Irritation.
Pure and simple irritation, as if my dead husband were a scheduling inconvenience.
“Marla,” he said.
“I’m going to say this once.
The whole world does not owe you a grief parade.
Your carrying-on is already casting a pall over the holiday and it is not even six in the morning.” Niko had been dead four months.
The Army had come to the door that July, two officers in dress uniform standing on my parents’ porch with their hats in their hands, and told me that my husband had been killed on a mission they were not at liberty to describe, in a place they were not at liberty to name.
I remember every second of that April morning with a clarity I have for almost nothing else.
I remember I was on the porch when the car pulled up, a plain sedan, and I remember that I knew — you always know, every military spouse knows, the sight of two people in that uniform walking up a path is the one thing you spend the whole marriage praying not to see.
My knees went before they reached the steps.
One of them caught my elbow.
They were kind, unbearably kind, in the practiced gentle way of people who do this terrible thing for a living, and they said the words, and the words meant nothing and everything, and behind me in the doorway my mother said, “Oh, is everything all right?” — because she genuinely did not understand what she was looking at, because in her version of my life Niko was a consultant and nobody sends two officers in dress blues to tell you a consultant is dead.
I had to explain it to her later, in small words, and even then I could see her struggling to make it fit, this fact that did not match the shape of the son-in-law she’d filed away as unimpressive.
That was the first crack in the cover, that April morning, though none of us understood it yet.
My family had spent a decade being faintly embarrassed by the modesty of my marriage.
And now two soldiers had come to say my modest husband had died in service to his country, and my mother’s first clear question, once she understood, was whether there would be a payout.
