My heart sank, but, just like those first days with AJ on post, I didn’t feel quite so alone. I had the fewest children of these wives. And the most family. Things could be far, far worse. Despite my devastation for my friend, knowing we were all in this together bolstered my spirit.
“How are your kids?”
She sighed. “The only one who really knows anything is out of the ordinary is Tommy. He asks me every day if they’ve found Daddy.”
“Oh, Maryanne.”
“What about AJ?”
I cleared my throat to keep my voice from cracking. “He asked me if Daddy was dead.”
I looked out the window at the boats passing by, at the children swimming. It seemed so odd that life could go on and the world could continue to turn when our husbands were in such peril.
“And what did you tell him?” she asked. I could practically see her sitting on her old brown sofa in the town house beside mine. I could see her bare feet, the piles of laundry she was most certainly folding, and could hear the children running all around her.
“I told him of course Daddy isn’t dead.” I could tell by the silence on the other end of the phone that Maryanne didn’t agree with what I had done. But, for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why. I was so convinced our husbands would come home to us that I couldn’t imagine another outcome.
“We’re going to get them back, Maryanne. I know we will.”
I thought of her, on post, with her four children. And of my other friends whose husbands were missing, too. “They’re stronger together,” I said, feeling my spirits rise, knowing it as clearly as my own children’s faces. “They’ll take care of each other, Maryanne. They’ll make it home.”
It wasn’t only our husbands who were stronger together. We Army wives were, too. If anyone could survive this, if any group of women was prepared to stand strong and see their husbands home, it was us. For the first time since I’d heard the news, I could imagine the day when Adam would be back in my arms.
I heard voices down the hall, slowly walked to the doorway, and peered out to see Emerson with Taylor on her hip, Grammy crouched down on the floor with AJ, and Mom putting a load of laundry in the washing machine.
It was going to be tough, and there would be hard days. But my fellow wives were just like the women down the hall from me. We were family. We could weather any storm that came our way.
A FEW HOURS AFTER my call with Maryanne, I could feel anxiety and panic well up in me again. Were my sons missing out by growing up with a father who was gone half the time? How long would he be gone now before they found him? Months? Years?
I looked around my room, straightened the throw pillows on the bed, and restacked the papers—or more aptly, unopened bills—on my desk. I needed to pay them, especially the credit card bill, but I couldn’t face them yet. I opened my computer.
An email from my favorite kids’ store pinged onto the screen. Forty percent off. Well, that was a great deal. The boys needed some new shorts, didn’t they? Sure, I was buried underneath a mound of credit card debt that not even my husband knew about, that I could probably never pay off. But that didn’t mean my children should suffer, did it? Weren’t they suffering enough right now? And, I mean, 40 percent off even the sale prices? They were practically giving the stuff away.
I zoomed through the site, adding items to my cart. Shorts and T-shirts, fleeces for the fall, a couple of cute toboggans—and all for less than fifty bucks. What a deal! I felt a little zip of electricity that was almost soothing. Some people ate; some people drank. Of all the unhealthy things I could do, this was far from the worst. It wasn’t like I was damaging my health.
I held my breath as the order processed, crossing my fingers that my card wouldn’t be declined. I had no idea what the balance was, but I knew it had to be almost maxed out.
Approved! Success. This was why I online shopped. A declined card at a real store was too humiliating.
The guilt would come later, as would the agonizing feeling that Adam would be so disappointed if he found out our emergency credit card was nearly maxed out all the time and I was accruing massive amounts of interest charges by paying the minimum every month. But Adam wasn’t here. I was. And if this was what I needed to get through this rough patch—like all those other rough patches—then so be it. Plus, my dad put aside money for the three of us so we never had to worry. Mom was bound to give me my share soon, and I could pay the whole thing off no problem, with plenty left over.
There were a couple of times I had thought about asking Mom about the money. But, even though I had lived in New York for the first fifteen years of my life, I still considered myself a Southern girl. And a Southern girl would never do such a thing. It would be not only rude to put my mom on the spot, but also tacky to talk about money.
With my feelings temporarily assuaged, I did the one thing I had been dreading since the moment those uniformed men showed up on our front lawn. I called my mother-in-law. I was sure my in-laws must have felt completely abandoned by me. But I hadn’t been able to face them, because as horrible as this was for me, it had to have been even worse for them. Adam was the love of my life, the father of my children. But he was
