MAY
It was only going to be me moving our boxes of books, silverware in suitcases, and our two bicycles down the stairs into a double-parked U-Haul, all open and exposed. But at the last minute the Army said he could come home, “to help.” He flew up from North Carolina, hopped on the M60 bus that took him across town from LaGuardia, and used his own keys in the lock one last time at our studio apartment behind the wrought-iron gate at 125th and Fifth. The next morning we walked to drink our coffee by the Hudson River and spent the day taking in “our New York” one last time before I drove the U-Haul north from where we picked it up at Sixty-Eighth Street. The following day he drove us out of the city. We stopped in Connecticut to pick up some furniture at his father’s, slept at a truck stop, and paid the tolls to drive fourteen hours south to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he had been stationed at Fort Bragg, working and training since Thanksgiving.
He was the one who drove the final leg. He knew the way. Off I-95, he said, “We’re getting close.” We were passing strip clubs with neon signs, abandoned gas stations, and run-down Chinese buffets. It was 3 a.m. We pulled into the driveway of a house I had only ever seen a video tour of by text: this new place, our rented home. He walked me through all the empty rooms. Our voices echoed in the hollow spaces. When he flipped the switch, some lights didn’t come on. “We’ll have to work on that,” he said. I could feel the old, grimy carpet underneath my feet. I could see the silhouette of cupboards in the kitchen. We pulled blankets from the cab of the U-Haul and piled them in the corner of the living room, like a nest. The first night we slept there.
JUNE
In the sandy, pine needle–covered backyard, if you smacked a mosquito before it got you, it’d turn to ash on your skin. If it bit, there’d be blood, it’d be wet. I liked seeing the red smears. We smacked our shins and the back of each other’s necks, stomping the tops of our bare feet while we grilled. We got a puppy, a rescue we named Teddy. It reached a point where I had to get out and meet people I didn’t know. I took our one car to post for an exercise class at the gym. I walked in—early—and the instructor was talking about how she didn’t like people from Indiana. I’m from Indiana.
We both needed protein. We hard-boiled every egg we bought. It was hot, like counting: 97, 98, 99, 100. He had to wear his combat uniform, his ACU jacket and pants. When he unzipped his jacket off at night, his tan T underneath was soaked in sweat. He worried about PT tests and whether he’d be able to run fast enough or do enough push-ups to pass. He worried about drug tests, not because he did drugs but because he sometimes ate granola bars with hemp seeds in them and he worried those would make him “pop hot.” The nightmare scenario was he’d fail, he’d get kicked out of the Army. That wasn’t going to happen, but I let him voice his concerns. What else could I do but listen? I worried what I’d be. I’d mostly finished my MFA. My thesis, a final fiction manuscript I was working on that was due back to Columbia in September, was the last piece of the New York puzzle. I drove onto post whenever our car needed gas. You didn’t have to pay tax there.
JULY
We celebrated one year of marriage, most of which we had spent apart. I applied to dead-end job after job. I sent my friends in New York the literary agencies I had seen that were hiring. They could apply. I could not. After one interview that went well— I would be writing for a website— they called back, No, we’ve decided to scale back, to keep the work in-house. He was gone for training for most of the month. My thesis was my priority, and so I worked. I discovered the revelation of doggy day care. The puppy needed it. This made it so much easier to work, to write. They posted pictures of the dogs online, so when I took breaks between hours of editing, my printed stories strewn about every inch of our dining room table, I saw our dog playing in a little pool, lying in the shade, sitting in the seat of a blue plastic kiddie car behind an immobile steering wheel. Teddy never looked straight at the camera. Some dogs did. Ours was in the background. Blurry, a flash of fur, running, chasing, caught in flight.
AUGUST
I finished my manuscript the morning I mailed it back to New York. The man who spiral-bound the pages at the copy store was a veteran. “Special Forces,” he said when I asked, and when I said that’s what brought us here too, he said, “You won’t ever see your husband. I hope you can get used to that.” He handed me my receipt. With Gabriel still away at training, I had to celebrate my own victories. I drove an hour and a half to Raleigh for a tattoo on my ribs. My first one. To mark the moment. It didn’t hurt, not like I thought it would. I stared at a row of track lighting on the ceiling the whole time. “Welcome to the club, darling,” the man with the righteous beard said when he wiped my skin—something wet?—for the final time. The dog was curious about the Saran Wrap that went around my torso. I stood sideways in front of the bathroom mirror, straining to see through the plastic, trying to see the ink. I didn’t tell anyone. By the time Gabriel came home, the tattoo had peeled and healed. I still didn’t tell him. He had to find it himself. It didn’t take long.
We had some of his Army friends over to grill in the mosquito-ed backyard. We smacked the back of our arms and joked about Zika virus, but we stayed outside all night and roasted marshmallows off the ends of long sticks we found by the chain-link fence between us and the neighbors. A man two houses down was yelling at his wife. Slowly, we all stopped talking. We stood there, trying to listen, making sure she was going to be okay. Someone said, “I think we should . . .” and we did, we dialed 9-1-1. We called it a noise complaint. It didn’t take long before we saw two cop cars through our backyard’s slatted fence make the turn, driving down the road toward the screaming man’s house.
SEPTEMBER
“I won’t pressure you because I know that’s not helpful, but money is tight,” he told me. “You need to get a job.” I knew this. The dog had grown up a little more and now slept most of the day. I’d been paying my credit card minimums, but my bank account was low and flat, like a puddle, almost all dried up. We fought. With only one car between us it was hard to know when I could use it. He had priority. His schedule was constantly changing; it never stayed the same. I wanted to find a job somewhere close, so if I needed to, I could walk. I applied online for jobs that required thirty-minute personality questionnaires. I applied to a new H&M that was opening soon at the mall. Macy’s. Kohl’s. Sure, I could fold clothes. Sure, I could rehang jeans. Sure, I could ring you out. I got email confirmations they received my applications, but in the end they didn’t want to hire me. You’re overqualified, one person let me know. I applied to be a medical receptionist, a café barista, a writing instructor, a copywriter for a jewelry company. I didn’t want to work nights or weekends because . . . that’s when he’d be home. The time we spent together seemed precious, valuable somehow, and better than money, which I couldn’t make anyway. He was gone again. Another block of training, this time for six weeks. We had no communication. Days seemed long. Frustrated, I wrote in starts and stops. I walked the dog in the park through the forested woods. Two women walked together on Mondays and Wednesdays. We became acquaintances, then some kind of friends. They loved seeing the dog, and he anchored his way over to them because they kept pieces of sweet potatoes and jerky in their pockets. We’d walk a ways, all of us, together. One of them asked if I carried Mace. I told her I did not. She told me I should. She lifted up her sweatshirt and showed me a small pink pepper spray pistol tucked into the elastic waist of her pants.
OCTOBER
Finally I got a job. The independent movie theater downtown hired me. It had two screens: one upstairs, the Loge, and one down, the Main Auditorium. Renovated, it used to be a billiards hall, a sandwich shop, an old movie theater. I learned how to work the projector if something went wrong. Everything was mostly digital now anyway, all the movies were sent as DVDs in the mail, like how Netflix used to be. It was my job to pull the thick velvet curtains closed once the trailers started to play. The sound of the grommets in the track soothed me. I swept up stray popcorn with the lobby broom. I fluffed the pillows along the wall on the banquette. I sat at the counter, tallying up my hours, calculating how much money I’d make in a day, in a week. It was easy math I could do in my head. She apologized when she hired me and told me the rate. She wished she could have offered me more.
An old friend came to visit. Gabriel was home. She talked too much, too fast, and too loud. She boasted and bragged and wanted to stay up late. Who had she become? And what about me? We went out for barbecue one day for lunch, and she flirted with my husband right there in front of me. I pushed my plate away, not sure how I could say anything, how I could not. Suddenly I felt old, protective of my life in a way I’d never been. Too many facets were falling apart, splintering; nothing was immune to the shards of life. Early the next morning I drove her an hour back to the airport so she could catch her flight. I yelled at her in the dark. The drive back, I realized just how tired I felt.
NOVEMBER
I requested day shifts. I walked to and from the movie theater in some kind of calm. On Sundays I started making my way out of the house to go write and do some work at the Coffee Scene on Morganton Road. One day I ordered a tea, but when I brought the steaming mug of it upstairs to my table, I realized I had no taste for tea. I wanted something else, something rich and milky and caffeinated. So I went back downstairs and waited in line with my wallet to buy another drink. I had known what I wanted from the start. Why was I second-guessing myself? I waited by the counter while they stamped down the espresso and pulled the double shot into the steamed milk, and I told myself this was going to be the beginning of something new. I’d start to say what I needed to say. I’d take risks. This was a turning over of a new leaf. I took the stairs slowly, balancing my latte in its big, white, takes-two-hands-to-hold-it mug, and got back to my table thinking of what I wanted to write, the stories I wanted to finish, the journals I wanted to submit to, how great it would feel to start getting things published.
A few days later I had my thesis conference. We were headed out of town the same afternoon, to visit family at the lake. I imagined the drive out there, out of the Sandhills and into the wide vistas of the Blue Ridge Mountains, feeling hopeful as if my future had unfolded another panel just like a road map, some kind of itinerary forward. My two advisers, both fiction writers up in New York whom I’d never met, agreed to Skype. The comments weren’t great. One writer kept getting the details wrong of the story I spent so much time on. I didn’t correct her. The worst part was it was video. I watched my face as I received their critique. It was impossible to self-correct in the camera’s eye. Before we loaded up the car, I walked our dog in the park. There, a woman was yelling at a man, sure he had stolen her child. Teddy pulled me around the pine trees. I stared, not sure what to make of fiction, of real life.
DECEMBER
Before the movie theater opened at three o’clock, there was a whole day to be had. What was between 7 a.m. and 3 p.m.? Between 7 a.m. and 2:30 there was school. I took the course at the community college that certified me to become a substitute teacher. After a TB test that bubbled in my forearm and as we were all nestled in a conference room at the Educational Resource Center, they made us watch a video about school shootings and how to respond within the first twenty minutes. Panicked, I still signed on the dotted line that I was a candidate interested in being on the “call list” for last-minute subs. I picked up when they needed a Spanish sub at the public high school with kids visibly cheating in front of me on their examens. I recognized that clock that hung on the cinder block wall, that red ticking second hand I had tracked with my eyes ever since I had been a student in school, back in South Carolina, back in Indiana. At the arts charter school not too far from the movie theater downtown, I subbed for the dance teacher one day and the music teacher another, dredging up what I remembered from my ballet years and doling out colored pencils for illustrations they were supposed to color of Mozart and Chopin. After the carpool lines emptied at the end of the school day, I walked up the street to the movie theater. I counted out the change in the register, restocked the wine in the fridge, put out the glass tip jar, and popped the kernels: the ever-glorious smell of heat and salt and butter.
DECEMBER
Apparently the Arts Council of Fayetteville/Cumberland County gave out artist grants. I walked in through their red door downtown one day and asked, Do you have any available grants for writers? I was introduced to a woman named Adrienne. Here, she said. Come into my office. She gestured, Have a seat. I learned if you completed an application and submitted a proposal with materials and an expense report of how much it’d cost, they’d possibly fund your project. I worked on my application. I turned it in. My cousin came for a visit. We got our eyebrows threaded at the mall. After she went home, our electricity went out. It was a Wednesday. We were supposed to leave for Florida on Friday, so we kept the fridge closed, hoping the food wouldn’t spoil. We decided we’d head down two days early instead.
On our way down we visited with a family who used to be our friends. So much had changed. It felt like visiting with a stranger. Her husband had cheated on her. She had called me, crying, throughout the saga. She had also gotten a boob job, a recent one. So recent she had to have me come with her to her daughter’s room to lift her daughter up and out of the crib after a nap. Outside we stood around the firepit, those glittering glass stones. Her husband kept going in and out, opening the sliding glass door for ice, for the bottle opener, for more wine for her, the crackers. What was there to talk about? The lake? The sun? The kid? The boobs? Her dog and our dog played in the yard. The daughter waddled around the yard in her diaper, pointing out every spot where there was “poo-poo.” She had a plastic grocery bag in her tiny hands, inside out. She bent down. She picked each one up. I envied her single focus, a simple job to do.
JANUARY
On New Year’s, still in Florida, we hiked with a walking group out to a part of an island that you could only get access to when the full tide was out. You had to time it right. And if you did, you could stand among the huge pieces of white-bleached, knotty driftwood as if they were giants, as if they were living beings. Some were as big as upright trees. At night, when I looked up, I could see the supermoon, hopeful yet empty, hanging in the dark sky.
We came back home. The lights worked. All the food in the fridge had spoiled, but our renter’s insurance covered it. They had to make some expensive repair on the house. In the email our landlord seemed to imply we had somehow cut the power ourselves. Gabriel was called out to training. I subbed at school, staring as that red second hand made its smooth continuous revolution, reveling whenever the bell would ring.
FEBRUARY
In one of our spare rooms, the small one I had turned into my office, I realized the central air wasn’t working. I kneeled at the vent in the floor by the window to see if there was something in the way. I peered in, curious. What was—? I could see an edge. I reached in under the grate and pulled out a large red square Lego. I reached in again. Behind it, another Lego. This one was long and blue, four knobby tops all in a row. By the end there were thirteen things, I counted them: wooden blocks, one with the word “dog” on it and an illustrated picture of one, a lime-green alphabet block with the letter “S,” a rubber stamp that said “Ice Cream,” a circle Pog with a smiling gas pump that read “Fuel,” the corner piece of a Dracula puzzle, a tiny blue SpongeBob camera, and an action figure, clearly a villain, with opaque blue wings and a button on his back. I wondered about the child whose room this had been. Did they hide their toys? Were their toys hidden from them? It was the afternoon. I was kneeling on the floor with everything in front of me. I didn’t know how to decipher what was there.
MARCH
By now I had started freelance writing for the local glossy magazine. I was writing stories about “fairy godmothers” who saved up prom dresses for high school girls in need. Local cattle farmers. The gentleman who owned the menswear store down in St. Pauls. I received assignments from the editor via email with a deadline, the requested word count, and how much they were willing to pay per article. I took every story I was assigned. Finally I felt like I was doing something right. And the Arts Council, they had accepted my proposal. They were funding most of my tuition for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference at the University of the South in June.
Then Gabriel came home and said, “We’re waiting on orders.”
I asked, “What does that mean exactly?”
“Well, there’s a chance we could get orders to stay at Fort Bragg. Otherwise, it might mean we’ll have to move. We just have to wait and see.”
APRIL
And that’s when the editor at the magazine, the one who assigned me stories, left. The magazine asked, Was I interested? Did I want to take her place? What could I say? How did I know where we’d be? If they hired me and we moved, I’d feel bad. But we stayed. The Army kept us at Bragg. I accepted the job. I had an office in a business complex I used to drive by and think, Wouldn’t it be nice to work in there, those brick buildings, those evergreen shutters on either side of all the windows? The wallpaper on my office walls was pink and floral and dated and reminded me of someone’s bathroom in the nineties. I loved it. Also it was an office—my very own office! And I got a paycheck! Direct deposit! Every two weeks! We bought a second car, a black Honda Fit, and the freedom that flowed in felt enormous. I could drive wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted, by the magnolia trees in Haymount, or I could take the long way home. My office mate, Robin, one of the magazine’s sales reps, was so kind. We talked about our dogs and her aging father while I ate my turkey sandwich at my big brown desk. I found no one answered my cell phone calls because I had a New York number, so I had to make my work calls from my desk. I had to dial “9” for all those outgoing calls. I had to learn the Fayetteville area code, a new number to me: 910.
MAY
In May we were back at the lake, visiting the same place we had driven out to after my thesis conference. Gabriel and I walked hand in hand around Asheville and found our way to Zambra, the tapas restaurant on Walnut Street where he had taken me to dinner on our first date back when we were students at the work college by the Swannanoa River. During our date I had gone to the one-room bathroom and looked at my reflection in the mirror and asked, out loud, Who is he? What is happening? knowing he was someone special, feeling as if the ions of my life were literally changing form around me in his presence. Before we walked on, I caught our reflection in the restaurant’s glass windows. There we stood, the two of us, in this now. I felt, on that narrow bit of sidewalk, a portal open up. I felt I was staring through time, already in the future, somehow looking back. I tried not to blink, as if I could have looked hard enough and seen a glimmer of something, some faint shimmer, some small holy sign of who we were going to become, of what might happen next.
