The Husband Hour(67)

“Did he perceive that you were supportive of his decision to enlist?”

“I think so. I tried to give him that impression. I mean, I was scared, but who wouldn’t be?”



She kept her negativity to herself. Rory was more excited and confident than she had seen him since she moved to Los Angeles. Maybe this is what he needs, she told herself. She had to trust him.

Lauren hated to admit it, but Emerson’s words just before she walked down the aisle stuck with her. No, she didn’t agree one bit that she could “barely handle” being a hockey girlfriend. She thought she’d done a good job, maybe even a great job, of keeping things working for the past five years. And if she had moments of worry or doubt, well, who wanted to see the man she loved get pounded bloody? Who wanted to know—not suspect but know deep in her heart—that head injuries were making her fiancé a different person? The chronic headaches. The insomnia. The recurring flashes of anger. She was afraid for his safety in the military, but the truth was, the NHL wasn’t exactly safe. He’d admitted as much himself.

“I bet I get banged up less over there than I did right here at the Staples Center.”

She tried to smile.

Basic training was nine weeks long. She didn’t have any idea how often they’d be in contact, and so she prepared herself for the worst-case scenario.

“I’ll be able to call,” he assured her. “And look, we’ve been apart for nine weeks before.”

Rory had urged her to join some of the military wives’ groups. “It’s an important support system,” he’d said, sounding like he was reading out of the army handbook for How to Deal with Your Nervous Wife.

She’d lurked on some of the groups online, read through some of the chat threads. The basic training/boot camp chat rooms seemed to be frequented by parents of new recruits and maybe the occasional girlfriend. Lauren couldn’t relate to any of the comments. Rory was older than most of the guys and she felt their circumstances were unique. She clicked around, desperate to find a thread that would help her feel connected. All the while, she told herself that this was temporary. In three years, they would move on with their lives. It was less time than college.



Just as she’d almost gotten used to him being away, he came home.

“He told me it was boring—frustrating sometimes. One day he spent eight hours mowing a lawn.”

“Was this discouraging to him?”

“No. He said, ‘I had to learn to skate before I could score.’ But he did have to get through months of Ranger School, and that wasn’t easy. I think people wanted to remind him that he might have been a star on the ice, but he was a nobody there. The thing they didn’t realize was that by that point, Rory hadn’t felt like a star in a long time. And he was deeply motivated to change that.”

“And how did things go at Ranger School?”

“He graduated with the Darby Award. Top honors.” Finally, he was the best at something again. “And his decision to do this was completely affirmed.”

“And in your mind?”

Lauren took a deep breath.

“In my mind, I guess something was affirmed too. The understanding that my husband was an exceptional person and that everything that was happening was part of the deal. My life with him was going to be one of high highs and low lows, and it always had been.”

The next six months apart would take it to another level. But they would get through it. There was no other choice.

The Rangers deployed for shorter tours than the general army—six months versus nine or twelve. But they also spent less time stateside between deployments.

“But you spent some time in Washington State, right?”

“Yes. We didn’t know exactly when he would be deployed, so after Ranger School we rented an apartment near Fort Lewis.”

“Rory didn’t want to live on post?”

“He did. I didn’t. It was one compromise he made for me, though he kept insisting it would be better for me to be in a place where I could meet other wives, not be so isolated.”

“You didn’t want to?”

“No. Not at all.” Her stance on the issue, her “stubbornness,” was one of the few things that almost pushed them into an argument during that time.




She had a bad attitude, she knew. And she could barely hide it. She hated Seattle. The change in climate from Southern California was a shock to her system. Yes, she had grown up on the East Coast where winters were cold. So it wasn’t really the weather. It was that going from a sunny seventy-five degrees to damp, cold overcast days in the thirties seemed a representation of the dismal turn their life had taken.

As for the apartment itself, she couldn’t really complain. It was a lot of space for very little money, with a view of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Under other circumstances, she might have found it charming.

Their last night before his deployment, she woke up an hour after she’d fallen asleep, rain landing like pennies outside on the metal air-conditioning unit. It was hard to imagine ever needing air-conditioning in that climate, and that’s probably why the building wasn’t equipped with central air, just the clunky window units.

It wasn’t the first night she’d woken to the tinny clatter, but that night, she knew she wouldn’t fall asleep again.