Read The Promise of Home for Free Online

had decided to paint her tummy. He’d used her makeup to transform it into a face, complete with a protruding tongue made possible by her popped-out belly button. In between fits of laughter, they’d used the timer on the camera to take a close-up of Nick’s face, with his tongue also stuck out, right next to her decorated stomach.
    The next album held pictures of Ben as a four-year-old. She gently touched one of the few that included Nick. In it, he was dressed in fatigues, standing in front of their house on a Texas air base and holding their son on his shoulders. Both of them were smiling in the picture, taken just before Nick shipped out on a new deployment. As soon as Nick had left, she’d started to cry, and little Ben had kissed her wet cheeks “to make Mommy all better.”
    Karen looked down at the third album. It was the only one that was white. She couldn’t bring herself to look at their wedding pictures inside. In fact, she found that she couldn’t stand to continue looking at the old pictures at all.
    After pacing around the room for a few minutes, she went to check on Ben. Her son was sleeping on his side with his mouth open and a gangly arm resting outside his covers. On the nightstand next to his bed was a stack of postcards and opened letters. Karen knew without looking that they were from Nick.
    Silently, she entered Ben’s room and lifted the postcard from the top of the pile. The front of the card was an aerial photograph of Riyadh. The city was vast and dusty and lacked even a hint of green. The orderly blocks of buildings with cars parked alongside seemed to go on forever, disappearing at the edge of the postcard into a grayish, blurred horizon. Nick was somewhere in that huge desert metropolis.
    Or maybe he wasn’t.
    Pushing that thought from her mind, Karen flipped over the postcard. Her heart broke a little at the sight of Nick’s slanted scrawl. The body of the message was short, almost cursory, containing only a mention of how hot it was getting and a promise to send a longer letter soon. It was the closing that got her, though.
Miss you and Mom more than ever. Can’t wait to come home.
    Love,
    Dad
    Karen struggled to keep her ragged breathing from waking Ben. She placed the postcard back on his nightstand and started backing out of his room. It was all she could do to get into the hallway and close Ben’s door before she crumpled to the carpeted floor.
    Pull yourself together, Karen. Stay strong. Nick would want you to stay strong. You’re all Ben has right now.
    And yet fighting against that internal voice of strength was a sinister undercurrent that threatened to haul her into a black abyss. She remembered the last time she had succumbed to it. It had taken a hospital stay and lots of therapy to pull her back from the brink. Despite the debilitating effects of the darkness—lack of focus or interest in things she enjoyed, fatigue, trouble sleeping, and a crushing feeling of guilt about her condition—she couldn’t let that happen again.
    From now on, until she got word that Nick was safe, she would keep up her routine. She would be a pillar of strength for Ben. She would summon up her courage and confront the fear and uncertainty bravely, as she knew Nick would. He would return to them. She believed that because she had to.
    The alternative was unthinkable.
    —
    In the parish house at St. John’s, Father O’Brien had just settled into his recliner when the phone rang. He started and reached to answer it. An unfamiliar but pleasant woman’s voice asked for him by name.
    “This is Michael O’Brien,” he told the caller.
    “Hello, Father. My name is Julia Tomlinson. I’m a reporter with
America,
the Jesuit magazine, and I’m working on a story about clergy in the United States who continue to serve past the typical retirement age. I learned about you from the bishop of Burlington at a conference here in Manhattan last month. He gave me your private number.”
    Father