Kaci curled up in the plush round chairbeneath a hanging sweet potato plant. “If you’d known what was gonna happen to Daddy, would you have still married him?”
One of Momma’s perfectly plucked eyebrows went up.“Age is no excuse to lower your beauty standards,”she’d said on more occasions than Kaci cared to count. “Are you reconsidering your separation from Colonel Kelly?”
Kaci hugged a mauve throw pillow. “No.”
Momma pulled off her glasses and swiveled soundlessly to face Kaci in the corner. “Had we known what your father’s fate would be, it’s far more likely he would’ve leftmeto save me from the grief.”
“Would you have let him?”
“Of course not.”
Kaci found a smile.
“I take it you’ve been dating again.”
“If that’s what kids these days are calling it.”
Momma’s cheek twitched.
“We’re over,” Kaci added softly. “I was just wishing one of us could’ve been a little different.”
“You wouldn’t like him if he were different, and if the man has any sense at all, he wouldn’t like you if you were different either.”
Some days, every once in a while, Momma was Kaci’s favorite person.
But then there were moments like this when her brilliance was as irritating as a mosquito bite in a place she couldn’t reach.
Because she was right.
Lance probably wouldn’t like her if she were different. If she changed her mind about what she wanted out of her career, he wouldn’t respect her as much.
And then where would she be?
“I think I’m better off single,” Kaci said.
“All the best of us are.”
Lance was backin his bunk, staring at his two-word reply from Kaci, when Pony came in with a stack of boxes. “Mail call. We got presents.”
Mail. One of the highlights of deploying.
“Shit, Thumper. Ain’t that your ex-fiancée?”
He took the shoebox-size package Pony thrust at him and glanced at the return label. “Huh.”
He hadn’t heard from her since September. But that was her name and address in the return sender field.
And sending a deployment care package was exactly the sort of thing Allison would do. Because it was the patriotic thing to do.
Doing it for him was a little weird, but the weirder part was that he didn’t feel anything seeing her name on the box.
No anger. No regret. No excitement.
Now, if Kaci had sent a care package?—
He tossed aside the box from Allison andexamined the other three boxes Pony had piled at his feet. One from his parents, one from Cheri—the dork, she was deployed too—and one from Flincher and his family.
None from Kaci.
