The General's Leave

The Driftwood Inn sits two blocks from the main gate of Fort Cartwright, and it has been fading in the sun since before either of us was born. I want to start there because that's where the whole night started, in that parking lot with the neon VACANCY sign buzzing over maybe four cars.

Michele is thirty-six now. She's my wife, three years this past June. She used to be a nurse at the base hospital, four years in uniform before she got out at thirty and took a job at a private clinic in town. I'm thirty-eight, a civilian logistics manager at the same base, which is a fancy way of saying I make sure the trucks show up when the trucks are supposed to show up. We met at a community college mixer eight years ago, back when she was twenty-eight and I was thirty, but the mixer isn't the part I remember. The part I remember is the vending machine.

There was a bank of machines in the hallway outside the gym where they held the mixer. Michele was standing there in her dress greens, still coming off a shift at the hospital, and she was watching me lose a battle with a snack machine. I put in my dollar fifty and the little spiral thing turned and my peanut butter crackers hung there, teetering, and then just stayed. I did it again. Same thing. Third time I was thumping the glass with the flat of my hand and this woman behind me said, "You have to hit it on the left side, near the top. Right side does nothing."

I turned around and there she was. Tall, dark hair pinned back, that clean pressed uniform look, and the kind of tired smile you get from somebody who has been on her feet for twelve hours and still finds you funny. I hit the left side near the top and two bags dropped, because apparently I had overpaid the machine twice without knowing it.

"Lucky," I said.

"Observant," she said. "Buy me a coffee with your winnings."

That was it. The entire thing began right there. A stranger in a hallway who knew something I didn't, and me with two bags of crackers and no idea I'd just met my wife.

Here's what I've learned since, or what I think I've learned. The electric part of meeting someone is that they don't know you yet. They have no file on you. When Michele looked at me that night she wasn't looking at the guy who leaves his socks on the bathroom floor, the guy who talks about truck schedules at dinner. She was looking at a stranger who was funny about a vending machine, and a stranger can be anything. Eight years and three years of marriage later, we know each other's files by heart. I love her file. But some nights I miss being a stranger.

So I hatched a plan, and in late October I finally sprung it.

"Okay," Michele said from the passenger seat, "you've been grinning like an idiot since we left the house. What is this?"

It was a Friday. I'd arranged for her sister to keep the dog, I'd made a dinner reservation I had no intention of keeping, and I'd packed one overnight bag that I refused to let her look in. She had her hand on my thigh while I drove, which she does without thinking, and her thumb was moving in these slow little circles that made it very hard to concentrate on Texas Farm Road 95.

"You'll see in about ten minutes," I said.

"Vince."

"Michele."

"Is this a surprise or a scheme? Because you have a face for both and I can't tell which one you're wearing."

"Both," I admitted. "It's a surprise with scheming in it."

She laughed and squeezed my leg, and her hand drifted a little higher, which I chose to take as encouragement. She was curious. I could tell she was curious because she'd given up on getting it out of me after about four minutes, and Michele does not give up that easy when she actually wants to know something. She'd also noticed the bag in the back seat had, among other things, a bottle of lube in a paper bag, and she'd raised one eyebrow at me at a red light and said nothing. We had talked a few weeks back, half asleep, about things we hadn't tried yet, and I had said I wanted to try taking her that way, slow, someday. She'd said we'd see. So she knew roughly what was in the bag. That conversation was already done, settled, no pressure attached to tonight. Tonight was its own thing.

The Driftwood Inn came up on the left, all yellow brick and brown trim, the sign half out. Wind was coming off the prairie with that dry grass smell over cold asphalt, the late autumn panhandle smell I've known my whole life. Michele looked at the place and then at me.

"The Driftwood? Seriously?"

"It's two blocks from the gate," I said. "It's where people who don't know each other go."

And then she got it. I watched it land on her face in the glow of the sign, and she went quiet, and her thumb stopped circling.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, you sneaky bastard."

The lobby of the Driftwood is about eight feet wide with a counter and a rack of brochures for attractions that closed years ago. The clerk was maybe twenty-five, lanky, phone in one hand, and he looked up with the exact amount of interest the situation deserved, which was none.

I had told Michele the rules in the car, so we played it straight. I went in first. She stayed by the door, arms crossed, watching the parking lot like she was bored, and God help me, she was good at it. She had this flat, wary look that I'd never seen her wear at home, this closed-off stranger face, and something about it went through me like a current.

"Room for one," I said. "One bed."

"King or two queens?"

"One. King."

"Twenty-eight, fifty. Card?"

I paid. He handed me a key, an actual metal key on a big plastic diamond, room 14, and went back to his phone. Michele came in behind me while I was signing the card slip, and she stood at the counter a polite distance away, not touching me, not looking at me. Two strangers, one desk clerk who could not have cared less. I picked up the little foam cup of free ice chips they leave out and held it toward her like an offering and she took it without a word, and I nearly lost it right there, I was so delighted with us.

Room 14 smelled like old cigarettes and industrial cleaner, but the bed was big and reasonably firm and the heater under the window did that clanking thing old heaters do. There was a painting of a sailboat on the wall, which in the panhandle, four hundred miles from any ocean, struck me as a joke somebody had been playing since the seventies.

Michele set her keys on the dresser and looked around. "Cozy," she said. "Very romantic. Very 'I met a stranger and made choices.'"

"That's the spirit."

She sat down on the edge of the bed, bounced once, testing it, and then looked up at me with that eyebrow again, the one from the red light. "So what now, mister? What's the protocol here? Do I introduce myself? Do I have a name?"

"You do now," I said, and I dug the folded paper out of my jacket, the one I'd written at my desk on Tuesday while pretending to review a shipping manifest. "You're Annie. You're a nurse, passing through, staying overnight before you drive on to Amarillo. I'm Vic. I'm in town on business."

"Annie," she repeated, tasting it. "Annie and Vic. Wow. You really workshopped this."

"Forty minutes," I said. "In the truck outside the credit union, waiting for you to get your oil changed."

Her face softened then, just for a second, the real Michele leaking through the stranger, and she reached out and took my hand and squeezed it once before letting go and putting her mask back on.

"Okay, Vic," she said, leaning back on her palms, cool as anything. "Buy me a drink first. Then we'll see about you."

"So what are we drinking, Vic?"

I had planned for that too, which I'll admit I was proud of. There was a pint bottle of whiskey in the overnight bag, the cheap kind, and two paper cups I'd taken from the breakroom dispenser at work like a man with no shame. I poured us each one finger, no more, because I had done the math on the rest of the night, and handed hers over.

"House special," I said. "The Driftwood bar is closed for renovations. Since roughly 1988."

She toasted me with the paper cup and sipped and made a face that was mostly theater. "That's terrible."

"The best things are."

While she drank I dug through the bag for the other thing I'd been carrying around all week, a dress, bought Tuesday on my lunch break from the western wear store on Kroeker Avenue, dark green, simple, the kind of thing you could wear to a wedding or a bar and nobody would ask questions. I'd guessed the size and held my breath doing it. I laid it on the bed and told her to put it on, and she looked at me with that eyebrow one more time.

"You bought me a dress?"

"I bought Annie a dress. Annie dresses for a long drive and an empty hotel."

"She sounds like a woman with sense." Michele stood and took the dress into the bathroom, and I heard her laughing in there, a short helpless burst, and then the laugh cut off and she came back out wearing it