October 2007. Let’s see if you’ve really got my six, if I can finally let my guard down. Let’s see if you can be trusted.
DONNA HOOKER’S FAMILY is moving to Australia next week! Shit! The JEANNIE ball is buried in my closet. When we moved to the new house, I had to be sneaky to move it without Jack seeing and questioning. The Hooker family lives off post in Sackets Harbor, thirty minutes from me.
Ben, my battle buddy with the empathetic brown eyes, and I are getting along and figuring out our dance. For my kids, adjusting to deployment is a seamless and familiar transition. The real breaking-in period is for the new rear command team of Captain Ben Black and me. Still learning each other’s facial expressions and voice intonations. Trying to establish where we fall with each other and who is in charge. A delicate dynamic; Jack is his boss, but what is Ben to me? I assign the REM song “The End of the World as We Know It” as his ringtone. Ben teases me and says that he can hear the theme song of Desperate Housewives play in his head as he rounds the cul-de-sac to my house, and he revels in using my term perfumed turds. I appreciate that he drops the formalities. There’s nothing worse than being ma’am’d in the middle of a crisis. He confides to me that the wives are afraid of me, the first time anyone has been so honest with me. Maybe Jack has said something similar over the years, but statements from spouses are somehow easily dismissed.
Ben can do a spot-on impression of Jack, and I admire his gutsiness for having a feel for me so early on—a sense that I will appreciate his impression without even being remotely offended. The other members of the rear detachment crew, men who look at me out of the corner of their eyes—and I see this as a test of my solidarity with them—encourage and even goad Ben into doing it for me. They gather around in anticipation of the shenanigans, and I can tell by their expressions that this impression has been done often, and highly perfected. Ben leaves the room, throws open the door, and strides past us with speed and impatience, never looking up from his BlackBerry. “What up!” I hear as he passes me. I almost pee my pants. Someone else who gets my husband the way I do. Yes, I made the right choice in this guy.
A test of solidarity presents itself in that bowling ball. He lives within spitting distance of the Hookers.
I take the ball to Ben and lay out his mission. The ball needs to be waiting for Donna in the morning when she opens the door. He gets it. Ben delivers the ball.
From that day forward, I never question his loyalty. He is stuck with me; he can’t divorce me or run from me. I and the other wives are his mission. A year from that fall, he will again stand next to me, squeeze my arm, and say the words, “I’ve got your back. My loyalty is with you.”