My husband, Livingston, was a Master Sergeant with nineteen years in the Army, and on the day he decided he no longer wanted to be married to me, he had our names pulled off the sponsor list at Fort Ridgely and let our sixteen-year-old son and me stand outside the front gate in the Oklahoma heat for forty minutes while he sat inside on post, not answering his phone. When the guard finally reached him on the radio, loud enough that I heard it clear through the little speaker box, Livingston said, “Take her and the boy off my list. They’re not my problem anymore.” Then he hung up before the guard could say another word. I want you to sit with that sentence the way I had to sit with it, standing on the shoulder of a two lane road outside a chain link fence with my son beside me, because it is the whole story in one breath. What Livingston did not know, standing inside that gate feeling like a free man, was that four months earlier he had asked me to put a folder of papers in the fireproof box at the house for safekeeping, and he had never once come back for them. I still had every page.
I need to back up, though, because you should understand who I was before that afternoon at the gate, so you understand what it took to become the woman I am now.
My name is Katarina. I am forty-four years old, and I have spent nearly twenty years of my life as an Army wife, which is its own kind of career even though nobody puts it on a resume. I met Livingston at a county fair outside Enid when I was twenty-two and he was a young specialist home on leave, all creased uniform and easy laugh, and I married him eleven months later in my mother’s backyard with folding chairs borrowed from the Baptist church. We moved seven times in nineteen years. Fort Benning, then Fort Campbell, then a stretch in Germany I still dream about, then three different posts in a five year span that blur together now, base housing and packed boxes and school transfer papers, until his last set of orders brought us to Fort Ridgely, forty minutes from the little town of Sorghum Creek, Oklahoma, where we finally bought a modest three bedroom rental-to-own house with a VA loan and I told myself we were putting down roots at last.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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