That's My Robe — The Military Wife Story Everyone Is Reading

Chapter 3 - Two Years and One Spring

Aaron came back the next night to collect his clothes, and he stood in the kitchen like a man who still had a right to be there.

I made him sit across from me at the table.

I set Melissa's phone face-down between us, and I said, "Start with how long.

And don't round down."

He looked at the phone a long time before he looked at me.

Then he said, "A year and a half."

I did the math out loud, because I wanted to hear it in the room.

"Eighteen months," I said.

"That's four hundred and thirty mornings I don't know about, Aaron."

He shook his head and started explaining.

He said it started during a bad week, back when his father was dying and I was eight time zones away.

He said it was one bad week.

I told him eighteen months is not one bad week.

I told him I was in a tent at two in the morning, on a base where the generators hummed all night, reading every text he sent me and answering every one I could.

I told him I sent him my pay schedule so he could pay the mortgage while I was gone.

I told him I called his father's hospital on my lunch break and asked the nurses to put the phone to his ear.

He didn't argue with any of it.

He just kept saying Melissa listened.

I asked him if she had a key to my house.

He said she borrowed his.

I asked him how many times she cooked in my kitchen.

He didn't answer that one.

I asked him how many times she stood at my stove in her bare feet, using my good casserole dish, sending her dog through my back door.

He looked at the floor.

I asked him one more question.

"How many times did she wear my robe?"

He looked at the floor a long time.

I let the silence sit there.

I didn't fill it for him.

He never said the number, and I stopped needing it.

When he left, he took one duffel and left the rest, like he was still planning to come back for the rest of his life.

I locked the door behind him and stood in the hallway for a while.

Then I sat down on my own bed, on the side I always sleep on, and I opened Melissa's phone.

I told myself I'd read one thing and stop.

I read more than one.

There were texts between her and Aaron from the first four months I was gone.

There were photos.

There was one from a Tuesday morning, taken in my bedroom, with my pale blue robe on her body and my sheets behind her.

The caption said, "your wife's other skin."

The date on that message was four months into my deployment.

Four months.

I sat there with the phone in both hands and looked at the window I'd left open, the window that used to let in the neighbor's sprinklers at six in the morning.

I thought about every bad-Tuesday report I filed in that first spring.

I thought about the days I went to breakfast on base and ate alone because Aaron said the time difference made it hard to talk.

I stopped reading after that message.

I didn't delete anything.

I opened the notes app and started a list.

I wrote down the date on the phone.

The account number from the message thread.

A name I didn't recognize in the contact list, saved as "A - work."

I wrote it all down in my own handwriting, in a notebook I'd bought at the PX before I deployed.

Then I plugged the phone in on the kitchen counter, next to the folder I'd started the day before, and I sat there until I heard my mother's voice in my head telling me to eat something.

I ate two crackers standing up at the sink.

I washed the last dish in the house, the one Melissa had used, because I didn't want anyone else's fingerprints in my kitchen.

I told Doreen next door the next morning that I was fine, and she looked at me the way neighbors do when they've been holding something for a while and finally don't have to.

She said, "There's a woman who's been coming by since spring."

She said she didn't want to say anything while I was gone.

I told her it was okay, and I thanked her for saying it now.

I went back inside and stood in the middle of my own living room and made myself say it out loud, to the room, so I'd have to hear it in my own voice.