1
meredith
“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” Jo declared from her spot on the rug.
She sat at the feet of her oldest sister, Meg. Jo’s long brown hair was unruly, as it always was. She was my strong girl. She was the only one of my girls who didn’t hog the bathroom. Her delicate fingers, the black polish on their nails chipped, picked at the frayed edges of the Afghan rug under her folded legs. The hand-woven black-and-red textile had once been bright and beautiful, and I remembered when my husband had sent it to our house back in Texas from his former post in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
In my head, my husband’s company’s FRG leader’s scratchy voice reminds me to use proper military lingo: my husband’s FOB in Kandahar. The biggest forward operating base in Afghanistan, she would also necessarily add. Denise was always on my case. Come to think of it, she even had comments about the rug when I got it. She said he could have sent it to the base and paid no fee.
None of that mattered to my girls. From the moment it arrived, they loved that rug as much as I did. When I ripped open the package from their dad, who had been living across the world for the past eight months, the girls—particularly Jo—were excited to own such a beautiful, culture-filled treasure from a place so far away. Meg loved that we now had a lavish handcrafted object in our simple home. She was my most materialistic daughter, but I always knew that if I tried to teach her right, she would use her love of shiny things to do something magical and worthwhile with her life. Amy was too young to really care about the rug, and of course Beth knew it was coming because her daddy knew that she was the only Spring Girl who could be trusted to keep the secret. Plus, on a more practical level, since Beth was basically homeschooled, Frank knew she could watch out for it. Later, he explained to me that he wanted to mail the package straight home so that we could be treated with the rug as a surprise on our doorstep, rather than as a pickup chore on the base. I’m not sure if I told Denise that, she would understand.
Of late, our beautiful rug wasn’t as beautiful anymore. Dirty shoes and heavy bodies had worn it down, and the colors blended into a mud brown that I tried my best to clean, but the color just wouldn’t come back.
We loved it not one bit less.
“We’re supposed to get snow in New Orleans. That feels like Christmas to me,” Meg said, brushing her fingers through her brown hair. It was grown to her shoulders now, and she talked Jo through instructions about how to ombre her hair so it looked like she had blond ends and dark roots. It was so cold that year that the roads iced over, and it felt like every day there was a wreck clogging the only major highway in this town. The sign outside our Army post keeping track of the number of days without a road-related fatality went back down to zero nearly every day instead of weekly. The highest number of days without a death that the sign at Fort Hood ever got to was sixty-two.
That morning didn’t feel as cold as Channel 45 said it would be. I wondered if my sister would make it to our house or if she would somehow use the weather as an excuse. She always had excuses. Her husband was deployed with mine, and their dirty laundry had been fully aired, left around in pieces, from his making jokes about her weight to a group of privates, to his sleeping with a female medic last month.
“Did Aunt Hannah call yet?” I asked my girls.
The only one who looked at me was Beth, who replied, “No.”
Since moving to Fort Cyprus the summer prior, Hannah had been engaged twice, married once, and is soon to be divorced. I loved my younger sister, but I couldn’t say I was upset when she moved closer to the city a few months back. She got herself a weekend bartending gig on Bourbon Street at a little bar called Spirits, where they serve mixed drinks in light-up skulls and make a tasty po’ boy. She had a good personality for a bartender.
“Is she coming?” Jo asked from the floor.
I looked at Jo, into her milk-chocolate eyes. “I’m not sure. I’ll call her in a little while.”
Amy made a small hmp in her throat, and I stared at the blank TV.
I didn’t want to talk to my daughters about adult things. I wanted them to stay as young as possible, but to also be very aware. I told them of things happening around them. I discussed current events with them, the war going on around us. I tried to explain the dangers and blisses of being a woman, but as they grew older, it got harder and harder. I had to explain to them that sometimes things would come easier to the boys and men around them, often for no good reason. I had to teach them to defend themselves if one of those boys or men tried to harm them. Having four daughters ages twelve to nineteen was not only the hardest job I’d ever worked, but it would be the most important thing I would ever do. My legacy wasn’t going to be that I was an Army wife; it was that I’d raised four reliable, responsible, and capable little women to unleash out into the world.
I felt a heavy sense of duty; if nothing else in my life, I wanted them to carry their strength proudly and their kindness openly.
Meg was the princess of the family. She was our miracle baby, coming to us only after two painful and soul-wrenching failures and finally making her entrance into the world on Valentine’s Day evening. But it’s not like when it happened, Frank and I were out on some romantic date sipping ten-dollar glasses of Yellow Tail merlot. Rather, Frank was sitting behind a desk at his company building, trying hard to stay awake. Every hour he had to do a walk around the barracks behind the building. He always seemed to be assigned to charge of quarters. (CQ, as Denise would note.)
He hated when he had to do it, and so did the girls, but the Army required it once a month. That night, I had to call the company phone four times before someone finally answered and corralled my husband. Just as my contractions became unbearable, he made it home and we rushed into his car. We thought she was going to be born right there in our 1990 Chevy Lumina. Staring at the fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror, I counted as they swayed back and forth, back and forth, and tried to keep at bay the faint smell of the Marlboros that Frank used to smoke in the car before we found out we were expecting. Frank held my hand and told me jokes and made me laugh so hard that I was crying and trying to keep myself from peeing on the fuzzy black seat covers. We were so cool back then.
By the time we got to the hospital, I was too far into labor to get an epidural, and so while Meg came out screaming into the small hospital room, it was all I could do not to scream myself. Still, that was just one night, just a moment. Becoming a mother changed something deep within me; I felt the scattered pieces of my life lock into place, and I knew that I had a new role.
Jo was next, and her birth took a toll on my body. She was breech and refused to turn her stubborn little body the right way, so a C-section was scheduled by my doctor.
Beth was easy, only thirty minutes of pushing. Her birth was calm like her, and she took to my breast easier than the rest of my girls.
Lastly, our unplanned little Amy surprised us on a Taco Tuesday when I realized my stomach no longer liked tacos, even though the rest of me did. After Amy, I asked my doctor to ensure we didn’t have any more surprises.
Amy was just as fiery as the spicy food I craved when she was growing inside of me, and I looked at her now, then to the rest of my girls. For a few minutes, no one spoke, and I pretended, just for a few heartbeats, that Frank was here, sitting in this old recliner he’s had since our first apartment. In my mind, he was singing along to the radio. He loved to sing and dance, even if he was awful at both.
“I saw online that White Rock cut the music program again,” Beth said, yanking me back to reality.
“Yikes, really?” asked Meg.
“Yeah. It sucks for the students. It barely existed before, and now it’s practically gone, no new instruments, no field trips. Nothing.”
Amy looked over at her older sisters, trying to keep up with their conversation.
“Are you kidding me?” Jo spat. “I’m going right down to Mrs. Witt’s office. That’s bullshit that they—”
“Josephine, watch that mouth,” I said, still eyeing Amy. Jo always cursed, no matter how hard she claimed to try not to. Given that she was almost seventeen, I didn’t know what to do about it.
“Sorry, Meredith.”
She also had begun using my adult name, for some reason.
Across the room, the phone rang from its cradle on the charger, and Amy jumped up to answer it.
“What does the caller ID say?” I asked.
Amy bent down and squinted her eyes. “. . . Something bank. Fort Cyprus National Bank.”
My chest tightened. On Christmas Eve? Really? That bank was already corrupt enough with their high interest rates and less-than-noble marketing. They were known for standing pretty women in the entries of the PXs and Walmarts to lure soldiers to open an account with a smile and the phantom promises of early direct deposits from the Army.
“Just let it ring,” I instructed.
Amy nodded and silenced the ringer. She watched the little red light on the port until it stopped blinking before asking, “Who’s calling from the bank?”
I turned the television on.
“What movie are we going to watch?” Meg interrupted. “I think . . .” Her printed nails skimmed over the rack of DVDs at her feet, and she tapped one. “How about The Ring?”
I was grateful to Meg for changing the subject. Meg was always good at reading a room and constructing and polishing true-ish stories to distract, charm, or disarm someone.
“I hate The Ring,” Amy whined, and looked at me imploringly.
It wasn’t funny when Meg dressed Jo up as the girl from the movie who climbs up the well. I didn’t laugh at all. Okay, maybe a little, but I was still upset at my oldest girls for tormenting their little sister.
“Really?” Jo’s voice had a spooky tone, like she was trying to scare her sister. Jo reached out to tickle Amy’s sides, and Amy jerked away.
“Please, Mom, tell Meg we aren’t watching The Ring!” Amy pulled at my sweatpants.
“What about The Skeleton Key?” Beth suggested. That was her favorite movie. Beth loved anything with Kate Hudson, and living just outside New Orleans made the movie especially terrifying.
“Jo, what do you want to watch?” I asked.
Jo moved over to the DVD stand, making Amy yelp when Jo’s knee landed on Amy’s toes as she passed.
“Cabin Fever or . . .” She picked up Interview with the Vampire.
It made me feel like a cool mom when my girls liked movies that I loved growing up. Interview with the Vampire was my favorite movie for a good twenty years. To this day, Anne Rice is the only author whose entire works I’ve read.
Meg said in a quiet voice, “That movie reminds me of River . . .”
Even hearing that boy’s name made my insides feel like a Ferris wheel on fire, but fortunately my girls’ penchant for drama distracted me. Amy moved to her feet and grabbed the movie straight from Jo’s hands and tossed it under the Christmas tree. Jo yelled an indignant “Hey!” and Meg blew a kiss to Amy.
“John’s calling!” Meg yelled, and disappeared from the room before her phone even rang.
“Cabin Fever it is,” Jo said, and took the remote from the table.
While Jo fiddled with the DVD player, Amy ran to the bathroom and Beth disappeared into the kitchen. The house was quiet except for the beeping of the microwave, then the soft hum as it spun around whatever Beth was making. My house wasn’t usually quiet like this. When Frank was home, there was always music playing or the sound of him laughing, singing . . . something.
The silence wasn’t going to last long, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted it to, but I was going to enjoy it while it lasted. I closed my eyes, and shortly I started to hear kernels popping and smell a decadent butter odor.
Jo was sitting cross-legged next to the TV, staring down at her candy-cane-striped socks. To a stranger Jo may have looked sad, with her pouty lips and her downcast eyes, but I knew she was calm. She looked like she was thinking about something important, and I wished I could read her thoughts, to help take a little of the weight off her shoulders. I no longer wanted silence.
“How’s the piece coming along?” I asked her. I didn’t get much time alone with Jo now that she had a job—a job that she seemed to love, since she spent so much time there.
Jo shrugged. “It’s good. I think.” She ran her hands up and down her cheeks and looked at me. “I think it’s good. I think it’s really good.” A shy but blinding smile split her face, and she covered her mouth. “I’m almost done. Should I use my actual name?”
“If you want to. You could also use my maiden name. When can I read it?” Her smile dissipated even faster than it had arrived. “Or not.” I added a smile to show I wasn’t upset. I understood why she wouldn’t want me to read her work yet. Of course it hurt my feelings a little bit, but I knew she had her reasons, and I never wanted to add any pressure on her.
“You could send it to your dad,” I suggested.
She thought about it for a second. “You think he has time? I don’t want to distract him.”
Sometimes she sounded too adult for me.
The bathroom door opened in the hallway, and Amy came walking back into the living room, her bedroom blanket in tow. My parents had given it to me at her baby shower, but it was really worn now, the colored patches that made up the little quilt a bit duller.
Amy, with her lip-gloss obsession and blond hair, was trying to grow up too fast. She wanted to be like her older sisters more than anything, but that was the typical youngest-sibling thing. My sister was the same, always following me around and trying to be my equal. Amy was now in seventh grade, which debatably was the hardest grade to push through. I couldn’t remember much of my own seventh grade, so it couldn’t have been so bad for me. Ninth grade—now, that I remember.
Jo always teased Amy, warning her sister that she should start preparing for high school now. But Amy was at that pivotal age in her life when she thought she knew everything. She was at the awkward stage in her appearance, too, where she hadn’t quite grown into her features. The bratty little girls in her class liked to make fun of her bony frame and her lack of a period. Just last week, Amy came in asking when she was allowed to shave her legs. My rule had always been that my daughters could shave when they started their period, but when I told Amy that, she had a twelve-year-old’s meltdown in the bathroom. Honestly, I didn’t even know where I got that rule, probably my own mother, and given what Amy was going through, I helped my girl shave her legs that day.
Meg was not only the oldest, but she was also the second-in-charge of our government-owned home. Sometimes it was easy to pretend that it was our home, until something happened like getting a ticket for my grass being too long. I had looked out the window to find a man standing in my front yard, bent down and measuring my grass. When I went outside, he cowered back to his truck, but not before handing me a ticket. Apparently the housing office didn’t have anything better to do than measure people’s grass.
I hoped that one day we would be able to buy a home of our own, maybe after Frank retired from the Army. I didn’t know what state we would settle in when he was finally done, but something like the middle of nowhere in New England sounded nice. But Frank often talked about moving to a sleepy beach town where you could wear flip-flops every day. Of course, it would depend on where our daughters ended up, too. Amy wouldn’t be out of the house for another six years, and Beth . . . well, I wasn’t sure if Beth would ever want to leave, and that was okay, too.
Beth brought in two bowls of popcorn, and everyone got comfortable in the small room. I stayed in Frank’s chair, Amy sat next to Beth as Meg walked in and plopped down on the opposide side of the couch, and Jo stayed on the floor near the TV.
“Is everyone ready?” Jo asked, and hit play without waiting for a reply.
As the movie started, I went back to thinking about how fast my daughters had grown. This could be the last year that we would all be together for Christmas. Next year, Meg would more than likely be with John Brooke’s family in Florida, or wherever their vacation home was. I couldn’t keep track sometimes. It wasn’t that Meg dated a ton, but she’d had a few boyfriends. Unlike my mom, I kept a close eye on my daughters and the guys they brought around, although so far that really just meant watching Meg. Frank minded more than me, but I knew firsthand that being too protective of our daughters could be worse than making sure they were educated about dating and relationships.
When Meg was sixteen, I took her to get on birth control, earning me an awkward lecture from my own mom.
She wasn’t one to give anyone advice: she had had two kids before she was twenty-one.
The house phone rang again, and Jo leaned over and shut it off.
Meg’s phone rang next, a pop song that Amy immediately started singing along to.
“Technology, man,” Jo commented from the floor.
“It’s Mrs. King.” Meg sighed, getting to her feet.
Jo grabbed the remote and paused the movie. Meg disappeared into the kitchen.
Amy lay down where Meg had been sitting, even though she would just have to get back up when her sister got back. “I’m too young to work, but when I’m old enough, I’ll work at a better place than a coffee shop or a makeup store.”
“You’re being obnoxious,” Jo said.
“You’re being obnoxious,” Amy mocked in a voice that sounded a lot like Jo’s.
Being the youngest, Amy liked to point out the flaws of her sisters any chance she could. I had a feeling that it took a heavy toll on Amy’s confidence to exist under her three sisters, who in her own way she looked up to. Sisterly love was tricky because she loved her sisters more than anything, but at the same time, she was jealous of nearly everything about each of them. Meg’s wide hips, Jo’s confidence, Beth’s ability to cook anything and everything . . .
When Meg returned to the living room, Jo started the movie again.
“Did she pay you yet?” Beth asked, mirroring my own thoughts.
I didn’t mind Meg working for Mrs. King, even if the woman intimidated me with her huge house and tiny purebred dogs. I had never met Mr. King, but I had met their three children on a few separate occasions. Meg had had a real thing for the boy, Shia, and I could see why. He was nice, with a big heart and a freight train of passion. I thought if there was a man who could keep up with Meg, it would be Shia King. I didn’t know much about what had happened between them, but I figured if Meg wanted me to know, I would.
Meg shrugged. “She just hasn’t yet. I don’t know why.”
Jo rolled her eyes and threw her hands into the air. Meg’s brown eyes bulged out of her head in response.
“Well, haven’t you asked her?” I said.
“Yes. She’s been so busy, though.”
“Doing what? Throwing parties?”
Meg sighed. “No.” She shook her head at me. “It’s the holidays—she’s busy.”
“I’m surprised you’re okay with this. I thought you were tougher than that,” Jo said.
“I am.”
“Yes, she is. You’re not tough as Jo, though—Jo’s as tough as a boy!” Amy laughed.
Jo shot up to her feet. “What did you say?”
I sighed from the chair. “Amy.” I said her name harshly enough for her eyes to snap to me. “What did I tell you about that?” I wasn’t having that in my house. My girls could dress however they wanted.
“I said you act like a boy.” Amy sat up on the couch, dodging Meg’s attempt to hold her on her lap. I knew if it got too heated, I would have to interfere, but I wanted to let the girls at least attempt to work things out on their own. Just like Meg with Mrs. King, though the nerve of the woman for not paying for honest work did grate at me.
“And what exactly does that mean, Amy? Because there’s no such thing as boys being stronger than girls!” Jo’s voice was loud and her fingers were bent into air quotations. “Being tough has nothing to do with being a boy. If anything—”
“Not true! Can you lift the same as a boy?” Amy challenged.
“You aren’t serious.” Jo’s mouth was a hard line.
Meg put her hands on Amy’s slim shoulders and pressed her flowery fingernails into her sister’s sky-blue nightie. Amy let out a stubborn huff of breath, but she lay down and let Meg play with her hair.
Jo waited, her hands on her hips.
The movie played in the background.
“Let’s enjoy our winter break. This is better than sitting in math class, right?” Beth asked. My sweet Beth was always trying to fix things. She was the most like Frank in that way. Jo had his political and social passion, but Beth was a natural caregiver.
Beth and Jo stared at each other for a few moments before Jo gave in and sat down quietly on the floor.
However, before long Amy began in again on her favorite topic of the last couple days. “Ugh, it’s not that much better than math. It’s not fair. You don’t understand that all the girls at my school are going to come back with all new clothes, a new phone, new shoes.” She counted the list on her fingers and lifted her cell phone in the air. “And here we are with no gifts under our tree at all.”
My heart ached and my head swam with guilt.
This time Beth spoke first. “We make more money than half the girls at your school. Look at our house and look at theirs. Our car, too. You need to look around and remember how it used to be before Dad was an officer.” Beth’s words were sharper than usual; they seemed to settle into Amy, because she frowned and her eyes darted around the living room from the beige walls to the fifty-inch flatscreen we’d bought from the PX, tax-free of course.
Amy looked at the Christmas tree. “Exactly my point. We could have—”
But, as had often been happening during the break, Jo forcefully interrupted Amy to remind everyone that the family only had extra money when Frank was dodging bullets and IEDs in Iraq, and so we had to respect that and not seem like we were being opportunistic on the back of his risk.
I hated when they talked in specifics like that; it was a little too much. I wondered if I still had that Baileys in the fridge. I thought I did.
“Plus,” Jo went on, all worked up into a lather, “all the girls in your grade steal most of that stuff anyway. You really think Tiara Davis’s family can afford to buy her Chanel sunglasses? Only officers can, and you don’t have any officer’s kids in your grade beside that one kid who moved from Germany, what’s his name?”
Amy nearly growled his name. “Joffrey Martin. He’s a jerk.”
Jo nodded. “Yeah, him. So, don’t be jealous. No one else has any money around here unless it’s the first or the fifteenth.”
“Except the Kings,” Meg said under her breath.
Her words expressed more than annoyance at not being paid. Everyone in the room could easily detect the longing in her voice for the finer things in life, and the King’s had all the finer things. There were even rumors that they had gold toilets in their expansive mansion, though Meg said she hadn’t seen any.
I knew how much Meg loved working for Mrs. King as an assistant. I hadn’t been quite sure how my princess Meg would do following orders all day, but since Mrs. King had plucked Meg from her job at Sephora and asked her to work for her, she hadn’t fired her yet. So far her job description remains unknown, aside from doing Mrs. King’s makeup and walking her yappy little dogs. Last week Meg loaded the dishwasher, but she told me that Mrs. King told her to never touch a dirty dish again. I wasn’t sure that I liked that message, but Meg was nineteen and I had to let her decide what kind of woman she wanted to be.
“No one likes the Kings anyway,” Amy said.
“Yes, they do!” Meg defended.
“Okay, so you like them. That isn’t saying much. That’s like saying people like Amy,” Jo teased, but Amy wasn’t having it.
Amy shot up like a firecracker to yell at her sister. “Jo always—”
Meg put her hand on Amy’s chest and laid her back down on her lap. “Amy, it was a compliment . . . Anyway, John Brooke is going to be an officer, too. When he graduates from West Point in a few weeks.”
I felt like a teenager when I rolled my eyes at Meg at this. “Don’t throw around rank like that. You sound like a snob.”
What Meg didn’t say was that she didn’t so much mind being a snob if it meant she got Chanel sunglasses or a pool in her backyard, like Mrs. King. I’d heard her say those exact words to Amy last week.
“Yeah, Meg,” Amy added.
“Shut up, Amy.”
“Meredith, do you know how rich they are?” Meg asked.
I shook my head. I only knew that Mr. King helped big corporations get out of lawsuits. I wasn’t fascinated by the Kings the way my daughters seemed to be. I was the opposite of my oldest daughter; I absolutely hated when people thought they were better than others, which happened too often in the Army community. Before Frank got his latest promotion, I felt like I fit right in with the enlisted wives. Everyone was equally lonely, equally broke, equally stressed over the war and taking care of their households. Some of the enlisted wives even worked, and I loved that. I had a small group of friends, one young wife who had just had her first baby and a woman my age who had just been stationed at Fort Cyprus from Fort Bragg.
After Frank became an officer, I was no longer accepted by my lower-ranking group, but I didn’t fit in with the officers’ wives circle, either. Being an officer’s wife came with more social responsibility that I simply didn’t want. I already had four daughters to raise and a husband to support while he was away.
Denise Hunchberg, the leader of our old Family Readiness Group, was pleasant once upon a time, but she’d become increasingly catty and crazed with the little bit of power she had. It drove me insane to sit back and watch her use her so-called authority to bully the younger wives. Every time she scolded me or mocked another wife behind her back, I would mentally lick my fingers and wipe the awful woman’s penciled eyebrows off her smug face.
Sometimes when I was feeling especially petty, I thought about telling Denise—a woman who acted as if her status in the FRG was the same as leading the free world—that her husband slept with the female medic, twice, during the battalion’s last deployment. When Denise’s little finger was waving in my face for forgetting to bring hot dog buns to the last fund-raiser that I actually went to, I almost told her off. But I knew better. I was too smart to do something stupid like that. It would be an awful thing to destroy someone’s family, and on top of that, a husband would get the heat for his wife’s mouth, so her behavior had to stay mature, almost regal.
Officers’ wives were held to a different standard than enlisted wives, and I couldn’t do that to Frank. Sometimes I felt that Fort Cyprus was like being a fish stuck in those fish tanks in Walmart. Too many fish, too little food, and nowhere to go but the other side of the dirty tank.
Our daughters needed to keep a good reputation, too. Well, as good as four teenage girls could. Word traveled faster than light at an Army post, and the Spring Girls had been sprinkling seeds for gossip all around town.
Something had turned in the conversation while I pondered Denise, because I was brought back by Amy saying, “And Dad has a safer job than everyone else. He doesn’t even have to carry a gun.”
No one told her she was wrong.
I had told her that little lie once to make her feel better. I mean, what the hell was I supposed to tell my seven-year-old when she asked if her dad was going to die?
For her part, Jo always tried to ignore the huge gun strapped across her dad’s chest in every single picture he posted on Facebook. Jo hated the idea of guns and said so often. She would be content never to hold a weapon in her life. I was the same.
“I wouldn’t call being on a base in the middle of Mosul safe,” Jo said, not bothering to hide the darkness of her tone. She had long ago given up on pretenses.
Never-minding Amy’s lack of details, my daughters knew where their dad was and how dangerous it was in Iraq. They knew that men died there, from both countries. Men like Helena Rice’s father. He left two days before her last year of high school and was dead before Christmas. Helena and her mom were now moving back to wherever they came from before the Army told them where to live. They were only given ninety days to evacuate their home on post.
It was awful. Just plain awful.
“It’s the safest post,” Amy said.
Another lie I told her.
“No—” Jo began, but I interrupted by saying her name.
I felt tired all of a sudden. Sometimes I had moments like that, when I wished Frank were here to help explain such heavy things to his girls.
“Meredith,” Jo snapped back at me, though her demeanor softened a little when she felt Beth’s eyes on her.
“Jo, come on. Let’s just watch the movie.”
I was so tired; I’d been very tired lately. I wanted to get up and check the fridge.
“Sorry, Beth, that my concern about our father’s life is disrupting your movie,” Jo snapped, crossing her arms around her chest.
If Jo would have said that to Amy or to Meg, or even me, she would have gotten an earful, a lecture, or even a slap from Amy. But Beth didn’t say a word. A few seconds passed, and Jo turned up the volume on the television. I felt the tension seep out of Jo’s shoulders, along with mine.
We just missed Frank, that was all.
The Spring Girls went through phases of missing their father. Meg missed her dad the most when her boyfriend showed the other boys at her school pictures that were supposed to be for his eyes only. Jo missed her dad the most when she was chosen to be the youngest editor her school newspaper had ever seen; then she missed him, even more, when she got her title taken away. Beth missed her dad the most when she was playing music and couldn’t find the right note. Amy missed her dad the most when she wanted to hear him sing her favorite Disney songs. And lastly, their mother missed her husband when life got just a little too heavy for her shoulders to bear.
The five of us missed our lieutenant for all different reasons, and we couldn’t wait for him to return next month. It felt like he had been gone so much longer than one year, and two weeks of R&R wouldn’t be nearly enough.
During those two weeks, he would always try to spend a year’s worth of time with his girls. Last year, we drove from Louisiana to Florida and spent a week at Disney World. I could feel Frank’s anxiety growing with each burst of fireworks in the sky above us. He left during the show, and I would forever remember the way he looked as he walked back to the hotel, his shoulders shaking as each blooming flower of fire lit up the dark sky. The explosions were beautiful to Jo with her wide eyes, and to Amy with her big smile. The booms made my blood pump, worrying about my husband, who couldn’t handle the chaotic blasts of color.
When Frank disappeared into the noisy crowd, I ran after him, and apparently Meg left Jo in charge and ran after a boy she’d met in the line to walk through Cinderella’s castle.
Jo smiled and leaned down to her sister’s ear. I couldn’t hear what she said, but I was sure I didn’t want to know.
In the kitchen, the oven beeped and Beth jumped up. If the other girls heard the sound, they didn’t show it. Beth spent a lot of time in the kitchen. Lately, I had felt less and less like cooking, and Beth was the only one of my daughters who noticed when the laundry was piled up.
“Are we watching a movie, or what? Everyone quit moving around and talking!” Amy exclaimed, to which Jo rolled her eyes.
Every year, I made my four girls watch horror movies on Christmas Eve. It’s been a tradition since my and Frank’s first Christmas alone. We were stationed in Las Vegas, and I was feeling homesick. Halloween was always the best part of my years growing up. My mom went all out, and I had adopted her love for the holiday, so when I sought out comforting things from home, I happened upon an all-night monster marathon that Christmas Eve. Ever since, I’ve kept the habit up and brought my girls into it.
All of my girls got into Halloween and spooky things, but since we’d moved to New Orleans, Beth and Amy had become more and more entertained by the voodoo tales and urban legends surrounding the Big Easy. I prided myself on having the scariest house on the block, no matter where we lived. I reminisced about my childhood and told ghost stories about haunted places in my hometown in the Midwest. When I was young, my friends and I spent our weekends touring “haunted” places near our small town, which comprised the few good memories I had of that place. So it was lucky that on that Christmas Eve I hit upon a TV horror marathon, instead of one about, say, depressed rural areas and alcoholism.
Jo pointed to the screen. “I love this part.”
She picked the same type of movies from the same time frame every year, always virus- or zombie-themed horrors. Last year it was 28 Days Later. Meg always chose movies off the lead actor. Last year her celebrity crush was Tom Hardy, and I had to agree with her on that . . . which was a weirder occurrence than ketchup on tacos.
“Me, too,” Amy said.
I caught Jo smiling at Amy and my heart warmed.
The house fell to a steady quiet, aside from the screams on the television.