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held my breath as we followed the exit to Fayetteville, wondering how I would weather Army life.
    The cold front caught up to us by the time we signed a lease on a house. We unloaded our U-Haul beneath a rain that fell without pause and my knuckles were rubbed raw in the chill and damp as we toted in our combined life: kitchen utensils and bed linens, spices in glass jars, jugs of olive oil turned cloudy in the cold. The house had yellow paneling and hardwood floors scuffed with age. The rooms filled with a heavy animal smell when we ran the gas heater, and I imagined geological strata of dog fur collected beneath the vents. My mother had given us her old washer and we stuck it in the kitchen. We paid fifty dollars for a secondhand dryer at the flea market in Dunn. At a thrift store in Fayetteville we bought a gold brocade couch, a battered coffee table, and a bureau with a rough paint job. By all accounts our place was shoddy—but I loved it. I loved having a house of our own, furniture that belonged to us, a backyard surrounded by trees that leaned together in the wind.
    Miles’s mother came for a visit three weeks after we moved in. She did not bring place mats. She was tense and unsettled and she refused to stay in our guest bedroom. She stayed in a hotel across town instead. In our home Terry was cordial. She cooked dinner, churning out Miles’s favorites, like burnt-steak stew, meals with a history that reached back to their hometown in Texas. She made the sugar cookies Miles liked, the kind I could never get right, and she talked about home and church and family.
    On the second day of her visit, after Miles had put on his uniform and left for the base, Terry suggested we drive to the mall in Raleigh. Spring unfolds slowly in North Carolina, and the air was cool and damp even as the first daffodils pushed through the wet earth. We climbed into her rental car and drove through Fayetteville where rhododendrons bloomed pink against the gray morning. The rain started when we reached the interstate and Terry launched into the reason for her visit.
    â€œYou know Brad and I don’t approve of you living together,” she said, referring to Miles’s father. She called it living in sin. Her hands gripped the steering wheel and outside it poured and poured. “When Miles has sex with you, he’s disrespecting you.”
    I thought about telling her that he sometimes disrespected me on the couch. Once in the kitchen. But I said nothing.
    She talked for an hour and a half without pause, without my input, but when we reached the shopping center in Raleigh the space between us seemed somehow lighter. We spent the afternoon shopping, inspecting sales racks, and eating Chinese takeout in the food court. At the Macy’s makeup counter, Terry tried on lavender eye shadow.
    â€œThat looks nice on you,” I said.
    She smiled shyly into the hand mirror, and when the saleswoman asked if she’d like her to wrap up the makeup, Terry nodded. She was strangely tentative about the exchange, as if she wasn’t used to buying nice things for herself.
    The drive home was easier, and I imagined a time when Terry and I might be close.
    I quickly found out that the city of Fayetteville lived and breathed Fort Bragg. Most of the businesses in town catered to a military lifestyle. Barbers, laundromats, boot repair shops. Storage units where menlocked away their lives while they headed overseas to fight in battles whose political under layers they could not always explain. Strip clubs with names like Victoria’s Cabaret and Bottom’s Up. There were used-car joints, too, where a hundred dollars gets you riding, and pawnshops for the end of the month when the money runs out. But on the base itself, none of this existed. No pawnshops, no titty bars, no used-car hucksters. Everything was neat and organized, the grass cut short, the streets clean. Even the soldiers themselves looked fresh with their trimmed