By the time we returned to Nevada, I felt like I had no tears left, which was a relief because there was a lot to do. A nurse at the base clinic had accidentally perforated Sam’s eardrum on one of our many sick calls a few months prior, and the specialist we’d been sent to in Reno had recommended that as soon as it healed, his tonsils, constantly swollen and now almost to the point of touching, be removed. The tonsillectomy would happen ten days before our move, which meant packing up the house with one toddler on pain meds and the other running under foot. But even this was not enough to dampen my spirits about closing the Fallon chapter of our lives.
Awaiting us on base in Lemoore was the exact same house we had lived in before on Hellcat Court. This kind of coincidence is almost unheard of in the high-turnover world of base housing, and though we had other options to choose from, something about returning to a place we knew appealed to us both. Moving back into the same house meant I got to feel things I hadn’t felt for decades, like a sense of history, of returning to roots already planted, even if shallowly. It also meant I got an exact physical measure of how drastically our lives had changed in three short years by measuring how differently we fit into the same space. I remember when we didn’t know what to do with this room. I remember when I crawled down this hall in labor. I remember cutting myself over in that corner and sitting by that window at four a.m. with a wide-awake baby convinced I would never feel any better. I remember before that, sitting in the exact same place and wishing we could have children, wondering if we ever would . . .
And now here we were with no spare bedrooms in which to hide from each other, and so much noise. There were no hazy areas where we just stashed stuff we wanted to forget about, boxes we didn’t want to unpack; every square inch had to be accounted for. But before we unpacked anything, Ross took three days and a whole lot of paint and transformed the white walls into the palate of soft grays we’d chosen. A few months later, for Mother’s Day, he surprised me by doing the kitchen too, and choosing a warm, vibrant yellow-green called Wheatgrass. I loved it.
It was ironic, but this all-purpose reusable house that we would definitely leave again felt more mine, more like home, than anywhere I’d lived since I was thirteen years old. And it had nothing to do with the house itself and everything to do with how we filled it, how we’d grown, and who we’d become.
We weren’t the only ones who had changed. Stella and Jake immediately welcomed us into their home, and I marveled at the tall, sun-browned girl and boy who had replaced the giggling toddlers who had toppled all the houseplants one day when their dad was deployed. I had hoped we could all just pick up where we left off, but life is more complicated than that. In the three years we’d been gone, Stella and Jake had become close with another couple whose kids were closer in age to their own. This new couple came up often in conversation—the family trips they took together, the jokes and stories they shared. I was jealous, but I had also learned that you can’t force relationships, both friendships and marriages, to conform to your own hopeful fantasies.
As spring moved into summer, Ross and I began spending more time with another couple a few blocks away on base. Aaron and Elizabeth were newly married, and Ross had known and liked Aaron from previous squadrons where they had worked together. They both shared a love of craft beer and ridiculous costume parties. When I met Elizabeth, a psychologist from Boston who was just as irreverent as Aaron and also fearlessly emotional and honest, we finally had another four-way friendship match. Aaron and Elizabeth were just at the beginning of their road to starting a family, and as I set things aside—Wes’s newly outgrown crib, baby blankets, sheets, clothes, and toys—I thought gratefully of Stella and Jake and this chance to pass on the favor. I fell with gratitude and abandon into a deep friendship with Elizabeth, even though we both knew that by the time she would be a new mother and most in need of someone to lean on, I would be preparing to relocate.