At Thanksgiving dinner, my husband’s cousin laughed and asked if my Navy career was just posing for recruitment posters. My husband said nothing. Then his father looked straight at me and asked, “What’s your call sign?”
And just like that, the entire table went quiet.
Not the comfortable kind of quiet either. The kind where people suddenly remember they are holding forks. The kind where nobody wants to be the next person to speak.
I wish I could tell you I had some clever response ready. I did not. I was too surprised.
The funny thing is, the evening had started out completely normal. It was Thanksgiving at the Harland family’s house in Chesapeake, Virginia. The same split-level brick home they had lived in for nearly thirty years.
The place always smelled like turkey, coffee, and furniture polish. Every November, the driveway filled with pickup trucks and SUVs carrying relatives from all over Hampton Roads. My husband Mark and I arrived around 4:30.
The sun was already dropping low. Cold wind. Gray sky.
Typical coastal Virginia holiday weather. I remember climbing out of the passenger seat and taking a second before standing upright. My right knee had been bothering me all week.
Old injury. Some mornings it felt fine. Some mornings it reminded me exactly how old I was not supposed to feel at thirty-nine.
“You okay?” Mark asked. I shut the car door. “Yeah.”
He looked at me.
“You sure?”
I said, “Yeah.”
That should have been my first clue. When a simple question annoys you, something is already off. Inside the house, football was playing in the living room.
Kids were running around with paper plates. Somebody had burned a batch of dinner rolls. My mother-in-law was pretending not to be stressed while being obviously stressed.
Normal family holiday stuff. For the first hour, everything felt fine. I helped in the kitchen, talked to a few relatives, and answered questions about work without actually talking about work.
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