Page 42 of Never Fall Again

If he wasn’t mistaken, the hostility was leaving her as she listened to his story. He hoped it would stay away when he was done. “I went to college, got my degree, and finished a deployment. But I still hadn’t met the girl for me. I was stationed in the eastern part of North Carolina and that’s when I met Gina.”

“I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t. We met at church.”

“Uh-oh.” Landry didn’t sound like she was being sarcastic.

“What?”

“Mean church people are the worst kind of mean people.” Her mouth had a hard edge to it.

If she was still speaking to him when this story was over, he’d have to find out what that was about. “I’d seen her with her kids. Two boys. No wedding ring. Didn’t take long before I found out her husband had cheated on her and left her with a six-month-old and a two-year-old. She was from a town about two hours away, but she’d stayed because her job was there. She loved the church. Had lots of friends. I got to know her a little and asked her out. She told me that the only way she’d go out with me was if I agreed to stay away from her kids. That they were too young to understand if things didn’t work out.”

“Seems fair.” Landry’s mama-bear side was coming out, and Cal didn’t mind that one bit.

“I had no problem with it. We dated for six months before she invited me to her house for dinner. The boys...” Cal swallowed. “The boys were three and five. Sebastian was potty training. Spencer was in kindergarten. They didn’t have a shy bone in their little bodies. Gina went to the kitchen to get me a Coke, and I was on the floor playing with them.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. You’re a kid magnet.” Landry spoke softly. “But Cal, I think I can see where this is going. You don’t need to say anymore. I...I shouldn’t have insisted on an explanation. This is obviously something very personal, and—”

“No. It’s okay. It’s not something I go around talking about, but it isn’t a secret either. And I think it’s fair that you should hear it from me and not from my aunts’ blabbing when they don’t know the full story.”

He led her to a small bench that Papa had put by the river so Granny could “watch the Lord put the day to bed,” as she liked to put it. They sat, and he leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Over the next few months, our lives became more entwined. We started going out with the boys. I was on duty every other weekend, but when I was around, we were together.”

“I feel like there’s a huge disaster coming.” Landry leaned forward and mimicked his posture.

“We’d been together over a year when I was deployed. The deployment wasn’t a complete shock. I knew it was coming, but I thought I had a few more months. I only had three days to get everything sorted. When I left, I fully expected to come home to her, the boys, and restart our life.”

Maisy came trotting down the path and joined them. How she knew to find him the way she did was a mystery, but he wasn’t complaining. She sat between his leg and Landry’s and rested her head on his knee.

“Every deployment is different. Sometimes you can call home, email, FaceTime. Sometimes you can’t. In my case, I only had a small window about once every three weeks when I could touch base. The first time I called, it had been a month since I’d seen her and the boys. I was so excited to talk to them.”

“She didn’t answer?” Landry’s voice held a potent combination of trepidation and indignation.

“Nope. I tried every number I had for her. No luck. I told myself that it happens. Time zones, schedules, the erratic nature of the communication. I was devastated, but I was more worried about how she would feel when she realized she’d missed my call.” He tried, but he knew he hadn’t kept the bitterness out of his voice.

“The next time I called, the same thing happened. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, and I was starting to panic. What if something had happened to them? What if someone was sick? I ran into a buddy whose wife knew Gina and asked him to mention it when he talked to her. Three days later, he hunted me down. Told me he’d talked to his wife and that she’d led with news about Gina.”

Remembering that day, he could taste the dust on the wind and feel the sand on his skin. “Gina had left town. Taken the boys. Moved back to her hometown.”

“She left while you were deployed?” Landry shifted so her body now faced his. “That’s so wrong.”

“I can’t disagree with you there. The next week, I got a package. She’d written a note telling me she was sorry. That on those weekends when I was on duty, she’d taken the kids back to her parents to visit and reconnected with a high school boyfriend. He’d convinced her that the easiest way to handle it would be to wait until I left for the deployment and then move while I was gone. It would be, and I quote, ‘less messy.’”

Landry snorted. “As in he was less likely to get his face rearranged by his girlfriend’s Marine boyfriend.”

Cal hadn’t expected to laugh during this tale, but he did. “Something like that.”

He wasn’t sure how to end this part of the story. Up to this point, it had been mostly telling her the facts. Now he’d have to tell her how he responded.

And how he fell apart.

Landry wanted to find this Gina woman and punch her in the nose. What an idiot. She had a man like Cal, and she walked away? “I’m almost afraid to ask, but the high school boyfriend? Was he rich?”

“How’d you guess?” Cal rubbed his hand over Maisy’s head. “He wasn’t millionaire wealthy, but he could give her a very comfortable life. He was a pretty-boy type. I showed Meredith a picture, and she said he was good-looking. It’s not like she left me for a fat slob who spends his days watching TV and his nights in a bar.”

“That’s not much consolation.”

“No. It wasn’t. I did my job and kept my head down, but I was a wreck. I was grieving my relationship. And I lost a few friends while we were deployed. But I got out alive. Came home.”