown Slim Jims and Almond Snickers Bars mocked him, marking time as the last nights of his R&R came to an end. He'd be back in Iraq soon. The sand and the dust and the grit would be back. Being home would be nothing more than a memory. Hell, maybe he was dreaming of being home right now and was already back in the desert. That would be a fitting fucking nightmare.
The Slim Jims stared up at him while Sam waited for the water in the sink to clear up. He held his cup beneath the stream. "Diet of champions," he muttered.
The chocolate would be gone before he hit the desert sand. Chocolate didn't stand a chance against 117 degrees in the shade.
He frowned as a faint glint of silver caught his eye. Lifting the front lip of one of his pockets on the assault pack, he found a small metal pendant. It might have been stainless steel or sterling silver. It was a small crest on a heavy silver chain, with the words “St. Michael” on a scroll across the top and “Protect Us” across the bottom, beneath the feet of the warrior standing on the neck of a dragon.
It had to be from Mom. She’d do something like that. He closed his fist around the small pendant. Unwilling to throw it aside. Unable to put it around his neck. Somehow, it felt hollow and false to be asking all the angels and the saints to watch over him when he wasn’t entirely sure they existed in the first place.
There was no angel guarding over him. Not now, anyway.
The water was cold on his throat as he swallowed, trying to ward off that mother of all hangovers. He leaned on the counter, gripping the pendant tight, trying to sort through the riot of emotions twisting in his guts like bad food.
"Fuck."
He sucked in a deep breath until the pain in his lungs faded, replaced by the dead sensation of alcohol purring through his veins. He wanted to crawl into bed and wrap his body around Faith. He wanted to smell her shampoo, that ridiculously expensive shampoo she used that took the hard water minerals out of her hair.
She'd be warm and wet from the shower right now, snuggled beneath her grandmother's quilt. Someday he'd buy her a bedroom set from Sears or JC Penney but right now, they had hand-me-downs and heirlooms, and that was okay.
The pipes protested as Faith turned off the shower. Sam summoned the common sense to turn off the lights in the kitchen and stumble upstairs. Faith was in the closet. He caught a glimpse of her pulling on a pair of faded blue sweat pants and a cream-colored tank top. He loved watching her move, the way her belly just slightly bulged beneath the pants.
He made it to the bathroom. The walls were wet with steam. The toilet paper was wilted on the roll, the mirror coated with fog. He had the half-cocked fantasy that Faith would step into the bathroom, wrapped in nothing but a towel and a smile.
He'd probably pass out before he got his dick out of his pants. But the thought was nice.
He finished his business, then stripped off the rest of his clothes. He swore when he stubbed his toe on the bedpost. Bright pain exploded up his calf to his brain. When the pain in his toe subsided from motherfucker that hurt to merely sonofabitch throbbing, he climbed into bed.
Faith was already there. She was just as he’d imagined: warm. Moist. Her skin radiated heat and smelled like Ivory soap. Clean. Crisp.
Warm.
He nestled against her back, pulling her against him. Breathing in the smell of that expensive shampoo in the faint hope that maybe, the warm scent on her neck could banish the burn of sulfur seared into his memory.
4
He padded downstairs some hours later, badly hungover and in need of butter and toast and greasy eggs. Because isn’t that what everyone wanted when they’d had a little too much to drink the night before.
He heard his mother’s voice carrying up the stairs. He stopped at the edge of the steps, wanting very much to have a last day home that wasn't a Jerry Springer episode.
He didn’t hold out much hope that it would actually go that way.
No matter how much he tried, he often found himself arguing with his mother. All because she didn’t understand all the things he didn’t want to say. Things he didn’t want to talk about.
She wanted to believe their war was just.
It wasn’t.
Dad didn’t ask as many questions. At least, not as many hard ones. Sometimes he wondered how his dad stayed married to his mom. But then he remembered his parents' religion: divorce was a mortal sin.
Sam was their biggest disappointment. At one point, he’d been convinced his mother wanted him to be a priest
. Instead, he'd turned toward war and the man the Army had made him. No disappointment in the world was as great as disappointing your parents and abandoning their faith was about as bad as it came.
Funny, he'd never remembered them being so devout when he was growing up, but Mom signed all her emails now with “be blessed” and regularly sent him prayers through Facebook. Sometimes he had this vision of a modern-day Jesus, reaching the masses through memes.
He'd never really thought of himself as devout but any shreds of faith in God had been left behind in the desert.
And nothing about the war had convinced him of any master plan. It was nothing but chaos and death and stupid, violent acts dressed up as heroism.
If God did exist, He had a hell of a lot of explaining to do.
His mother was chopping onions. Faith's expression was tight and tense, her back to Catherine. If she hadn't been pregnant, Sam was sure his fiancée would be nursing a beer instead of wearing the long-suffering expression on her face.
The two women in his life were squared off around the small kitchen island. Faith’s mouth was pressed into a flat, hard line. Oh lovely.
In the Gospel According to Catherine, Faith hadn’t been raised right. The fact that Faith had lived with her father after her mother had run away to join the Texas National Guard had made her an object of pity in high school. Now that the girl from the wrong side of the tracks was going to be his wife, Saint Catherine had turned her back on the fallen woman he’d asked to be his bride. Guess all those stories about Jesus and the prostitutes didn’t actually apply in real life. Catherine swore the apple didn't fall far from the tree: Faith would run off and leave Sam the first time something better came along.
Walking into his kitchen felt only slightly less nerve-wracking than turning down a loaded alley.
He wondered if he would ever gather the courage to tell his mother to back the fuck out of his life. But even if his faith in the God who wrote it hadn’t been destroyed, the fourth commandment had been drilled into his bones from birth. He wasn't likely to break it any time soon.
The Long Night Page 2
