by Sarah Smiley
Dustin pulled me close and kissed my forehead. “Let’s not worry about that now,” he said. Then he bent to pick up Owen’s carrier and took Ford’s hand. He didn’t say another word as he led us out the heavy front doors and into the parking lot, but I noticed that the clomp of his boots was more subdued than before.
3
I SHOULD PROBABLY CALL MY PARENTS
The last night Dustin was home, we finally undressed the Christmas tree. Why? I don’t know. There couldn’t have been anything more depressing or symbolic. With each ornament I wrapped in tissue and packed in a box, I felt like I was tucking away more than tinseled decorations. The ornaments were so much like our lives: packed away, dragged back out again, put on display, then wrapped in tissue and stowed in a box for the next move.
There were so many ornaments—scattered on the floor, on the piano bench, on the tree waiting to be taken down—it was almost ridiculous. Most families collect ornaments from places they’ve visited; military families collect ornaments from all the places they’ve lived. It gets confusing to remember the significance of them, and that night Dustin and I found ourselves bickering over one ornament in particular: a wooden sailboat with SD marked in red ink on the bottom.
I thought the initials stood for “Sarah and Dustin,” but Dustin insisted that it would say “DS” for “Dustin and Sarah” if it were our initials.
He thought the letters stood for “San Diego,” where we had lived twice already, once together as husband and wife, and one time when we were children and our parents were neighbors. This began to trigger some vague memory, and I reluctantly admitted he might be right.
But then we were disagreeing over which year: Did the sailboat signify our childhood memories of San Diego? Or the year we lived there when we were first married?
“I think my mom gave it to us,” Dustin said. “To remind us how we met as kids.”
“No, no,” I said. “She gave us the picture-frame ornament for that. The picture frame I’ve never found a one-inch photo for.”
He crinkled his nose and laughed. “Gosh, my mom gives us some strange ornaments, doesn’t she?”
I only raised an eyebrow at him, as I dangled the ornament by its red ribbon and watched it twirl. “I think Courtney and Derek might have given it to us,” I said. “That first year we met them in San Diego. When you were still in flight training.”
Dustin accepted that explanation, and I tossed the sailboat into a cardboard box.
“Whoa, wait a minute,” he said. “Why did you put it in that box?”
“I don’t know. Who cares?”
“Well, I think that box is mine.”
“We have our own boxes?”
It was a sincere question, but I see now how it might have seemed baited.
I scratched at my hair and looked down at the side of the box. Sure enough, DUSTIN’S ORNAMENTS was written on the side . . . in my mother-in-law’s curvy handwriting.
“She gave you your own box?” I said. “Even though you’re married?”
Dustin looked flustered and embarrassed, but he spoke in a practiced, easy voice. He obviously saw where this was headed. “I think those are just some ornaments from when I was a kid,” he said. “She brought them down last time she was visiting. I don’t know why. I thought you saw her give them to me.”
I peered into “Dustin’s” box. It was filled almost to the brim with ornaments fastidiously wrapped in tissue paper. There were dozens and dozens of little bundles. I wondered how I’d overlooked the box when we were decorating a month before, and how Dustin had snuck the ornaments onto the tree.
“My parents keep my childhood ornaments on their tree,” I said. “What do your parents put on theirs if they’ve sent you these?”
Dustin massaged the back of his neck and knitted his brows. “I don’t know, Sarah. Do we have to get into this tonight? I’ll put the ornaments in the attic and we can give them back to my mom next time she’s here.”
“This is so typical,” I started to say, but just then Ford padded into the room in his red footed pajamas. He squinted at the light and came to stand between us. “Water,” he said, in a voice thick with sleep.
Dustin and I both rushed to the kitchen, relieved by the interruption, I suppose, but it was Dustin who got to the sippy cup cabinet first, and once Ford drank the entire cup—with us staring and smiling at him, but not speaking—Dustin volunteered to take him back to bed and read another bedtime story.
I finished with the ornaments, now highly annoyed by any that were supposed to go in “Dustin’s” box. I could feel the anger building inside me and my ribs felt tight.
I was wrapping one of Ford’s “Baby’s First Christmas” ornaments (one of the twenty people had sent us) when I thought about my first major run-in with Dustin’s mom.
I was pregnant with Ford, and Dustin and I were living at my parents’ house in Virginia. (We were between orders and waiting for our house in Florida to be built.) Everyone was taking bets on when the baby would be born. November 17 was my guess (I had heard that first-time mothers go early), but Dustin said, “Duh, the baby will be born on the twenty-second, just like the doctor said.”
“Sweet, naive Dustin,” we all laughed. “Babies are never born on their due date!” Ha, ha, ha, ha.
It was just a few weeks before Thanksgiving and my mom had come up with a “brilliant” idea: “Let’s invite all the Smileys down to celebrate!”
“No way, Mom,” I said. “Either I will have just given birth or I’ll be ready to, and I can guarantee you the last thing I’ll want is a bunch of company!”
Clearly, though, whatever I wanted didn’t matter (I was merely a vessel at this point for everyone’s long-awaited grandchild), and ever the hostess with her hospitable Southern heart, Mom invited the Smileys anyway.
“Oh, goodness!” my mother-in-law squealed. “What on earth should we bring? We could bring the potatoes . . . and stuffing . . . and dessert . . . and rolls. . . .”
What was once my family’s small, intimate Thanksgiving was now turning into a Smiley circus. As a general rule, when you gather more than two Smileys in any room, the food multiplies by twelve and the noise increases exponentially. In fact, the biggest difference between my family and Dustin’s is the volume of our voices. While I sometimes have to ask my dad or brothers, “What was that? Could you speak up?” Dustin’s family talks—or, rather, bickers—all at once, until the conversation becomes mere noise. Loud, annoying noise.
But besides all that, who ever heard of being invited to a dinner and bringing ALL of the food?
“Why don’t you just bring a pie,” I told my mother-in-law. “Except not pecan pie because I’m already making that for Dustin. It’s his favorite.”
She gasped with delight. “Pecan pie is Dustin’s favorite? Well, I never knew! My goodness, let me make it for him if it’s his favorite!”
“No, no,” I said through clenched teeth. “It’s sort of a tradition of mine: I always make one for him on special occasions.”
“But, honey,” she said, “you’ll either be taking care of a newborn or getting ready to deliver—you don’t need to be worried about making a pie! Let me. I’m his mother, after all.”
For the next several days, our conversations were a pie-making tug-of-war: “No, I’ll make the pie,” I’d say, and she’d come right back with, “No, let me, let me!”
To my friends I said, “I’ll be you-know-what if I don’t make that damn pie! Even if I have to bake it between contractions, I’m making Dustin’s pecan pie!”
My plan was to make it the day before Thanksgiving (my due date). I even had all the ingredients. But sure enough, Dustin had been right with his prediction, and in the wee hours of the morning on the twenty-second, I went into labor. I hadn’t baked the pie yet.
At about four o’clock in the morning, as I gripped the bars of the metal hospital bed railing, Dustin said, “I think I should call my parents.”
Mind you, I was
not waiting to be admitted to the hospital, nor waiting for that magical dilation; I was in active labor, and minutes away from having a baby. This was no time for my husband to divide his attention. I needed him.
“Whatever!” I said, rolling my eyes. But Dustin mistook my emotion for predelivery husband hating and called his mom anyway.
“Sorry to wake you, Mom,” he said, “but we’re in the hospital and your first grandchild is going to be born soon.”
Through the receiver came a loud squeal like a jumbo plane taking flight. Then I could hear my mother-in-law’s voice squawking like a bird’s. Dustin was listening closely and knitting his brows. “Hmm, I don’t know, Mom,” he said. “But I’ll ask her.”
He covered the phone with the palm of his hand and bent down toward me in the bed. Then, in all sincerity, and with the innocence of a child, he said to me, “Mom wants to know if you had a chance to make the pecan pie yet.”
Sitting on the piano bench now, with ornaments in my lap, I laughed to myself, thinking about what my face must have looked like to Dustin that day. Because although I never answered him, he got back on the phone and said, “Uh, I’m going to guess she did not, Mom.”
I wiped at my brow. Most of the ornaments were packed away, but a shiny silver wedding cake with our wedding date engraved on the bottom sat on the black piano top. I held the ornament in my hand and sighed. Dustin’s mom came to Thanksgiving dinner that year with not one, but three varieties of pecan pie. “So typical,” I said to myself and tossed the wedding cake ornament into a box.
But then I remembered something else: Dustin didn’t eat a single bite of his mom’s pies. In fact, I think he even told her, “I’m going to wait until Sarah can make me one of hers next time.”
Yet when was the last time I had made Dustin a pecan pie? I wondered. Had I ever made him one since Ford was born?
I heard Dustin softly closing the door to Ford and Owen’s room and then coming down the hallway in his socks. I taped up the last box of ornaments, trying to stall, and maybe hoping Dustin would come out and get me, before I gave up and went to our bedroom.
We met in the bathroom and both started getting undressed.
“I’m sorry about earlier,” I said.
Dustin winked at me and threw his dirty clothes into the wicker laundry basket. “We’re both on edge,” he said.
Then I walked past him on my way to the dresser, and ran a hand across his bare back. “The counselor from Fleet and Family Support said we might argue more than usual,” I said.
Dustin came up behind me and rubbed the sides of my arms.
The white flag had officially been raised.
“I’m sorry, too,” he whispered in my ear. “Now let’s forget about all that.”
“All right,” I said and turned around to face him with a playful smile. “But we’re sending that box back to your mother.”
Dustin grinned and patted me on the rear.
We got in bed and I curled up behind him. Our legs fit into one another in a familiar way, just like a clasp. My nose was pressed against his back and the musky smell of his skin sent waves down to my stomach.
In that moment, as we were lying there in the dark together, all the emotions of the previous week seemed insignificant. I couldn’t embrace him tight enough or long enough to suit me: I knew all too well how empty and cold his side of the bed would be tomorrow night.
Dustin turned to face me and we stared at each other until I saw green spots from the darkness. I was trying to memorize his face—his full eyebrows, the mole next to his lip, the scar beneath his nose where a mustache won’t grow. I wanted to take it all in, to store the images like dots of light that stay on your retina after you’ve looked at the sun. But most of all, I wanted to believe, there in the silence, that he was memorizing my face, too.
And then he said, “I should probably call my parents.”
I blinked. “What? What for? You’re only going to be gone two weeks! It’s not like this is the big good-bye. It’s not the deployment.”
But Dustin was already throwing back the covers and swinging his feet over the edge of the bed.
“Yeah, but things are so uncertain,” he said over his shoulder. He put on a shirt and stepped down to the floor. “I mean, what if they send us straight to the Middle East after our training?”
“They’d really do that?” Now I was sitting up and my heart was pounding. From fear or anger, I wasn’t sure.
“It’s a possibility,” he said and stepped into a pair of boxer shorts.
He lifted the phone off the charger and it beeped. Tanner woke up beneath the bed. Her dog tags jingled as she shook her head and groaned. I knew she was stretching, preparing to see what trouble was brewing in the house. Then she poked her nose out from under the dust ruffle and eased her body out to follow Dustin into the living room.
I threw myself back into the pillows. I should call my parents? My teeth were beginning to clench. Why does my mother-in-law have a way of sneaking up at the most inopportune times? Whether it was her fault or Dustin’s, I wasn’t sure. No one in their right mind would expect a phone call from a man on his last night home with his wife, and honestly, I didn’t think she was an exception.
“Hello, Mom?” Dustin said, and I strained to hear his muffled voice through the wall.
“We’re leaving tomorrow. . . . No, it’s only a two-week workup. . . . We’ll be doing some training for our upcoming deployment. . . . Yes, I did tell you I was leaving for deployment. I told you that several months ago. . . . Yes, I’ll be careful. . . . No, I won’t be able to call you. . . . No, I won’t be able to use e-mail every day. . . . Yes, I’ll try to send you a postcard.”
The words were fading into one another, as if I had heard this same conversation over and over again, only in different forms.
But then my breath caught when I heard something different: “Mom, look after Sarah and the boys for me,” Dustin said. “Call on them every now and then, OK? I’m worried about Sarah. She had such a rough time last deployment, and now with the two boys . . . Just promise me you’ll take care of them for me—during these next two weeks and then during the deployment as well.”
I hugged the blanket to my chest and waited for him to come back to bed.
The next morning, Dustin paced through the kitchen, visibly bothered. He has such a low tolerance for chaos. I was sitting on the floor of our bedroom, surrounded by piles of underwear, undershirts, and packing supplies. “Don’t forget to pack a picture of me and the kids,” I called out, and then, “Did you remember to pack a camera? And what about your razors? You always forget your razors. Oh, and did you pack floss? You do have a picture of me and the kids, right?”
Originally Dustin had packed for two weeks on board the ship, but a phone call from the squadron at eleven o’clock the night before informed him to “pack for six months . . . just in case.” After Dustin had fumbled in the dark to hang up the phone, he jumped out of bed and rushed around in his underwear to gather more pairs of socks and undershirts for the seabag. I had sat up against my pillows and, with drooping, tired eyes, penned Dustin’s social security number on the extra clothes. I felt like a mother marking her son’s backpack and jacket before the first day of school. And with that thought, I was mad at my mother-in-law and her boxful of ornaments all over again.
After the harried assembly line in the middle of the night, Dustin and I should have been exhausted, but instead we were jittery, perhaps functioning on overdrive, as if we’d had too much caffeine or were high on adrenaline. I noticed my hands trembling when I put Ford’s Pop-Tart into the toaster, and Owen arched his back and wailed when I tried to nurse him. Kids can be awfully perceptive, and I knew—mostly by the way Ford chewed on his thumb and ate a clump of Play-Doh when he thought I wasn’t looking—that mine sensed something was wrong.
Even Tanner was turning circles in her bed, feverishly scratching the denim-covered pillow.
“Dustin, look,” I said, leanin
g toward her. “Tanner’s sad you’re leaving. Poor thing.” I stroked her head and smacked my lips, making kissing sounds at her.
Dustin smirked and continued searching through a drawer for his missing keys and wallet.
“What?” I said, looking up at him. “What are you smiling about?”
He shut the drawer, scratched his head, and said distractedly, “Oh, nothing. It’s just that you’re talking through Tanner again.”
“What?”
“You’re talking through Tanner,” he said and wandered out of the room.
I knelt down and smoothed the fluffy hair between Tanner’s ears. “I don’t understand what you mean,” I called out.
Dustin wandered back into the room, still in searching mode. “Sometimes when you get upset,” he said, “you tell me your feelings through Tanner.”
“What? I do not! That’s absurd!” I cupped Tanner’s muzzle in my hands and stared into her watery eyes. “Tell him, Tanner. I don’t talk through you, do I?”
Dustin was pacing in and out of rooms now, seemingly half interested in our conversation. “Have you seen my keys, Sarah?” he yelled from the kitchen.
Tanner rolled onto her side and I patted the soft pink skin of her belly. “Tanner, say, ‘No, Mommy hasn’t seen your keys, Dustin.’ Will you tell him that, Tanner? Say, ‘If Mommy knew where your keys were she’d have found them for you by now.’ ”
Dustin was standing in the doorway again. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” he said. “Right there! You’re talking through the damn dog.”
The word “damn” struck me as unfair, but I tried not to cry. “Oh, Tanner,” I said, “tell Dusty Wusty to calm down and relax a little bit. Maybe if he put his keys in the same place every night, he wouldn’t lose them so much. Isn’t that right, sweetie?”
Dustin stared at me for a moment, then threw up his hands and left the room.
It was five o’clock in the morning when we finally pulled out of the driveway. The exhaust blowing from the car, mixed with the cold winter air, made an impressive cloud of white frost as Dustin backed down the driveway. Houses all around the cul-de-sac were quiet and dark, with only a few dim lights coming from front porches and lamps on end tables inside. Our neighbors were either still sleeping curled up next to their spouses, or they were sipping coffee and reading the morning paper. When the garage door squeaked closed behind us, I worried we might wake up all those sleepy neighbors. And suddenly it occurred to me, by the time I drove back up the driveway alone later that afternoon, I would see all the houses filled with families and twinkling lights in a new and different way—the envious way.
