A Soldier Comes Home. Cindi Myers

missing and what she hadn’t deemed worthy of taking. The air smelled of stale onions and cooking oil and pine cleanser. The kitchen looked all right. She’d left the coffeemaker, and the little table where they ate breakfast. The bigger table in the dining room was gone.

      The dresser was there, but she’d taken the bed. He was glad of that. He wouldn’t have to lie there now and wonder who else she’d shared that mattress with. Her clothes were gone from the closet and the dresser, though a single empty perfume bottle stood in the dust on top, as if she wanted to remind him of her. He lifted it to his nose and inhaled, and had an instant image of a laughing, dark-haired young woman looking over her shoulder at him.

      He set the bottle carefully back on the dresser and walked out of the room and down the hall to the last door.

      This room was unchanged. The Winnie the Pooh border she’d picked out still ringed the room. The single bed under the window filled most of the space. The rest was shared by a dresser and bookcase and plastic milk crates of toys. A fuzzy purple bear grinned at him from the bed. Looking at it made Ray’s chest hurt. He closed his eyes and tried to remember what his son, Thomas James Hughes, looked like, but he couldn’t.

      He’d know soon enough. She’d written that she’d left the boy with his parents in Omaha. He’d spoken to his mother only yesterday and she’d confirmed that T.J. was well, but “a handful. I love him dearly, but your father and I can’t wait for you to come and take him home with you,” his mother had said. “We are just not prepared at our age to raise a little one again. Besides, we’re supposed to leave on a cruise next week.”

      As if he was prepared. He hadn’t even seen the boy in over a year. Kids changed a lot at that age.

      Ray backed out of the room, then stood in the hallway, rubbing his jaw where his tooth throbbed. If he left tonight, he could be in Omaha by morning. He’d spend the night driving, instead of sitting in this house alone.

      He returned to the bedroom and retrieved a spare set of keys from their hiding place beneath his socks and headed for the attached garage. The familiar smells of motor oil and old tires greeted him as he stepped into the dimly lit sanctuary. He reached behind him to flip on the light and stared at…

      Nothing.

      His single curse was loud, echoing off the empty concrete. He closed his eyes, then opened them again, not believing what he was seeing.

      The bitch had taken his truck. The brand-new, cherryred Nissan Titan, purchased not eighteen months ago. He’d put the title in her name, thinking he was being smart, in case anything happened to him, and she’d promised to take care of it, to drive it once a week to keep the engine lubricated, even though she said she preferred her little Honda.

      She must have sold the Honda. Or maybe sold the truck.

      Feeling sick to his stomach and unable to look anymore, he went back into the house, slamming the door behind him.

      The refrigerator was empty, but he looked anyway, hoping for a beer. He needed a drink to dull the waves of anger and pain that kept on coming and wouldn’t stop. But he’d have to call a taxi and head into town to find a bar or a liquor store and he wasn’t up to that much interaction with other people yet.

      So he sat in the recliner, and stared at the spot where the TV had been. He cursed himself for being an idiot, and cursed the day he’d met the woman who had done this to him, and then cursed the woman herself. Tammy. The mother of his child. The thief who had stolen his truck. The wife who had left him.

      CHRISSIE ENDED UP going out after work with Rita—not to drink, but to dinner and a movie. They chose a comedy without a lot of plot, but enough laughs to take their minds off their troubles. She arrived home late and was surprised to see lights burning in the house next door.

      The house had been empty for over a month now, ever since Tammy Hughes had moved across town. Though Tammy had never come out and said so, Chrissie suspected her young neighbor had moved in with the skinny private who had been a frequent visitor to the little brick house in the months preceding Tammy’s departure.

      Chrissie collected her mail from the box at the end of the drive, then unlocked her front door and went inside, stopping to kick off her shoes in the entryway. Her cats, Rudy and Sapphire, greeted her with pitiful yowls, tails twitching.

      “Yes, I know, you’re so mistreated,” Chrissie said, bending to pet them, her mind still on the house next door. She hadn’t thought of Tammy in a while. After Tammy’s husband had shipped out to Iraq, Chrissie had tried to befriend the young woman, who had seemed so lost and alone. Despite the fact that she had a child—a little boy called T.J.—Tammy had seemed like a child herself. She thought nothing of wearing her pajamas and eating only cereal and ice cream for days at a time, letting T.J. do the same. When her Honda broke down, rather than have it fixed, she left it sitting at the curb and began driving the red truck her husband had left behind. When the city had finally towed the car—after leaving numerous citations, which Tammy ignored—she had been unconcerned. “I was tired of it anyway,” she’d said.

      Chrissie had gone out with Tammy a few times, giving in to the younger woman’s argument that they deserved to have a little fun. They had spent one memorable evening at a bar frequented by soldiers from nearby Fort Carson. While Chrissie politely fended off the overtures of earnest young men who reminded her of Matt, Tammy drank and danced and flirted and drank some more. Chrissie had ended up pouring her into a taxi and taking her home, and got stuck with the bill for both the taxi and the babysitter.

      Soon after that, the private showed up. Tammy would call Chrissie sometimes and ask her to babysit. “I have a class at the community college and my regular girl canceled,” she’d pleaded.

      Chrissie suspected the only thing Tammy was studying was the private, but she’d agreed to babysit, if only for the chance to spend an evening with T.J.

      The dark-haired toddler with the chocolate-brown eyes could melt Chrissie with a single gap-toothed smile. A happy child who loved to cuddle, T.J. had won Chrissie’s heart the first time they’d met, when he’d taken her hand and earnestly introduced her to a purple stuffed bear. “This is Mr. Pringles,” he’d said. “My daddy gave him to me.”

      Chrissie had never met T.J.’s father. Captain Hughes. Tammy never talked about him, except once, when Chrissie had tried to broach the subject of Tammy’s frequent nights out on the town. “I’m too lonely at the house all by myself,” she said, flipping her long brown hair over her shoulder, her mouth shaped into a pretty pout. “If my husband expects me to sit there all by myself until he comes home, he’s crazy.”

      You won’t know lonely until they tell you your husband is never coming home again, Chrissie thought, but she said nothing. After that, she stopped trying to give advice to Tammy. But she would babysit whenever she was asked, and spend hours rocking with T.J., reading to him and singing him songs. In those few hours, at least, she was able to fill the hole inside her where a husband and child belonged.

      She carried the mail into the kitchen, the cats following, weaving figure eights around her feet. She put the kettle on for a pot of tea, and opened a can of seafood delight for the kitties. From her kitchen window she could see the kitchen in Tammy’s house. The light was on, but the room was empty. Had Tammy split with her private and decided to come home?

      Or had Captain Hughes returned to his empty house?

      Her throat tightened at the thought. Had Tammy’s husband been part of the unit that had arrived home today? How must it have been for him, standing in the crowd of joyous families, with no one to welcome him home?

      The thought of that man—any man—sitting alone in that empty house after a year away brought tears to her eyes. She blinked them back and did the only thing she could think of to do. She took a bottle of wine from the rack on the counter, and assembled a plate of sandwich fixings from the refrigerator. Then she put on her coat and started next door.

      She made it as far as her front porch before she turned around and went back into the house, to comb her hair and touch up her makeup. Not because