Unremarried Widow (3 page)

“Do we go in?” I said.

He scanned the dark lake. “I don't know, babe.”

The woman in the camp chair leaned forward.

“You all thinking about going swimming?”

“Thinking about it,” Miles said.

“Might better wait awhile,” the woman said. “My boys seen a water moccasin just a few minutes ago.”

I took a step back.

“Here?”

The woman pointed to a spot by my feet.

“Right over there.”

I backed out of the water and ducked beneath the sheltering beam of Miles's arm.

“Should we go back?” I said.

Miles surveyed the water and the almost deserted beach. My skin pricked with goose bumps.

“Let's go home,” he said.

That was how life felt then, danger lurking in the sweetest days.

On a Friday afternoon a
few weeks later I left work early and drove west through Tallahassee and north into Alabama to the outskirts of Fort Rucker. Outside Miles's apartment in the late afternoon I stood on the tips of my toes and felt above the light for his spare key. My fingers came back covered with dust but otherwise empty. I lifted the rug in front of the door and hunted beneath the lip of the step and in the corners, but no key. I checked my watch. Miles wouldn't be home for another hour. I thought about sitting in my car and cranking the AC, but I hated to waste the gas. Instead I fetched a book from the backseat and settled myself on the staircase beside Miles's door. Before long, gravel crunched under tires and gave off the sound of rubber rolling in. I looked up to see not Miles's pickup but another, smaller truck. Jimmy Hyde. He climbed out of the cab of his truck and hoisted a pack over one shoulder, and as he moved up the walkway toward the building I turned back to my book.

“Hey, there,” he said.

He stopped in front of me and pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head.

“Hey, Hyde.”

“Jimmy,” he said. “I hear ‘Hyde' all day. You locked out?”

I raised my hands in front of me, palms open.

“Locked out,” I said. “Am I in your way?”

“You're fine.” He dropped his pack to the ground. “Miles forget to leave you the key?”

I held my place in my book with one finger and closed the front flap.

“Looks like it. He normally hides the key over the light there”—I pointed—“but I can't find it.”

Jimmy reached above the light and felt across the flat strip of metal.

“Anything?”

“Nothing.” He bent down to the doormat. “Did you check under the rug?”

He lifted the mat by the corners and glanced to the left and right, then lowered it back in place.

“Guess you're stuck,” he said.

I shrugged. “Miles'll be here in an hour.”

Jimmy leaned one shoulder against the side of the building. Sticky heat draped over the apartment complex and shimmered in pools above the pavement.

“How was your drive up?” he said. “Hit traffic on I–10?”

“Just the usual.”

I marked the page in my book and set it on the step beside me.

“How's flight school?” I said.

“They work us hard.”

“That's what Miles tells me. You're flying Black Hawks?”

He nodded. “UH–60s.”

“How do you like it?”

“They're good aircraft.”

As a car pulled into the parking lot I looked past Jimmy, hoping to see Miles.. But a woman in cutoff shorts stepped out of a faded El Camino. She hoisted a toddler on her hip and headed for the stairs at the far end of the building.

“How's Tallahassee?” Jimmy said. “Miles told me—you're working for a senator down there? Is that right?”

I nodded.

“How's that going?”

“It's okay.”

Heat rolled off the pavement in waves and in the distance rotor
blades chopped the air with a steady
thwack-thwack-thwack
. Jimmy stopped leaning against the brick wall and took a seat on the bottom step, near enough that I could smell his end-of-the-day mix of sweat and hydraulic fluid.

“So, how long have you and Miles been dating?”

“About six months now.”

“Is that all?”

I laughed. “Seems like a lot to me.”

“I shouldn't be talking.” Jimmy shook his head. “My longest relationship lasted three months.”

“You're kidding. Three months?”

He smirked. “Guess I haven't met the right girl.”

I kicked at the dirt under my heel and looked over the empty parking lot. Jimmy watched me from the corners of his eyes.

“Think you'll have to go overseas?” I said after a while. “To Iraq?”

“Or Afghanistan. Looks like I'll be headed that way once I get done here and they assign me to a unit.”

I heard tires ground the pavement in the parking lot and saw Miles's truck pull in. Jimmy stood and dusted his hands on his pants.

“Guess I'll be leaving you,” he said.

Miles stepped out of his Chevy and waved. I waved back. He came up the concrete pathway with his pack hefted over one shoulder.

“Hey, man,” he said. He tapped Jimmy on the back. “How you doing?”

“Good, good,” Jimmy said. “Just got home from class.”

I stood, smiling.

“Hey, babe,” I said.

“Hey.” Miles leaned forward to kiss me.

“What are you doing out here?” he said when he stepped back.

“I'm locked out.”

“Did I forget to leave you the key?”

“No big deal,” I said. “Hyde kept an eye on me.”

Miles turned to Jimmy.

“Were you watching her for me?”

“Yes, sir,” Jimmy said.

“Well, thanks, man.”

“Anytime.”

Miles unlocked the front door and I picked my book up off the stoop. Jimmy hoisted his pack and headed up the stairs.

“Dude,” he called over his shoulder to Miles, “I love your girlfriend.”

That Sunday morning we drove
to church on base. At the security checkpoint I handed my driver's license to Miles and he passed it with his military ID through the window. The guard inspected both cards, looked at the military decal on the windshield, and waved us through. The base was deserted, the brisk hum of weekday activity ceased. Normally there were soldiers everywhere, crisscrossing streets in their smart uniforms, hurrying down sidewalks on important errands. I straightened the hem of my skirt and stared anxiously out the truck window.

“Can't you drive any faster?” I said. “We're going to be late.”

Miles pointed to a speed limit sign as we passed. “That's as fast as I can go. If I get a ticket and it gets back to my instructors, I'm in big trouble.”

“Seriously?” I said.

“Oh, yeah. And you better not get a ticket on base, either.”

I looked across the seat at him. “Or what? Don't tell me you'd get in trouble for that, too.”

“That's what I've heard. If a wife or girlfriend is caught speeding and it gets back to your commanding officer, then you get a stern talking-to.”

“What would they say? ‘Control your wife'?”

“Something like that.”

“Jesus.”

Miles gave me a sharp look, and I clapped a hand over my mouth.

“Sorry,” I said as he turned into the church parking lot.

During the service a slick preacher spoke in front of the crowded church while his done-up wife sat in the first pew, holding a baby in her lap. She laughed indulgently when he made jokes at her expense. The praise band took the stage, a mix of boys in their late teens who held their guitars with stiff arms. They were mostly the kind of young men who let the hair on their upper lips grow in thick and dark, whose palms are always clammy, who take on a wistful faraway look when they talk about doing missionary work overseas. The lead singer, though, was pure rock star. He wore a microphone headpiece and ran down the aisle during sets high-fiving parishioners. When the band wasn't playing he sipped water from a bottle and dabbed his forehead with a towel. I made paper airplanes with the church program. When a man came around with plates of wafers and wine for Communion, I declined, and on the church steps afterward I carefully avoided taking the preacher's hand.

In the truck after the service Miles loosened his necktie and cranked up the radio. I lowered my window and let the warm breeze blow in. With church behind us, the day felt suddenly light and limitless.

“Where to now?” I said.

Miles tilted his head as he considered.

“Want to see an Apache?” He pointed to a stretch of grass in the distance. “They're having an exhibition. They've got Black Hawks, a Chinook. One of the guys from class told me he took his wife. You can climb up into it and everything.”

I hesitated. When the U.S. invaded Iraq the year before, I was vehemently, vocally against the war. I was angry about the politics of it
and angry at the lives lost—on both sides. I understood why Miles had joined the Army. After September 11 he felt like it was his duty. He said he wanted to step up so that someone else would not have to. I respected that and I was proud of him. But I struggled with the realities of the Apache. The Army calls them gunships; the pilots call what they do hunting. I looked at Miles beside me and his face was radiant.

“Let's go,” I said.

He pulled into the parking lot alongside the exhibition field, and I followed him across the grass.

“Here she is,” he said in front of the helicopter.

I reached out to touch the side the way I might touch a strange animal. The metal had warmed in the sun and I flinched from the heat. The helicopter was wasplike and barbed, frightening, and it was all I could do to keep my feet rooted to the ground.

“You want to sit inside?” Miles asked.

I thought for a moment that I might not want to know the inside of the Apache, that I might not want to have a memory of its tight spaces or the narrow view through the glass. But instead I said, “The back seat or the front?”

“I usually sit in the front,” Miles said.

I pulled myself up the side and lowered my frame into the seat. The upholstery was rough beneath my hands. I slipped the straps of the seat belt over each of my shoulders and had the feeling not so much of strapping myself in as strapping the Apache on. Through the front windows I saw the nose of the aircraft and the grass below. I took hold of the cyclic that rose between my legs and imagined what it felt like to sit in that seat, to shoot the guns, to fire the rockets. How to understand that the man I was falling in love with—a man who almost never cussed, who went to church every Sunday, who pressed his nose to the back of my neck as we slept—would kill other men? I released the cyclic and stripped off the seat belt. I stood in the open door and Miles peered up at me from the ground, smiling.

“What do you think?” he said.

I held out a hand so he could help me down.

“I think this is a dangerous piece of machinery.”

“I know,” he said as he reached up for me. “Isn't it great?”

The aborigines say we live
a spiral life, that our narratives curl around like smoke, the events of one moment rhyming with the events of previous moments so that in a single lifetime we live the same story many times. Before my father died, my family had a farm in the Appalachian foothills. We lived in northeast Georgia, red-earth country, and when my father ran a tiller auburn clods of dirt turned toward the blue sky. He had a lean frame although he carried a thickness around his waist that had come with age, and he kept his dark hair and mustache short. He drove an American-made pickup, hung a shotgun in the back, and wore a bear claw on a chain around his neck. He was funny, I'm told, and in photos his smile seems to just stifle a laugh. I'm sure his first wife had her own stories about him—about infidelity, certainly—but my mother says he was a great man. I like to think it took a particular kind of woman to catch and hold my father's attention, and my mother was that woman. She was nine years younger than my father, born two months and a day before the
first bomb fell on Japan in the summer of 1945. Her family scraped by on a farm in central Florida where she learned to ride horses bareback and scuffle with the neighborhood boys. She hated dolls and dresses, nearly failed home economics, and never made a casserole in her life.

“I'm no lady,” she said.

But my mother was beautiful. She was tall for a woman and her skin tanned a deep brown. She wore her dark hair long and parted down the middle like the Seminole women on her mother's side. I imagine she created a stir at the University of Miami, where she earned her teaching degree, and afterward when she took a job at a high school in one of Miami's toughest neighborhoods. During her first year teaching she caught a student in the hallway after the bell had rung.

“You need to get to class,” she told him.

The boy was built tall and strong, and he stepped close to my mother with his fist cocked as if he meant to hit her in the face.

“Go ahead,” my mother said. “I'll give you one shot. After that, I'm going to wipe your ass all over this floor.”

The boy froze, then dropped his fist and moved off down the hall.

By the time my mother met my father in 1971, they each had a marriage behind them. He showed up at a mutual friend's house for dinner carrying a pineapple.

“Everybody brings flowers,” he said.

To hear my mother tell it, their relationship was special from the beginning.

“Sometimes it was like, could this really be happening?” my mother said. “Because when something feels too good, you're sure something bad's going to happen.”

Beside our house in Georgia,
my father kept a runway where the hills sloped into flat land. He parked a single-engine Piper Cub in a hangar by our house. The plane had seats upholstered in red leather, cracked in places, and windows that slid open in the back. A layer of dust coated the instruments in the console. My father took my mother and me flying the way some families go for a drive, and a week after my fifth birthday he pushed the plane out of the hangar for an afternoon flight. It was mid-June and warm and the backs of my thighs stuck to the seat as my mother belted me in. She stood in the open door of the airplane and pulled the seat belt tight across the tops of my legs until the fabric pinched my skin.