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Leaving North Carolina was even more difficult than Derek or Anne ever anticipated.
Derek planned on staying with his brother and sister-in-law until he left for Navy Boot Camp. With the exception of a planned trip to visit Anne before he left for training, they would be separated until after he graduated from his various camps and schools.
“Okay,” Anne sighed one afternoon as he explained what would be happening in greater detail than before. “So, after basic training...”
“Boot camp,” he interrupted.
“Is there a difference?”
“Yes,” was all that he said. “And Navy Boot Camp takes place in Great Lakes, Illinois.”
“Right. It’ll be cold.”
“And I’ll be there for nine weeks.”
“Nine?”
“One week for processing and eight for training.”
Nodding her head, Anne continued, showing that she mostly understood his explanations. “After that, you go to an additional training school.”
“Right.” Again, he didn’t bother going into more detail. Anne didn’t realize that it was difficult for him to think about life apart from her, even though they had only spent every day of almost two months together.
“Which is, at the minimum, ten weeks.”
“Correct,” Derek replied, leaning his head against hers.
“So, that’s nineteen weeks apart.”
“With only e-mail, letters, and the occasional phone call,” he whispered.
“That’s almost five months.”
“I know.”
Turning around in his arms, Anne looked up at Derek. “We can do it. That’s only half of my school year. We can do this.”
“There is a lot of things that we can’t guarantee,” Derek tried to explain to her. “I don’t know what will happen after Boot Camp and ‘A’ school. I don’t know when or where I’ll end up on a base or a ship or anything.”
“It’ll be fine,” Anne repeated. She felt as if somebody had to be the reassuring person in their relationship.
“We don’t know that,” he whispered.
“Have a little faith,” Anne scolded him. “We have e-mail and letters and the occasional phone call. You can come by for Christmas...”
“I’ll see if Ed and Ava are visiting her parents this year. They live near you and they don’t mind if I tag along.
“Okay then,” she gave him a look at his interruption. “And there is still your leave between A-School and your first placement.”
“There is that,” he agreed, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek. “I just wish I could be there for your things like prom and graduation and everything else.”
“I do too,” she sighed. “But this is only part of our lives. If we can make it through this, then we can make it through anything,” Anne reassured him. “Have some faith in us.”
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Anne closed her eyes as she returned home. The first thing she noticed was the silence. It was completely different than the silence she felt when she was with Derek and they sat together in comfortable silence.
There was no screaming across the hallways between Mary and Beth.
“Hello?” she called out into the empty entryway.
“Anne?” Mary’s voice called out from the dining room. “Hurry up and help me split up the school supplies!”
“School supplies?” Anne asked, mostly to herself, as she dropped her suitcase on the floor.
“School supplies?” she asked again, this time to her sister.
“Mom took me shopping!” Mary bounced up and down on the balls of her feet. “She made certain I grabbed enough for you. It’s just the stuff like pens and pencils and paper and highlighters and...” Mary rambled. “You know, the basics.”
“Then why haven’t you already divided them up?” Beth’s voice sounded from the kitchen where she was consuming a bowl of cereal.
“Because Anne might want something like all blue highlighters.”
“But you need a set of all colors,” Beth replied, her eye roll evident in the tone of her response even if nobody could see it.
“Anne?”
“She’s right,” Anne whispered back, not wanting Beth to hear her agreement. In a more normal voice, she added, “Just divide the paper and notebooks up evenly.”
“But the colors,” Mary pointed out, waving her hand over at the stack of twelve notebooks that her mother had stocked them up on.
“Just give me one of each color so I can color code my classes,” Anne started to say before Beth interrupted her with a snide, “I told you Anne would want to color code her classes.”
Shaking her head, Anne closed her eyes for a moment before adding, “And we’ll stash the spares somewhere for when we need them.”
“And the pencils?”
Looking down, she noticed that there were two mechanical pencils of different colors. “I’ll take the blue one,” she answered. She didn’t say that the color reminded her of Derek’s eyes.
“Told you she’d take a blue one,” Mary smugly grinned in Beth’s direction.
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Derek, unfortunately, didn’t have the luck that Anne had. His father had summoned Derek home for training before Boot Camp. He found himself running five to ten miles a day depending on Mr. Worth’s schedule and the weather. Mostly Mr. Worth’s schedule. As much as he wanted to complain, he knew his father’s plan was for his own benefit.
