Megan averted her gaze and traced her finger across the lace holes of her Dr. Martens unconsciously as she answered. “I think that they’ve had to grow up faster than I would hope. I was expecting the Thomas the Tank Engine stage to last a lot longer than it has, but the boys really have become good workers around the homestead. Auntie Malorie cracks the whip between snacks, hikes, games of tag, and extra stories.” Megan smiled, locked eyes with Joshua, who was listening attentively, and said, “They don’t understand why Eric isn’t there, but they do very much realize that he’s absent.”

Joshua reached out and put his hand on her hand, gently squeezed it, and did not say anything as Megan continued. “Hawaii was paradise. Eric and I were very much in love as newlyweds. Eventually, we both came down on orders together—compassionate assignment, of course—to come to Fort Meade. It was hard to get promoted in the Marine Corps when you’re having children—that is a fact. So I was passed up for two promotions and was seemingly locked in at being a corporal. As an NCO I had plenty of responsibility, but as an E-4 it’s hard to live on such a small paycheck. Eric was in the navy and we were fortunate to be stationed together. The world was our oyster, or so we thought. We found this house in the country and we bought it. Eric wanted to raise the boys far out of the pressure cooker of the Beltway metropolis, but then not long after we got settled into our new routine and duties, Eric came down on orders to deploy again as a ‘Sand Sailor.’”

Joshua asked for clarification. “Sand Sailor? I’m afraid that I haven’t heard the term before.”

“It’s navy slang for a ‘fish out of water’ or a sailor who is deployed in the desert. It’s almost always used as a pejorative term.”

“I see.” Joshua thought it best not to interrupt her.

“So he was on orders for a whole year; our oldest son was two and starting to toddle around. We thought that he would go over, get his ticket punched, and be in a good spot for his next promotion—such a simple plan. All the while I would be home saving the extra money and paying down our mortgage. Eric said that he liked the job okay, and the long days made the time go by so that he didn’t have to think about missing Leo and me as much. But as the time went on, he was not staying grounded in true godly things. He stopped going to chapel services and there was a noticeable decline in substantive letters from him. I guess that the targeting mission really got to him. It’s one thing to process signals impersonally as strictly empirical data; it’s another to track someone’s life and be responsible for steel on target when the boys in black show up to shoot people in the face.

“Somewhere between the ones and zeros of Johnny Jihad’s life and the ‘actionable intelligence’ derived from the analysis—we lost Eric. To deal with that stress, the office would generally play television shows in the office on those huge flat-screen monitors that they used for shift-change briefings. They showed everything from Seinfeld to Friends to Desperate Housewives. You can’t take in that level of pop culture and not be affected by it.

“Eric eventually started to notice a female Air Force senior airman attached to his section. She would bring him up on chat more often than necessary and comment on certain scenes in the television shows. Seems like histrionic crass girls with ‘daddy issues’ are beacons for extracurricular activities. Toward the end of the deployment he called and said that he wanted to discuss the ‘dissolution of our marriage,’ which could not have come at a more inopportune time because I was pregnant again, but had been reluctant to tell him because things were deteriorating so quickly.”

“Wow, so you went from deployment widow to single mom and pregnant?”

“It was illogical. Yes, he wanted to chase his sweet young complicated thing and I was holding down the fort with all the responsibility. You can say that we had a ‘mismatch in our commitment level’ to the relationship. He initiated the paperwork on his end with the JAG office, and I signed it, and that was that. I was here, pregnant, alone, and a single mom. I called Malorie, and she dropped everything to move down to West Virginia. I could hardly afford the live-in nanny anyhow. I took the option to separate from the Marine Corps and I became another green-badge contractor. I ended up with the house and the leased car, while he took his porn collection, his truck (with the payments), and all of the guns. I changed my name back to my maiden name of LaCroix, and the rest is history. That was three years ago now.”

Joshua squeezed her hand and said, “I’m sorry you had to go through such a terrible ordeal, Megan, but I want you to know that you haven’t scared me away. Knowing what you’ve overcome, I’m even more amazed by you.”

9

TOLERANCE

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.

—President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Millinocket, Maine—Four Years Before the Crunch

Malorie LaCroix went on to trade school after she finished high school early and worked as a first-year apprentice machinist at Millinocket Fabrication and Machine, Inc., in Millinocket, Maine. She was more conversant in French than her elder sister, Megan, and after translating some French machinery manuals for Millinocket, Malorie eventually developed a side business doing French-to-English technical translation. She was an avid 4WD enthusiast, preferring older Ford eight-lug pickup trucks to all other modes of transportation. She was nineteen years old and already had a local reputation for building trucks for several people around the state.

Malorie was single and, like her older sister, grew up in a stable family home where her parents loved each other. Their father, Cedric LaCroix, was a lumberman in the northern woods who might be away at camp for weeks at a time, but while he was home he doted on his girls. After an accident late one winter that would have broken most men, he was left injured, with a permanent limp, and no longer able to have children. Since then, he had always joked that he would have to raise his girls like boys, so both Megan and Malorie would learn to sharpen axes with a stone, rebuild chain saws, and drive a skid steer during the summers, and in the autumn they would rack, hunt, pack out, and process deer. No matter how hard he worked them, both Megan and Malorie knew that they were the object of their father’s love.

With that level of confidence, the sisters never needed to be reaffirmed by other boys. So why should they care if they never were asked to go out by the football players for pizza after a game or to an unsupervised party out by the lake, which usually meant underage binge drinking and propositions for sex. Malorie had consoled way too many women who had given away what they could never get back.

Megan and Malorie were both homeschooled up through their eighth-grade year in the classical tradition of education. Their mother, Beatrice, had them memorize huge portions of the Bible as well as read nearly all of the classics, the writings from the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Founding Fathers. Beatrice would tell them, “You never know when these books will be outlawed, so read them now. The Founding Fathers were not clairvoyant; they just read their history and decided what kind of government they did not want.” Cedric did not have an education beyond the eighth grade, so he was insistent that he would work as hard as he could so that Beatrice would be able to stay home to educate the children properly. He would drill them on their memory work every night after dinner that he was home to ensure that they were getting their money’s worth from homeschooling.