We had a marriage measured in returns — the ache of the leaving, the long gray middle of the deployment when I couldn’t say where he was and half the time didn’t know, and then the almost unbearable brightness of the homecoming, every one of them like a small resurrection.
People pity that, when they hear it.
They shouldn’t.
We loved each other across distances most couples never have to survive, and the love got stronger for the survival, denser, like a thing under pressure.
He wrote me letters he wasn’t supposed to write and I burned them after reading like I wasn’t supposed to keep them, and in every one, somewhere near the end, he’d draw the house — a stick-figure house with a stick-figure garden and two stick figures and then, in the later ones, three, four, a whole crooked row of them under a lopsided sun.
That was the future he was building toward, payment by payment, board by board, homecoming by homecoming.
He got the house finished.
He did not get the future.
And my parents looked at the finished house and saw square footage.
And now he was four months in the ground, and my parents had looked at the house his body had paid for and decided it was more or less abandoned property, a windfall, a thing to be handed to the son-in-law they actually liked.
It did not seem to occur to any of them to wonder whose name was on the deed.
It did not occur to them to wonder much of anything about me.
That had always been their mistake, and it was about to become an expensive one.
Chapter 5 — Silk Robes and Car Keys
Delphina came down at half past, in a silk robe the color of oyster shells, and Cato was a step behind her the way he always was, holding a coffee that had cost more than the whole pot my mother had made, spinning the keys to his Audi around one finger like a man who wanted you to know he had an Audi.
“It really is just temporary,” Delphina said, in the bright reasonable voice she used for saying unreasonable things.
“Cato needs somewhere quiet to run the business.
