LITMIR.BIZ

       2

      Newport and Utica.

      For Rose, the new life started when she closed their rented house. She had loved living there, but now she was ready to go to the life she had dreamed of and worked toward for six years—Houston, the Space Center, astronaut training.

      “Ready to go?” she said to Mikey, their seven-year-old.

      “Let’s go!”

      “You ready?” she said to the dog. The big tail banged against a wall.

      “Well—let’s go!”

      And without a backward glance she piled them into the 4Runner and started for her parents’ house in Utica, New York. The kids and the dog would be left there while she drove to Houston, then camped out in the house they had already bought there. Her children would adapt. They belonged to a happy family, except that every two or three years, one or both parents went to sea. Or into space.

      “You feel abused?” she said to Mikey.

      “I’m busy.” He was playing a computer game.

      “That’s what I thought.”

      The dog put his head over the seat from the back and licked her hair.

      “You feel abused?” she said.

      The dog wiggled all over.

      “That’s what I thought.”

      The trip was long, and Mikey got cranky, then slept; the baby howled; the dog threw himself on the floor and panted and gasped and whimpered. On and on, through Massachusetts and into New York, stopping to buy junk food and to piss and to walk the dog, then west along the Thruway and at last, as it was getting dark, to the little house in the Italian streets where she had grown up. Mikey, awake again, was eager.

      “The first thing your grandmother will say is, ‘You’re later than you said.’”

      “Grampa will tell her to shut up.”

      Kids hear a lot.

      “You’re late,” her mother said. “You said seven o’clock.” They kissed. “Dinner’s ruint,” her mother said.

      “How’s my girl?” her father shouted, embracing her. He was a small man, wiry even in old age, a fair singer and a great ballroom dancer. “Shut up, Marie, she drove all this way, she done great.” He began to sing, Rosie, she is my posy—

      “I’m starved, Ma,” she told her mother. “Just starved.” She wasn’t, but she knew her mother wanted to feed her. Singing, her father took her in his arms and began to dance her around the driveway. Rosie, she is my joy—

      Rose winked at her father, and they went into the house with their arms around each other’s waist, Mikey holding his mother’s hand. It was only after another ten minutes of shouting and trading news that her mother said, “Oh, your father forgot, you got a phone call! It’s his business to tell you, I guess, but he forgot.” She drew herself up. “Not bad news, I hope.”

      “Nah, nah, Jesus H. Christ, Marie! Give her a break, she just drove three hundred miles!” He turned to Rose.

      “It’s some goddam military Mickey Mouse, I’d of told you tomorrow. Probably you didn’t dot the i on an exam paper.”

      “She better call,” her mother said.

      “Call tomorrow. Tonight’s for fun!”

      “I’d of had her call the moment she got here.”

      “Goddamit, Marie—”

      Rose was laughing at them, because nothing bad could happen and she knew her father was right; it was some Mickey-Mouse nothing. Still, she knew her mother wouldn’t let it go until she called, so she asked where the number was and her father said by the phone. As soon as she saw the number, she knew it was her detailer’s, and her confidence that nothing bad could happen gave a little hiccup. There was a second number, as well, with “home” written next to it in her father’s precise writing.

      Her confidence stumbled. Why did he want her to call at home? Or was that simply something that her father, a thorough man who had been a machinist and always worried about details, had asked for?

      There was no privacy in that house. Even her father believed that if you needed privacy, you’d done something bad. She walked out to her car and got her cellphone from a box of office stuff that she’d shoved in the back, and she dialed the detailer’s home number from there, leaning her buttocks against the back end of the car and looking up and down the twilit, familiar street.

      “Anders,” the male voice said.

      “Hi, uh,—this is Lieutenant-Commander Siciliano. You called me?” Letting her voice go up in that crappy, little-girl way that women affected now. Christ, what was wrong with her? “Something wrong?” she said, not able to keep from saying it, not even able now to keep the anxiety out of her voice.

      “Oh, yeah.” He sounded as if she had ruined his evening. “Thanks for calling.” She could hear papers moving, an insect sound. He had her file next to the phone! “Your orders have been changed.”

      It made no sense to her. Then it made only trivial sense—the reporting date had been changed, or the time. Or she should go to a different office. But a warning voice was murmuring, Just like Alan, just like Alan—

      “Your orders have been changed from Houston,” he said. He was going slowly, but she said, her voice steely now, “Give it to me.”

      “The Houston orders were changed, I don’t have the reason here—now don’t shoot the messenger, okay, Commander—”

      “Cut the crap. What are you trying to tell me?”

      She heard a sigh, then words spoken to somebody on his end, something like I’ll be there in a minute. Then he said, “The orders to the space program have been canceled. You have a new set of orders to a command in West Virginia. The, uh—Inter-Service Word Processing Training Center. As XO. Look, I had nothing to do with this; I just got a priority message—”

      She stopped listening.

      Her life stopped.

      She wasn’t going to astronaut training.

      But why?

      They had loved her in Houston. Her fitreps were great. Her physicals were perfect—the doctor’s own word, “perfect,” “You’re a perfect type for space.” She was perfect for space from the Navy’s PR viewpoint, too—combat experience, a mother, attractive.

      The detailer was asking her a question. Fax—did she have a fax?

      “No. No, they don’t have a fax here.” Her voice surprised her with its steadiness.

      “Well, get a fax number there someplace so I can send you the orders. The reporting date’s been put back, so you’ve got a couple of weeks to, you know, adjust things.”

      Adjust things? That did it!

      “Like my household goods, which are all on the way to Houston?”

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