Chapter 145

I still don’t want to believe that she’s gone, or that this is the end of Sugar Creek for me.

Then he calls his superior, a man I’m almost ninety percent sure knows who I really am and why one of his enlisted boys lives off post with a “friend,” but he adheres to the Army’s don’t ask, don’t tellpolicy and because Dan’s a good soldier, he’s never been rude to me. I’ve run into him a few times on base while I waited for Dan after TDY, and he nodded curtly at me each time. Once he even came over to the car with Dan, leaned onto my open window as my lover stowed his bags in the trunk, and laughed. “What can I do to convince you to sign up for the service, kid?” he wanted to know. “If you’re half the soldier Dan the Man is, I want you in my unit. You’re more punctual than most of the boys I’ve got under me.”

“He’s joking,” Dan told me later, as if afraid that I might actually rush to the nearest recruitment office and enlist. “It means he’s cool with you.”