Chapter 6

Melissa's Diary:

I was happy for Ron. After seeing him so miserable for so long, it was good that he'd found someone he could be happy with and who seemed to have his best interests at heart. They made a beautiful couple on the three occasions Cal and I saw them about town and especially on the dance floor at Fischer's. Ron, I could tell, had taken some dancing lessons. I don't know where he found the time, but their effect was more than evident. He and Karen would glide around the ballroom floor almost effortlessly, their arms wrapped around each other and their attention focused completely on each other.

It was clear they were in love and I had mixed feelings about that. I'd been Sherrie's best friend since high school and Ron was a comparatively recent addition to my list of close friends. But he was so happy... and I couldn't blame him one bit.

Karen was so beautiful and Ron was a much better looking man than he knew. I knew more than a few women in the club who would have left their dates, and some their husbands, in a heartbeat if Ron had crooked his finger and beckoned them to come to him. But he'd never do that. I knew my Ronnie. It's enough to say that the two of them just seemed to fit perfectly together.

Now that he's moved to Denver, Ron emails me once a week or so, always full of cheerfulness and inquiries about the new baby and everything. I never told Ron I was sure Cal had gotten me pregnant the night both Karen and I took off our panties in Fischer's ladies room, but I think he knows. I did tell him about the panty thing in Fischer's... and that was probably enough. Ron's a smart guy and reads between the lines pretty well.

When Calvin Junior was born six months after Ron left, I'm not sure he realized the "R" that was Cal's middle initial was for "Ronald." That was just like him. That Cal senior and I had given our baby his middle name in recognition of Ron's friendship would never occur to our good friend.

Anyway, after her divorce, things were really rough for Sherrie and that went on for a long while. She had to quit her job because the word got around the office about her and Ron's divorce and what caused it. Every unattached male, and many who weren't, thought what he had between his legs was just the thing to make her happy again. Even though she cut everyone off cold, and embarrassed a number of them in the process, they wouldn't quit trying.

Her new job was at lower pay and she found it hard for a time to pay all the bills. She finally found the big two-bedroom apartment she wanted, but it cost more than she really had to spare, and she had to buy a lot of new clothes too. When the sale of the house she and Ron had lived in finally closed, things got better but she was soon buying food, clothes, and what all for those two other people who came into her life and... well, I don't really want to get into that. I didn't understand what she was doing for the longest time, and I still don't agree with her reasoning. I mean, those two "roommates," as she called them, weren't going to intimidate my--. Shoot! I said I wasn't going to get into that mess, didn't I? Enough said.

It took 'til almost a year after their divorce for me to get comfortable with Sherrie again. She called me every week during that time and never got off the phone without apologizing to me and Cal for that Vegas nightmare. She was sorry... but sorry don't cut it sometimes, you know?

Well... that's what I figured, but after a while it was clear the girl was absolutely overwhelmed, totally ashamed of what she'd done with that man in Vegas and more ashamed of seeing him after she came home. Separate from that, she was also devastated that she had hurt her husband so badly. She couldn't talk to me for even a minute without breaking down and crying when she tried to say how bad she felt about betraying his trust and love.

She'd felt guilty at the time, she said, but she got messed up in a feeling of dirty excitement. She said it had given her a fluttery feeling in her belly like when she used to sneak out of her mom and dad's house to meet with her first serious boyfriend. She said doing that guy from Vegas made her feel young and alive again, vibrant and a good kind of nasty. I didn't understand any of it, and the part about feeling young again didn't sit well at all. I turned thirty year before last, and Sherrie was just twenty-nine now. I wasn't sure I bought a single word she said about a need to feel young "again," the little twit.

Hey, guess what? I didn't know this until Sherrie and I resumed visiting each other on Saturday mornings again for coffee and a little gossip. That was a long time coming, let me tell you! I was some kind of unhappy with that girl for the longest time.

Anyhow... she told me one morning that she'd actually been at Fischer's one night, all by herself... and she'd seen Ron there with Karen. She said it had been just before he moved to Denver. She'd gone just to have a decent dinner she didn't have to cook but she wound up watching them dance while she tried to eat a cold steak.

Sherrie said what she had done to Ron really came home to her finally. She said she'd hadn't understood--not way down deep where she lived--exactly what Ron had gone through... what he'd felt. That changed when she saw him with "that woman," as she put it. Seeing that Ron cared for Karen really hurt. It was like someone had driven a stake right through her belly, she said. She actually felt a physical pain, according to her.

I told her Ron had every right--I was a little snippy about it, I'm sure. I said he had a perfect right to be seeing Karen and Sherrie said she knew that, and she'd known it at the time. They'd already been divorced a month and more at the time, but it still hurt her worse than anything she'd ever known.

She was only telling me so I'd know she finally realized how shitty she had treated the man she loved and who had loved her. I told her it was about time and Sherrie didn't even get mad at me. Actually, she was real bitter--mad at herself. She wanted to punish herself but didn't know how. She had too many responsibilities.

Well, Sherrie and I got through that phase and we've gotten closer. I suggested she get a little counseling or talk to a minister or something. When she got back on her feet financially, she did go see a guy who did marriage counseling and she got better. She never got comfortable with what she'd done, but she came to accept the things she'd done without them dominating her whole life. If she'd let it, I'm not too sure she wouldn't have wound up in a mental hospital or something. She felt that bad about it.

She comes over all the time now and we talk about anything under the sun, just like we used to. My boys think their "Aunt Sherrie" hung the moon and stars and they run to greet her whenever she comes around. She hugs them tight and gives them tickles and kisses until they laugh and laugh and laugh.

Cal took longer to warm back up to Sherrie. For the longest time, he would quietly be somewhere else whenever she came over. Between what I was telling him from my talks with Sherrie, and the things that he saw firsthand, he slowly thawed. Sherrie used to bring her two roommates over to visit every so often and Cal took to them right off. After a while, the house seemed a little empty when the three of them weren't there.

I'm going to fix that though. Cal and I are going out to dinner at Fischer's tonight and I'm not even going to wear a pair of panties out there to begin with. We're going to work on having a houseful of people ALL the time, even if I have to change diapers on a bunch of them. I want a girl this time.

The first three years in Denver were busy, exciting, and jam packed. I was working hard and spending long hours in the office. It was the same old story. When the big bosses find out you can handle responsibility, they give you more pressure and additional responsibilities just to see if they can find your breaking point. They hadn't found mine... yet. But they were surely getting close.

Karen and I didn't seem to cool off at all and I was thinking of giving her a ring and asking her to marry me. She never brought the subject up though, and I sometimes wondered why.

Then the shit hit the fan in Afghanistan. Our firm had secured a number of sub-contracts from one of the major Defense Department contractors to rebuild the infrastructure in that poor country. In one of them, we were acting as a service corporation, gathering the resources and sub-letting our own contracts to smaller firms to perform a myriad of tasks, very much like Halliburton does in Iraq. We just do it on a much smaller scale.

Anyway, we were overseeing a contract to build a major highway north from Kabul through Feyzabad and up to the border with Tadzikistan. The road was going to be used primarily for military purposes for a long time, but the newly free elected government of Afghanistan hoped someday it would promote trade in the northern intermountain region between the two countries.

It was dangerous because the shredded remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists who'd gotten their asses kicked by a U.S. supported group of Afghani warlords weren't THAT far away in the steep mountains on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. They came back across the border from time to time, slipping through an increasingly tight ring of Pakistani, Afghani, and U.S. soldiers, to wreck whatever they could and run hard back to their sanctuaries. It didn't happen often. It was, more often than not, a one-way mission and the number of willing suicides had been steadily decreasing for years.

At the end of November, one such group managed to sneak into the country and had blown up a key bridge over an impassible gorge and shut down the road between our crew at the head of the new road and the supply depots in the rear. At the same time, they'd gone through a number of the small towns and villages for fifty miles around the bridge, destroying such things as schools built to educate both girls and boys, community centers, a few fledgling radio stations and one television relay site.

The contractor personnel on the ground had called back for help and our firm had had to let a contract to another small business so our main contract could get finished on time. It was important for our future as a corporation. Seventy-two hours later, young Mr. Ron Masters was in the air heading for Kabul to supervise the combined effort of two dissimilar groups of workers now working on the same project. Both companies had agreed to that. In fact, they'd been relieved they wouldn't have to work out a pecking order and try to find for themselves an equitable division of the labor.

Before I left, I had to have a talk with Karen. I'd be gone a long time and some things between us needed to be resolved. I needed to know if there was an "us" and, if so, what were we going to do about it?

"Honey, have you ever thought about getting married?" I asked. I was watching her prepare a tossed salad in her apartment the day before I had to leave. The knife she was using kicked against the side of the sink and made a harsh, clattering sound as it rattled around in the bottom. She turned around to stare at me with her eyes wide. She was clutching her hands against her stomach and I was afraid she'd cut herself. I got up and stepped quickly across the kitchen. Taking her by the wrist, I turned her hand over and examined it carefully but I didn't find even a slight nick.

"Sorry," I said, "I thought you might have cut something."

"I nearly did!" she remarked. Some color was coming back into her face and I sat back on the stool at the breakfast bar.

"Well, have you?" I asked. She leaned back against the counter and looked at me wonderingly.

"Have you?" she answered, except that it wasn't really an answer. I nodded anyway.

"Yeah, I have," I said. "But I don't know how you feel about it. Sometimes I think you prefer what we have now... the independence and stuff, you know?"

"What else?" she demanded.

"Well, there are those times that I wonder if the way we live now doesn't suit you best. We see each other for a few days each month and we have an incredible time, but you live here in Sacramento and I live in Denver. I wonder if it's not one of those 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' kind of things. Getting married would be a heck of a step and I wonder if you would want me around... underfoot all the time, as it were." I'd rehearsed almost all these words. I truly had been thinking about our situation for a long while.

I think I surprised Karen. We'd become comfortable with each other and hadn't found any reason for disagreement in a while now.

"No," she said. "It's not that at all, hon." She hesitated, came to me and wound her arms around my neck. She kissed me long and hard.

"Ronnie," she said slowly, when we came up for air, "the reason I haven't brought this up is a little different from what you think." She took a deep breath, not backing away an inch. Her arms were still wrapped around my neck a little more loosely than before.

"I love you, Ron, that's no secret, and I know you love me, too," she said softly. "The only thing wrong is that you hold back something of yourself from me and I don't think you even know you're doing it. If it weren't for that, darling, I'd quit my job in a heartbeat and come to live with you for the rest of my life."

I was astonished. What was it I was holding back from her?

We talked for hours. I couldn't get my mind around what she believed I was holding back. It had something to do with a belief that I hadn't yet closed the book on Sherrie--that I still loved Sherrie and hadn't worked her out of my system.

I thought that, if anything, I might still be harboring a lot of pent up anger and hostility towards Sherrie. To me that sounded more like what I was feeling than anything else. I got a little impatient with Karen. I didn't believe there were any good feelings left for my ex-wife and I told Karen so. She was adamant though, and wouldn't budge on the idea.

We ended the discussion after dinner, refusing to let it devolve into a full-blown argument. Neither of us wanted to do that with only twenty-four hours before I left for Afghanistan. Life was too short.

Later that night, we made love in her bed and bathroom, and back again--twice. We finally lay exhausted in each other's arms.

"Ronnie," she said just before we both fell asleep, "let's both of us think hard about our future while you're gone, okay? When you come back, we'll go away somewhere... by ourselves for a long time... and we'll work it out, okay, darling?"

"Okay, it's a date," I said softly. She didn't say anything more. After a while, she turned away from me and backed up until we were spooning. My arms were wrapped close around her. We slept hard, woke up early and made love again... and then I had to go.

When I got back to Denver, I had about six hours before the flight to JFK Airport in New York. From there, I'd take a series of flights heading east to Europe and on to the Asian continent, gradually working my way to Kabul. There weren't that many airlines flying into that war torn country and the corporation had a policy of requiring its employees to use American flag air carriers whenever possible. It made the routing a little more difficult and more circuitous than it otherwise would have been.

After doing a load of clothes and packing everything I could imagine needing in Afghanistan, I still had two hours left with not much to do before going to the airport. Mulling over the near argument with Karen, I hunted through the back of my closet until I found the box containing all the papers, court motions, and other material left over from my divorce. In the bottom, hidden by a mass of paperwork, was the packet of photographs I had snapped of my wife and that other man.

Beside them was the small ring box that held Sherrie's engagement and wedding rings. She'd sent her rings back to me through her attorney the day after our divorce had become final. I'd figured they were her property. After all, I'd given them to her; I didn't loan them to her, but I guess returning them to me was her way of getting some finality to the marriage.

I looked at the photographs one by one, finding them to be distasteful but I couldn't summon up any deep resentment or anger any more. It was like the pictures were of two strangers instead of one stranger and one loved one. As such, they were just examples of low-grade pornography.

It occurred to me I didn't want these left behind just in case I died over in Afghanistan and someone had to go through my personal things. Impulsively, I pushed everything else back into the box and closed it, leaving out the pics. I put the photos through my shredder. In a few moments, they were unintelligible bits of glossy, colorful paper and I thought no more about them.

Afghanistan in late winter is abominable. It's always bitterly cold... or snowy... or windy. Actually, it was usually all three at once. It was seldom that all three of the weather patterns ease up and give us a nice day. On top of that, this north, northeastern sector of the country was incredibly barren and bleak to my eyes. I had no clue why anyone would want to live here, but Afghanistan is one of the longest inhabited countries on the face of the planet. I could only shake my head.

The days were long, the work hard and dangerous even without the threat of Al Qaeda or Taliban terrorist attacks. Working with heavy equipment is dangerous in its own right, but we built a pretty good safety program and rigorously enforced the rules.

For defense against the bad guys, we had a platoon of Marines under the command of a young Lieutenant to defend us but they couldn't be everywhere. I didn't like the naked feeling of being unable to protect myself and my crew. After I'd been there a month, I coaxed the senior sergeant in the platoon into giving me an M-4, the carbine version of the M-16. Its real owner had gone back home on emergency leave and hadn't come back. It was still on the Marine company books; it was just that I was taking care of it for them.

I felt a lot better with it around. I was a passable shot with it; I always had had a knack with weapons. With my Remington Model 700 at home, I could knock down a deer at 200 yards and more every time I fired it. Well, anyway, the M-4 felt comfortable in my hands.

By the third month of my stay, we had the bridge virtually rebuilt. New foundations were poured where they needed to be and replacements filled in the places where the blast had blown girders away. At the same time, we'd worked out a resupply plan for the crew still building the road north, using helicopters to ferry in supplies and materials needed urgently. For other equipment, supplies, and vehicles, we bulldozed a dirt road around the gorge and through empty terrain. It worked, after a fashion. We could get to the head of the road, but it took a lot of time and the crew up there had to make supply requests a long way in advance.

Actually, things were improving every day. The contract looked secure--the road would be finished on or before schedule, and the Department of the Army had even awarded us another small contract that looked very lucrative. We were working hard, but there wasn't much else to do in the empty wasteland so we routinely worked fourteen hours a day, or more, just to have something to do.

Melissa's Diary:

When we heard Ron was going to Afghanistan, I almost died. Ron was as close to me as a brother and I was worried sick about him. When I told Sherrie, her face turned white as a sheet. She nearly collapsed. It surprised me a little; she and Ron have been divorced right at three years now and had lived apart for even longer, what with the separation after he left her and all.

It's been so long since I had a minute free to add anything to this diary. If I repeat some things, I guess I'll just have to delete them when I look at this thing when I'm old and gray, huh?

Well, let's see... where was I? Okay... a while back, I had to try and get Sherrie to lighten up on herself again. For the longest time, she went back to beating herself up pretty bad about having caused so much grief and it was hurting her health. She went through a second round of counseling and it finally began kicking in. She got over the worst of her depression as she and the counselor explored what she did and what she could do to make things better. She's done pretty well ever since.

When I told her about Ron's trip overseas though, it threw her for a loop. It wasn't until we started getting regular emails from him that she settled down again. The emails were widely spaced because they didn't have real good communications over there but they came through often enough to keep us from being worried too much.

He said it was hard work and stuff like that, but also pretty boring. There wasn't much to do except work. On the other hand, he said that he'd worked off the "love handles" he'd been getting worried about and he was probably in the best physical condition of his life. A photo he attached to one of his emails showed us he was right. Sherrie made me blow it up to an 8 X 10 and print it for her. She also kept a couple of 5 X 7 prints.

It was about that time that I noticed Sherrie wasn't dating--not at all. When I asked around, I felt like a fool. She hadn't dated since she and Ron broke up... and I never noticed. Isn't that terrible? My best friend and I didn't know.

Well, anyway, Cal and I started taking her out every so often with us to dinner and stuff like that, and sometimes to Fischer's for some dancing. Sherrie would dance fast dances with some of the guys, but she was awfully picky. Most of the men got turned down flat and some went away red-faced from whatever she said if they persisted. My Cal says Sherrie has a "real good" command of the English language when she wants to use it. He said it like he admired her for it. I guess that tells me what kind of language she commanded, huh? Well, I figured out Sherrie would only dance slow dances with Cal and a few older married men she'd found she could trust. On top of that, she wouldn't have anything but a little white wine when she went with us and only a couple of glasses lasted the whole night.

It didn't take a genius to see that she was "saving herself" for something and one day, I got her to talking about it. It took isolating her in my backyard back under the pecan tree and making her real comfortable with a lot of good food and a couple of hours talking about nothing in particular. Finally, she let down her hair a little and said she had this feeling that Ron was going to come back to town someday.

When he did, she said, he was going to see she wasn't fooling around with anyone and maybe he would forgive her for what she did. If it took the rest of her life, she said, she'd wait for him to see how she'd changed and then she'd deal with whatever came next.

She didn't really have more than a slim hope they'd get back together, she said. In fact, she assumed they would not. It was like this whole thing was some kind of penance and she was just serving time until Ron released her from it by coming home and agreed she had changed.

Sherrie didn't know when he would come back, she just figured he would. I told her I could think of a couple of sure-fire ways to get him to come home. She wouldn't have any of that though. She was adamant she wasn't going to use any coercion though. I told her that sounded like she was setting herself up for a long, dreary life but she just shook her head and smiled knowingly at me. He was going to come back to town someday; she just knew it. I gave up talking to her about it.

I even tried to introduce her to some nice guys from Cal's work but she never would go out with them. I'm not real pleased with this whole mess but she seems to be okay with it. She is just not going to date anyone at all. I had to accept it and let the discussion drop. I didn't have to like it though.

Sherrie filled out again after getting her mind around most everything in the second series of counseling sessions. She'd lost a lot of weight with the worry and self-recriminations and stuff, but now she's gained most of it back and she looks really great. I hate her. Even after having three kids of my own, my boobs aren't anywhere near as big as hers. It's not fair.

The woman seems to be more focused and happier than at any time since her divorce. She's a volunteer with the local PTA and works hard on the neighborhood watch program too... of all things, huh? Her life seems to be fun again; I guess her two roommates help keep her from getting too down in the dumps. Heck, they smile all the time and I guess that would have to give her a boost just about all the time, huh?

Oh... and Sherrie's doing good at work too. She had taken a job at a new accounting firm not too long after the divorce and has been promoted three times in the little bit less than three years she's worked for them. She has sixteen auditors and financial analysts working for her now and it looks like she's in line for a better job when the old fart screwing it up finally retires. She loves her work.

She's been coming over for barbeques for a long time now... whenever Cal and I have one... and she's just fantastic with the kids. She's like part of our extended family. Our oldest boy is five now. His birthday was last week. My three year old, Cal junior, is just like a son to her and my fourteen-month-old girl follows Sherrie around everywhere she goes. It's cute to watch my baby walk a few steps toward Sherrie, stand still when she feels her balance going, and plop down on her bottom when she looses it. She gets up on all fours and crawls sooooo fast. She giggles like a maniac when she finally catches up to Sherrie. All three of my kids just love her to death.

Ron should be emailing us again any day now. It's been about a week and he tries to send Cal and me something every week or ten days. I show them all to Sherrie; she hounds me for the latest one if I haven't forwarded it on to her right away. I wonder what Ron would say if he knew?

I found out that Afghanistan in early spring isn't the garden spot of the world either. Instead of blowing snow, we got blowing dust and I wasn't sure which was worse. Both have serious disadvantages. I think I'm tending toward a preference for snow though. At least it melts and goes away; dust and sand just get into small crevices and clog up the works. Twenty-five percent of our heavy equipment--bulldozers, dump trucks, rock crushers, etc.--were down on any given day because dirt had fouled air intakes, gotten into lubricating oil, or any number of other things. It's particularly galling because most of our machinery was made for environments where dust and sand are part of the working environment. I was beginning to suspect a little sabotage.

Two weeks after my first suspicion, Marine Lance Corporal Arvin Cantwell and I caught one of the nameless unskilled laborers screwing on an air filter housing that should never have been unscrewed to begin with. We didn't like hiring these guys because it was impossible to vet them and we had no idea if the local warlord had actually sent them as trusted workers, or whether the guy just wandered into camp. The one we caught might have been Osama bin Laden's cousin, for all we knew.

The handful of dirt and rocks we found in the air intake confirmed he had ties to one terrorist group or another so we turned him over to a trio of Afghani National Guard soldiers. They took him away and we never saw him again.

The incident put us on guard and our equipment up time improved dramatically, but other things continued to crop up. We had about forty days to go on our schedule so we clamped a tight security on all our vehicles. First, we parked them separately from the main "tent city" set up for locals and contractors alike. Lieutenant Fredericks put on a night guard around them and my crew also provided personnel for that task. My people weren't armed, but they could sure raise a commotion if they saw anything out of the ordinary. Their purpose was to get an alarm spread wide enough, and quickly enough, for some of those tough Marines in our security platoon could handle whatever came up.

There was a pervasive concern among all the imported contractor personnel that if something was going to happen, it was going to happen soon because once the road was bulldozed all the way to the border, disrupting it would be a strictly local event and easily repaired. We were uneasy and uncomfortable.

I'm going to have to have a talk with Melissa, I guess. Turns out she's been passing my emails on to my ex-wife, Sherrie. When I'd last talked face to face with Karen, Sherrie's name had come up as an obstacle in mine and Karen's relationship. Karen believed I wasn't "over" Sherrie yet and that she would always be some kind of ghostly presence between Karen and me. I thought that was ridiculous, but fortunately I bit my tongue before letting that word get out into the discussion. I don't know much about women, but I was smarter than that.