Page 70 of Guarded Secrets
“We got married at a courthouse, and a week later I’m in boot camp at MCRD, San Diego.” His gaze followed the flight of a crow skimming the treetops.
“Gloria was working as a receptionist for an insurance company and living with her parents. I didn’t see her until Family Day, which is the day before graduation from boot camp. She already had a baby bump and had ultrasound pictures of him. That made the baby more real.”
He caught Keeley’s gaze with his own. “The idea of being a dad scared the crap out of me, but I was excited too. I’d get to be the kind of dad I’d never had.”
He studied her. “You were pregnant once.”
She nodded. “Yeah. I was scared and excited too. But I’d had a better role model with my mom.” She brought the blanket around her shoulders. “What happened after boot camp?”
“I reported to Camp Pendleton. Gloria hated base housing. Complained our place was too small. She said I wasn’t spending enough time with her, and living on base was too far from Fullerton for her to visit her friends and family as often as she wanted.”
He paused. “I was committed to the military and working my ass off. Any time I had free I tried to do what she wanted. I painted a room for the nursery and tried to make sure she’d have everything she needed for the baby before I deployed because I knew that was coming. She still wasn’t happy.”
“She sounds young.”
“Actually, she was a few months older than me, but it doesn’t matter. We were both young.”
He shrugged. “The thing was, I felt like I was growing up. I’d accepted my responsibilities, I was being trained for military service, I was providing for my wife. But she still wanted to do what she’d always done.
“She’d go home for long weekends. Then I found out she was partying. She said she wasn’t drinking, but I don’t know what she was doing.
“One weekend I thought I’d surprise her and showed up at her parents’ house. She was at a party. I tracked her down and found her making out with some asshole. She was seven months pregnant and letting a guy put his hands up her skirt at a party. I lost my shit and beat the guy bloody.”
Talking about it brought the memories flooding back, but something about Keeley’s quiet, unwavering presence allowed him to keep the emotions in check.
She paid attention, he’d give her that. She watched him with those gray-green eyes, hanging on his every word. But he hated showing her what a failure he’d been.
“Thing was, I wasn’t giving Gloria what she needed most. She was lonely and felt like she was stuck in our apartment on base with nothing to do. She said I didn’t understand her, that I didn’t even try to understand her. Then I got my mobilization orders. The baby was due in a couple months, and I was being sent to Afghanistan.”
“You felt like you were abandoning her.”
“Yeah. I did. But I got on that plane and flew to the other side of the world. Seven weeks later I got a text and a bunch of pictures of Gloria holding this tiny baby boy. She’d had her mom with her.”
“Oh my gosh.” Keeley was so open her emotions were written all over her face. “You were a daddy. That must’ve been so hard to be away from your family. Hard on Gloria, but hard on you too. That’s an awful sacrifice we ask of our soldiers and their families.” She reached out and took his hand, her palm pressing to his. “What did you name him?”
“She’d wanted to name him after her dad, so he was John Robert Hardesty. She called him Robby since her dad went by John.
“We’d talk on the phone when we could, but it felt like she was always mad about something. She was exhausted and had to figureout the parenting thing by herself. She was upset because she was struggling to lose the weight she’d gained.
“There wasn’t a fucking thing I could do for her except listen and send home a paycheck. When my deployment was over, I went back home and tried to be the husband she needed, and the father my kid needed.”
“It must’ve been a shock to go from a war environment to home.”
He gave a humorless laugh. “The first week back I was so fucking overwhelmed. When you’re deployed, you don’t have to think about what you should be doing, because you have a mission, you have orders, and your job is to execute them.
“Stateside, I was figuring it out as I went along and not doing a very good job of it.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Most important thing for me? I wanted to get to know my son. The kid was amazing. He was doing this army crawl thing using his elbows to scoot himself across the floor. He was the cutest damned thing with the bluest eyes.”
He shouldn’t have been surprised when he saw the sheen of tears in Keeley’s eyes.
“Oh, that’s sweet,” she whispered.
He gave a grunt of agreement. “Gloria was trying, I could tell she was. She didn’t like how much I had to work, but I tried to make it up to her.
“Then I’d get time off and it was like she was punishing me because she’d go visit her family and leave me with Robby. I didn’t really mind, though. I had him all to myself, and if she was gone, we weren’t fighting.”
He rubbed a hand over his beard. “Turns out that wasn’t a good solution because she was seeing someone else. I didn’t find out until later. I was sent back to Afghanistan a day after Robby’s first birthday.
“I got back to the barracks one night and my lieutenant was there with a major. They told me there’d been an accident.” His voice went flat. “Gloria, Robby, and this guy she’d hooked up with were ina car accident. Some asshole kid street racing hit them. Fucker was going over a hundred miles an hour and he tore the car in half.” He gazed into the distance. “There were no survivors.”
