“How did you get his number?”
“Mendoza gave it to me.”
I sighed. My small circle was becoming more and more tangled.
“Are you and Mendoza close? I knew you were friends before, but have you stayed in touch?”
Austin nodded and the screen door creaked. Elodie’s voice chirped through the house, cutting the conversation off before my brother could respond.
“Karina?”
“In here!” I answered, as she came in, her face looking more tired than usual.
“I got home just in time, it’s about to pour!” She sat down at the table next to Austin and he gave her a big smile.
“We’re making dinner. You hungry?” he asked her.
I laughed, turning around to them. “Correction,Iam making dinner. For Austin. Pasta with . . . well, random stuff, but it’ll be good.”
I turned the stove on to boil the water and started to dig through the fridge to see what random vegetables I had to throw into the pasta sauce. Carrots. Even though Austin was like a child when it came to food, if I chopped them up small enough he wouldn’t notice them. Hell, even if he saw me chopping them, he probably wouldn’t notice.
Austin and Elodie started basic small talk, how unpredictable the rain was and how the weather people never got the forecast right, that Austin had a headache and that Elodie’s hands were starting to ache each day after work. The pain was increasing quickly, and she was a little worried. Austin touched the tips of her fingers and she winced.
“Sorry.” He let go, looking like a puppy who’d chewed apart a favorite shoe.
“It’s okay,” she assured him, verbally petting his head. “I have about ten minutes until I have to meet Martin; he’s with Julien and Gloria.”
I turned around faster than I meant to, coming comically close to chopping the tip of my finger off. I set the knife toward the back of the cutting board, facing away from me.
“Martin, Kael Martin?” I asked her, somewhat puzzled. He told me he had meetings on post until five, but he was with Austin maybe an hour ago; now he’s somewhere with Mendoza’s wife and baby, and Elodie is going to meet up with them?
Elodie nodded. “He picked them up from home and dropped them off at the doctor. Kael’s been spending all his time on post for his discharge stuff. I offered to take them home since Mendoza’s on twenty-four-hour duty. I haven’t met Gloria, but I’m hoping to make mom friends.” Elodie’s voice became more and more exhausted as she finished her sentence.
“Oh. Yeah. Gloria seems cool.” I turned back around and continued chopping the carrot, noticing that the water in the pot was beginning to boil. My mind drifted to Kael as Elodie and Austin started talking about some park she saw on Instagram. So Kael must have driven back and forth to help them out. Of course he did. I felt the little nudge between my lungs as I thought of how much I liked the softness of his actions and how they spoke infinitely louder than his words.
I realized that Kael and I don’t talk much about his military life day to day. It’s more about the big picture of his life, but even then, the conversation is mostly focused on me. Elodie seemed to talk to Kael every day, and I wondered what he might have told her about us. I thought about mentioning to Elodie how often I’m hanging out with him.“Hey, Elodie, Kael and I are. . . friends . . . and we kissed more than once. I kinda want to kiss him again, but we’re just friends . . . okay, thanks?But since I can’t even explain what the hell we’re doing, there was really nothing to say to her.
Elodie’s loud laugh suddenly interrupted my thoughts. Clearly, I had missed one of Austin’s jokes, but I noticed how he had managed to charm her. The banter between the two of them was a pleasant distraction.
“Mom friends in the Army can be brutal. My mom got treated like shit by the wives around us. She hated it, that’s for sure,” Austin told Elodie. It felt a bit too personal, a bit too vulnerable for him to say so casually in my kitchen.
“It’s hard. I just want them to like me, is that too much to ask?” she whined, laying her forehead on the wooden kitchen table. She lifted it and gently put it back down, not actually touching, but pretending to bang the table a few times for dramatic effect. “I feel like I’m in primary school again but this time it’s worse, because I don’t know anyone, they are speaking another language, and I can’t even run home to my parents,” she sighed.
I couldn’t imagine Elodie not being liked by the women she desperately wanted to befriend. They were the only people who would truly understand her situation and be able to relate in a much deeper way. I was proud of myself for wanting my friend to be happy and loved and have as many friends as her little pure heart could hold; the thought of her happiness didn’t make me jealous at all. Unlike my father, who needed to possess the people closest to him under the pretense of love. I tried really fucking hard to not be like him in that way. I wanted the things I love to flourish, uncaged and free. He made the mistake of marrying someone whose mind, body, and spirit were wild. She couldn’t be owned, and he needed to collect things. While my mother couldn’t be tamed, Estelle was primed to be a precious and pampered doll—a beautiful brunette with eyes for him and his world only, a prize he could display, polished and perfect.
“What time is it?” Elodie asked, eyeing the downpour of rain through the window. “Gloria was supposed to be here with Julien by now.”
“Have either of you seen their baby? He’s so cute.” Austin strummed his fingers on the table.
“Only in pictures!” Elodie responded immediately in a high-pitched voice. “He looks just like his—” She stopped in mid-sentence and her face lit up; so did my brother’s.
Elodie’s hand shot up into the air and waved. I turned to see who they were looking at as the back door opened. Kael stood, half in, half out, dressed in his uniform, his cap hanging out of his front pocket. I quickly ran through my appearance in my head. I was still in work clothes, with frizzy, air-dried hair. Even though I’d planned to be a bit more polished when I saw him, when we made eye contact, my self-consciousness instantly disappeared. It was wild, the effect he had on me. All of the spiraling thoughts slid from my mind as he took a step forward and a small child walked in behind him. The boy had dark hair, wet from the rain. He was as cute as Elodie and Austin had gushed, and Mendoza’s wife, Gloria, followed behind him. She was beautiful—of course she was—and radiant, despite the dampening rain. She had big, dark eyes and thick, long hair. She was dressed in a white turtleneck tucked into dark jeans. Her jeans were baggy on her frame and her smile oozed confidence and sweetness, almost as if she was an old friend, though I had never spoken to her.
“Hi.” Elodie addressed the child first. “I’m Elodie.” She was using a baby-talk voice and the boy smiled brightly. Okay, he was actually the cutest child I had ever seen. He looked so much like Mendoza, but also like his mother. Big, bright brown eyes and thick lashes.
Austin stood up to hug Gloria and I waved awkwardly. It was clear that Austin knew her well by the way he smiled at her and the fact that he wasn’t hitting on her. My kitchen felt smaller than ever as Gloria glared at Austin and playfully hit his arm.
“I heard you got Martin smoked today for what you did last night. Get your shit together.” She spoke to my brother like a sibling.