I looked out into the ocean and imagined the dry heat of Afghanistan. Was it odd that a part of me missed it? I wondered. Maybe it wasn’t the land… Maybe it had to do with the purpose of being there. Maybe it was because I knew whom I was when I was serving. My life was straightforward, uncomplicated. I had a job to do, and I enjoyed doing it.
But now… Everything was different. I was no longer in the army, I was no longer a major, and I no longer had the same sense of purpose I had once had.
“Do you miss it?” Luis asked as though he had read my mind.
“Is it weird if I said yes?”
He smiled. “Hey, I happen to understand where you’re coming from. When I’m over there, I miss it here. But the moment I’m here… I can’t wait to leave again. But it’s different for me.”
“Why?”
“Because I have no one to come home to,” he said.
“You have parents,” I pointed out.
“That’s different,” Luis clarified. “My parents have each other. They have two other sons and five grandchildren to occupy themselves with. They don’t depend on me for anything. Having a family of your own is a whole other thing, though.”
“What if you did have a wife?” I asked. “What if you had kids?”
“I would keep serving until the day I died, or they begged me to r
etire,” Luis said. “I would have had to keep saying goodbye to my wife and to my children, and they would have had to live with the uncertainty of my career and the fear of knowing that every time I leave, I might never come home again. That is why I will never get married.”
I bit my lip. A part of me wished I had been that smart when I was younger. I remembered the first few months of my courtship with Daphne. It had made me stronger; she had breathed new life into me, and I had gotten caught up in the moment. I had never stopped to think about the future or the freedom we were sacrificing in order to be together.
“You made the right choice, Middleton,” Luis said. “You made the right choice by leaving the military. Noah needed you. And, you’ve done amazing things since you left. It’s rare for a Major to give up his position like that. It’s even rarer to find him managing a whole company within a couple of years of his retirement.”
I smiled. “Some days I prefer the military.”
Luis laughed. “It’s funny,” he said. “The first day I met you, I looked at you and thought, that guy was made to serve. He was made to be a soldier. But now I look at your life now, and I think, this is where he’s meant to be. I think that’s how life works. We end up where we’re meant to end up.”
“Very poetic,” I said. “I didn’t know you were such a softie.”
“Just philosophical,” Luis laughed. “I’ve been reading a lot of Khalil Gibran lately.”
“Daphne used to read him,” I said, mostly to myself.
“How is Noah?” Luis asked.
“He’s…doing well,” I said. “He’s four now.”
“They grow up so fast,” Luis nodded. “Do you have a picture?”
I took out my phone and showed Louis a couple of recent photos of Noah. He was smiling in all of them and looking bashfully at the camera.
“He’s a looker.”
“Isn’t he, though?” I said proudly.
“I can’t see any Daphne in him, though,” Luis said. “He’s your spitting image.”
“Daphne used to say the same thing,” I nodded. “People just tell me he looks like Daphne because they think that’s what I want to hear. They think somehow that’ll make me feel better.”
“People don’t always know what to do with loss,” Luis pointed out. “They tend to react strangely.”
I thought about my behavior last week towards Kristen and felt instantly ashamed. Despite my shame, though, I still hadn’t worked up the willingness or the courage to apologize to her. In fact, I had been downright rude to her all week long. I wasn’t exactly sure what that was about; I just saw her and I would hear myself barking instructions without even bothering to meet her eye.
I had sensed her hurt the whole week, but I still wasn’t sure why I just didn’t man up and say I was sorry. She had been doing me a favor, and I had treated her terribly. A part of me wondered why she hadn’t quit already, and I realized at that moment perhaps that was my unconscious reasoning. Maybe I felt that if I treated her badly enough, then she would leave and I wouldn’t have to see her around the office anymore.