Once Her Man, Always Her Man(3)
Luke….
***
Eleven years earlier
“I don’t understand.” She sat on the edge of the picnic table. Instead of the movies, they’d planned a quiet Saturday night together. But he’d been late and just when she thought he wouldn’t show up, he’d arrived, agitated, out of sorts and distant. “What happened?”
“September 11th happened, Becca. We’re retaliating and I plan to help.” The sweet autumn of their graduating year had turned into a nightmare a few weeks before. She’d been with him when the first reports of the terrorist attacks came in. School dismissed early, but not early enough to stop the news of the flight numbers involved. His mother and sister had been on a flight out of Dulles that morning, returning home from touring colleges on the east coast.
He’d taken the news without a glimmer of emotion. Her heart ached for him. For weeks, he pressed through funerals, obligatory family visits and bore the brunt of the hushed pity that rippled through the halls of Lowell High wherever they went.
He quit the football team.
His grades slipped.
He stopped coming to school regularly.
But Rebecca hadn’t left him. She brought his homework, bullied him to eat, cleaned up after both he and his father. After 9/11, his retired Marine, Navy reservist father informed them over dinner that he’d been activated. She held Luke’s hand through his father’s speech.
“Dad’s leaving tomorrow. He reports to Camp Pendleton. I’m going with him.” His words struck her like a body blow.
They’re moving. A hell of a long way from Lowell High School and Rockwall, Texas.
“Luke….” She squeezed his hand. The chill icing her heart suffocated the unseasonably warm Christmas air. “Wait.”
He’d avoided direct eye contact since walking up to the picnic table and he’d been stiff when she’d hugged him. He looked at her then, and it wasn’t her Luke, but a stranger, cool and remote. “I’m not sorry. And I’m not going just because Dad got called up. I enlisted in the Marines yesterday.”
I enlisted…. The words knocked around like a silver pinball caught bouncing between two objects, pinging against her soul. Enlisted in what?
“I’m eighteen. I took my GED this morning. Dad has some pull, so basic starts the week after Christmas. I don’t have to wait.”
Confusion added a second ball pinging around with the first. Luke enlisted. He joined the Marines. “When did you…?”
“Last month, after my birthday. Dad drove me down to….” His words drifted away, muted by the static in her brain. “…and that’s that. You’re great, but you’ve already gotten your acceptance letters to Brown and you’re going to school.”
“You’re breaking up with me?” She hadn’t meant to blurt it out, but shock cut off her good sense.
“Becca, America is going to retaliate. We’re already going into Afghanistan, and if I can get done with basic fast enough, I’ll be going with them. Bin Laden needs to die for what he did. Those fanatics need to understand that they attacked us. We have a duty to defend our country, to speak up for everyone who died.”
“Luke, I know. I know how you feel.”
“No.” He pulled his hand out from under hers. “You don’t know how I feel. And I don’t want you to ever know how I feel about this. A clean break is better. You’re great. Some guy is going to snap you right up and you’re going to have a great future. It’ll be easier on both of us if we make it a clean break now. I don’t want you to have to wait, to worry or to wonder.”
Nothing she said after that got through. He’d made up his mind. He’d taken her home, not even kissing her as he left her on the sidewalk in front of her house. He wasn’t home the next day.
Or the day after that.
A week later, the Dexter house had a For Sale sign in front of it.
A month later, a new family moved into it.
Rebecca didn’t know where he’d gone, so she addressed her letters to both he and his father, in care of the Marines.
She wrote him weekly.
Studying any news reports coming out of Afghanistan, she was terrified that one day they’d include a tidbit: local Rockwall boy dies overseas.
She didn’t go to Brown, sticking it out at the University of North Texas and commuting. She wanted to be where he’d left her.
So he could find her again.
A week before she graduated, an email blast from their high school graduating class’s annual newsletter caught her eye. Lieutenant Luke Dexter, former Lowell High football star, had been awarded a medal for bravery in combat. He remained on assignment in Afghanistan after a brief visit to speak at the school.