I had been hanging back at the kitchen counter, smiling awkwardly near several conversations and trying to arrange the handful of limes I’d brought to go with the beer, wondering if I was really supposed to be here or if this was going to be another disaster like in Corpus Christi. Within the first few minutes of chatting with Stella she dropped an F-bomb into a story about driving her preschool-age daughter around to various activities, and when she covered her mouth in mock horror and apology, I knew I’d found her, my next good friend.
In another stroke of incredible luck, it turned out Ross and Jake, Stella’s husband, had already become good friends and were eager to get us all together for dinner. Up until now, Ross and I had weathered a series of mismatched friendships with couples, one of us always lagging behind in our connection and enthusiasm, but Stella and Jake were a different story. As our friendship with them developed over time, I found a sense of belonging I’d thought was impossible for me in a military community. Over the next three years, Stella and I would go through a deployment together, travel to Singapore and back, and watch her two kids grow from toddlers to schoolchildren. By including me in the rhythm of her daily life when the guys were gone, Stella showed me how the next act could go, the one still somewhere off in the future where Ross and I may or may not agree that it was finally time to have a baby.
For now, there was still a lot to learn, including how to say good-bye to our husbands for half of the coming year. Ross asked if I wanted to drive down to San Diego after his last work-up to see the USS John C. Stennis, the aircraft carrier that would be home to his squadron on its deployment of the western Pacific. I was on the fence about going until Stella suggested I come with her and the kids. “It’ll be noisy,” she said by way of apology, but it was noise I was looking for. I needed a distraction if I was going to do this, something to keep me in the present and not stuck with the memories of another port city, twenty years in the past.
CHAPTER 8
Iwas ten years old the first time I saw an oil rig up close. The P-82 had been towed into port for repairs in Galveston, Texas, and the four of us—Mom, Dad, Doug, and me—went down to the docks to check it out. I remember this being sort of a last-minute detour on our way home from a rare family vacation, an educational experience my mom jollied my dad into and about which he seemed less than enthusiastic. Years later, knowing a little of the backstory on this particular rig, I can imagine it now through my father’s eyes, this hulking, decrepit structure whose deficiencies had been ignored while it was a working rig pulling in revenue, but in port for millions of dollars’ worth of expensive repairs now that the company had been bought out by a foreign firm. It was a time when OPEC was playing with the price of a barrel of oil again, and many companies were vulnerable to foreign buyouts. The P-82 was also the site of a long-standing personality conflict between my dad and another man representing one of the rig’s contractors, a man he later described as the only true sociopath he’d ever met. The man was a known problem, but, like all the other things broken on the P-82, something my dad was encouraged to make do with until a replacement could be found.
I knew none of this at the time, just as my dad knew nothing of the fact that less than a year after our tour of his old rig, his company would lay him off after seventeen years. My dad maintained a separation between work and home so profound that I struggled to explain what he did for a living, and never knew how to interpret the reactions of surprise I got from my friends and their parents when they asked. I got the impression that we were some kind of novelty, and that my dad working offshore fell somewhere on the spectrum between quaint and shameful, the operative question behind such a career choice being “Why?”