The resulting sulk would be long and quiet and sour and I was often the last to come out of it, feeling doubly wronged because I was so convinced that I was the only one who had worked to try to prevent the whole thing. My consolation in these sulks was a promise I made to myself, written over and over again on the pink pages of a diary otherwise given over to fantasies and doodles: “I will never, ever do this to myself or my kids. I will never, ever marry a man who leaves.” As I got older and meaner, I started throwing this little barb out at my mom when she would try to break the ice and apologize.
The hot chocolate incident is my clearest memory of the sudden appearance of the nuclear specter of divorce, which in itself was a tricky concept because it seemed so common in the lives of my friends at school, and because many of my schoolmates assumed that my dad’s infrequent presence meant my parents were already divorced. But I lived in fear of the idea, enthralled by it, the way standing near a huge drop-off can make you feel like you’re actually leaning into it. Just as I believed every time that my dad might change his mind and not leave for work, or that I could short out the circuit that led to our family explosions when he was gone, I believed that every time they invoked the word “divorce,” the event was imminent. It was Doug who finally whispered to me from the backseat of our car, still rocking from where Dad had slammed the passenger’s side door and begun his long walk back home from a rare family dinner out, “Maybe we’d be better off if they did.”
What I wish my parents had said to me during those moments when it seemed everything would explode, that separation, abandonment, and chaos were imminent: “This threat isn’t real. It will pass.” What I’m terrified that I can’t say, even now, to my own children: “I have no idea if the threat is real or not. We’re making it up as we go along.”
CHAPTER 3
We love you, Pensacola, YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL!”
“NO LOOTERS. This property is armed.”
“Why, Ivan?”
“State Farm is a lying neighbor who cheats and STEALS from you!!!”
When I arrived in Pensacola, Florida, as a newlywed, forty-eight hours married and in the front seat of a U-Haul with the dog in my lap, the city was still reeling from the damage from Hurricane Ivan, which had stomped it flat only two months prior, while Ross was finishing Officer Candidate School. Spray-painted messages that ranged from mournful to outright profane decorated the fronts of storm-gutted homes and businesses. Ross and his classmates had sheltered beneath desks in a cryptology bunker, later emerging to distribute MREs to newly homeless civilians and clean up fire ant–covered debris, their OCS syllabus on indefinite hold, while I had busily continued planning our wedding in Austin on the weak promise that he would probably be there.
My mom, laughing, had proposed a contingency plan to avoid thousands of dollars in cancellation fees by exchanging vows at the altar with Ross represented via cell phone (and following up later with a justice of the peace if cell phone unions weren’t considered legal), but I’d been unable to either join her in laughing or come up with a suitable counterproposal. Instead, I’d found myself in the minor emergency clinic with what I believed to be totally unrelated chest pains, and when basic tests turned up nothing, I’d surprised both the doctor and myself by bursting into hiccuping tears when she asked, “Is there any kind of unusual stress in your life right now?” In the end, Ross made it, and the evening was one of those magical ones where time and its passing seem so utterly beside the point that I actually stopped to notice things like the smell of fresh rosemary in the table centerpieces and the crisp precision of Ross’s freshly cut hairline before his Florida tan began on its way down to the stiff white color of his uniform coat. But military life had stepped in quick on the heels of our Friday night vows, and by Sunday morning, we were packed and on the road to Pensacola.