Total pages in book: 92
Estimated words: 89265 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 298(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89265 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 298(@300wpm)
In the kitchen, I set the plate on the counter, reached beneath the foil for another cookie, and shoved it in my mouth before deciding maybe I’d take a run before eating dinner, then lift a little. Mack had given me an old bench of his and a few weights, which I kept in one of the upstairs bedrooms.
I changed into running clothes, traded my work boots for Nikes, and scarfed one last cookie before taking off. Starting off at an easy jog down the sleepy small-town road I lived on, I thought for a moment about all the things I’d missed like crazy while I’d been deployed.
Sweets. Steak. Snow. Sex. Things that at one point had made me glad to be alive. Things that had kept me going through horrible loss and bone-crushing exhaustion and not knowing if the next step I took would be my last.
When my first four years were up, I’d gone home and reveled in the novelty of all of it—the home-cooked meals, the sting of winter in my lungs, the softness of a woman’s body beneath mine—for about a week.
After that … nothing. Life was flat. Colorless. Quiet.
I missed the adrenaline. The life-or-death rush. The danger.
I missed the powerful sense of responsibility I felt for my buddies and the knowledge they had my back.
I missed the certainty in knowing who I was—a United States Marine—and what I was supposed to do—serve and protect.
It’s not that I didn’t attempt normalcy. I did.
I got a job. I married a girl. I bought a house. But I still didn’t feel alive.
So I went back.
As I pumped my legs harder, lengthening my strides and picking up the pace, I wondered how different my life would have been if I’d just stayed home and worked harder to fit in. Would I be a different person? Would my marriage have survived? Would I be a father? Would Sunday afternoons be spent grilling burgers, drinking a beer with the neighbors, watching our kids run through the sprinklers?
I tried to imagine it but couldn’t. That life wasn’t meant for someone like me, someone who’d made the choices I’d made, done the things I’d done.
The second time I came home, my life fell apart fast.
Over and over again I’d apologized to Brie, who’d felt abandoned when I re-enlisted, betrayed when I returned a different man, and angry at my inability to “get over it and move on.”
I took the blame, stood there silently while she screamed at me to fucking say something when she told me she was in love with someone else and wanted a divorce.
“What do you want me to say?” I asked.
“How you feel!” she yelled. “I just fucking told you I’ve been cheating on you for the last year and a half and you’re standing there like it doesn’t even matter to you!”
“Maybe it doesn’t.”
Her mouth dropped open and her cheeks flared red. Then she crossed the kitchen in three angry strides and slapped me hard across the face. “You’re a heartless fucking bastard. You never loved me. You’re not capable of love.”
I flipped the switch and the scene went dark in my head. I pushed myself to run even faster. I concentrated on the rhythm of my feet hitting the road, the tightness of my muscles, the quickness of my breath.
The truth was, losing Brie hadn’t really mattered to me. I’d felt nothing when she walked out the door, and I didn’t miss her once she was gone.
That’s how I knew she was right about me.
Five
Stella
I spent Monday morning rescheduling clients with individual sessions during the week and securing other therapists to run my group sessions. At noon, I grabbed a sandwich and cup of coffee from Starbucks and hit the road.
Hadley Harbor was a small bayside town in Leelenau County. In the summertime, the population swelled with tourists and what Grams called “summer people,” but by fall, it was pretty much dead. The area was picturesque, dotted with farms and vineyards and evergreens, and the foliage was beautiful. The highway bordered the western edge of Grand Traverse Bay for a while, and the water glittered in the afternoon sun. As I approached Grams’s small town, I was inundated with childhood memories of visiting my grandparents during the summertime and begging my mom and dad to stop the car so we could get out and swim as soon as we saw the water.
I pulled up to the curb in front of the house just after four o’clock, and nostalgia washed over me again. It seemed like only yesterday I was jumping out of the car and running up her front porch steps or zipping around the house to beat my sisters to the swing that used to hang from the branches of a birch tree in the yard.
Today, I moved a little slower as I pulled my small suitcase up the front walk and took in the house’s familiar appearance. It actually looked pretty good—I’d been a little nervous driving up that Grams’s questionable mental state might mean the house and yard had been neglected. But other than some peeling paint and perhaps a slight tilt to the entire front porch (to be expected on a house nearing a hundred years old), her home looked as welcoming as always, and the front yard looked beautiful. The leaves had been raked, the grass recently cut, the rose bushes pruned.