Chapter 1: Who Is K?
“Who is K?”
I held my husband’s phone out across the kitchen table so he could see his own screen. Behind me the coffee maker gurgled. Upstairs, the twins were fighting over the bathroom, and Maddie was yelling at them to hurry up, and three-year-old June was banging a spoon on her high chair tray like a tiny judge.
Sunday morning in base housing. Seven forty a.m.
Travis didn’t take the phone. He looked at it, then at me, and then he did something I’ll never forget as long as I live.
He sighed.
Not a guilty sigh. A tired one. The sigh he does when the car makes a noise, or when a kid needs new cleats in the middle of the month.
“Jo,” he said. “Not in front of the kids.”
“The kids are upstairs. Who is K?”
He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his olive T-shirt, the one he sleeps in, the one that says nothing because he cut the unit patch off years ago. Sixteen years I’ve watched him cross his arms like that. In counseling sessions with the chaplain. In the parking lot at the commissary. In the delivery room when June came early.
“You want to do this right now? Fine.” His voice went flat and reasonable, his platoon-sergeant voice. “You’ve been so busy with the kids, Jo. For years. You don’t even look at me anymore. You fall asleep on the couch at nine o’clock with the baby monitor on your chest. When’s the last time you asked me how my day was?”
I stared at him.
“I have five children,” I said.
“I know how many kids we have.”
“Five. Caleb, Maddie, Eli, Ezra, June. I’ve moved them seven times. I’ve unpacked this kitchen in Kentucky and Texas and Germany and here. I’ve done three deployments by myself. And you’re telling me you did this because I fell asleep on the couch?”
He uncrossed his arms and rubbed the back of his neck, and his face softened into something that looked almost like sorrow. That was the worst part. Because I knew that face too. I’d been forgiving it for sixteen years.
“Babe. You know me,” he said. “I can’t say no to people. She kept texting. She was going through a rough time, and I was trying to be nice, and it just… happened. You know how I am.”
You know how I am.
Upstairs, something thudded and one of the twins yelled, “MOM!” I didn’t move.
“How old is she?” I said.
He didn’t answer.
“Travis. How old is she?”
He looked at the table. At the ring of coffee his mug had left. At anything but me.
“Twenty-one.”
The kitchen went so quiet I could hear the refrigerator.
Twenty-one.
I was twenty-one when I had our first baby in the back bedroom of my mother’s trailer in Valdosta, because Travis’s truck wouldn’t start and the ambulance took forty minutes. I was twenty-one, scared to death, holding a seven-pound boy with Travis’s ears.
That boy is twenty-one now.
“She’s Caleb’s age,” I said. My voice sounded like it was coming from the next room. “She is our son’s age, Travis.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Then what is it like?”
Before he could answer, the front door opened. I heard the screen door slap and keys hit the hall table and a voice I’d know anywhere.
“Mom? I brought donuts. The good ones, not the gas station ones.”
Caleb comes over every Sunday. He moved off post in June to a two-bedroom apartment with a buddy, and he still brings his laundry, and he still eats like a teenager. He came around the corner into the kitchen holding a pink box, all six-foot-one of him in a red flannel, grinning.
The grin stopped when he saw our faces.
“What,” he said. “What happened?”
Travis stood up fast. “Nothing. Your mom and I were just talking…”
But Caleb was looking at the phone in my hand. At the name glowing on the screen under the K. The full contact, the one Travis had forgotten to delete from the top of the message thread.
Caleb set the donut box down on the counter very slowly.
“Kaylee Brooks?” he said. He looked at his father. “Dad. I went to high school with Kaylee Brooks.”
