One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [12]
“That was me kicking the damn wall. The air conditioner’s broken again. That’s just great. Right before you leave. Perfect. Something else I’ll have to deal with.”
This wasn’t a good way to start our last night together for at least six months. I tried to mollify her. “I’ll have Paul handle it. I’ll call him right now.”
Paul was our next-door neighbor. He was a good guy, but I really didn’t care for him. He was always upbeat, always helpful, to the point where it was sickening. I’m probably jealous because he spends more time with my family than I do. He’s the one that Heather turns to for any immediate help, and that hurts. But that’s not his fault, it’s mine.
Heather waved her hand. “Paul couldn’t fix a leaky faucet. Don’t bother. I’ll get Tim to help. He’s a lot better with his hands, and he’s home now.”
She started to say something else but held her tongue.
I could tell she wanted to get something out but wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it tonight. I needed to avoid a fight at all costs. While I, personally, didn’t really fear what the future held, I couldn’t predict what would happen on a deployment, and couldn’t allow Heather’s last memory of me to be a fight. We both knew the job was dangerous. We never talked about it out loud, but the potential consequences were there all the time. Tonight it was worse, because I was leaving. It was like a heavy presence that surrounded everything in the room. I took a gamble, hoping whatever she wanted to tell me would be a simple thing that I could smooth over before I left.
“What? What were you going to say?”
“I’ve said it before.” She sighed, brushed a strand of hair out of her face, then let it out. “Why do you have to go? Why is it always you? You’ve been gone since 9/11. Isn’t it someone else’s turn?”
Shit. That gamble hadn’t paid off. “We’ve been over this. I can’t just up and leave. I’m the team leader. It takes time to train a replacement. This is my last tour. I promise.”
Task Force tours were a little different than anything I had done before. They were six months long, followed by three months of downtime, followed by a three-month ramp-up prior to deploying again. During the last month of the ramp-up, we deployed permanently to D.C. and dropped all contact with our past, so for the family it was more like a seven-month rotation. The final month was lockdown. It was when we were completely cleaned from our past and prepped to become whatever was called upon by the mission. Tonight was the last night before the lockdown in D.C., the last night before my final seven-month absence. I was stepping down after this tour, something I had promised Heather I would do.
She gave me a bitter look. “Yeah, just like your last rotation at the Unit. And then you go and volunteer for this new thing. What’ll it be next, Pike? At least when you were with the Unit I had other wives to talk to, people I could call who knew what I was going through. Now I don’t even have that. I have to run around telling everyone you’re some sort of communication technician in the Eighteenth Airborne Corps. Do you know how stupid that makes me sound? You’re never here, and when you are, you never put on a uniform. It’s ridiculous.”
“Honey—”
She continued, speaking so fast her sentences began to run together. “Angie’s learned how to swim and you’ve never been in a pool with her. The damn next-door neighbor’s teaching her to ride a bike. She’s going to be six in a month and you haven’t been to a single birthday she can remember.”
She stopped, clearly wishing she hadn’t said these things on the night before I deployed. She began to cry. “It’s not fair. Why is it always you? Tim left the Unit. Why can’t you do the same?”
Tim was a friend who had just retired from the military and started his own security consulting business. It would do me no good to tell her that Tim was still conducting dangerous work—maybe more so because he no longer had the backing of the U.S. government. I embraced her, whispering in her ear, “It’s not always me. There’re plenty of guys like me. I’ve told you I