Book Sample II

I heard about a writing contest. It's a Christian company. A contest for fiction or non-fiction pieces. Hearing about it, made me pull out my book again. A book I don't work on as often as I should. But a book that is still very much part of me.

I started talking about it with Connie. I told her I had posted a sample of my book on my blog at one point. I went back looking for it. 2008? It was 2008 that I posted the introduction chapter? Four years ago? Yepper. Here it is. To read book sample 1, click here.

I initially posted it to put some pressure on myself. To write more. And so, now, I post again. I've done a lot of work since then. But not nearly enough. And if I were going to enter this contest, I'd have to have it done by the end of January. Hmmmm .... we'll see. Either way, here's another sample to lay the pressure on myself a bit thicker.

As always, your comments are welcome.

 

Wendi heard the key in the lock and glanced at the clock. Half past seven. She’d take that. It had been a long day, but now he was home. Now she could breathe again. Now she would have him to herself until the sun rose the next morning and he wandered back to the hospital to go help other people while his wife sat at home, helpless.

He had been her rock. He had fought for them. For the marriage they had hoped they would one day have.

And he wanted her to fight this too. This sadness. This grief. Fight Wendi. Fight.

He walked in and dropped his array of supplies onto the counter: pager, keys, jump drive, palm pilot, and uniform hat. He’d only been wearing that military uniform for a few weeks now, and she still hadn’t gotten completely used to it. While he had been on inactive duty during his four years of medical school, the only thing he had done remotely military during that time was four weeks of Commissioned Officers’ Training during the summer between his first and second years of medical school. Other than that, the only reason they even remembered he was in the military was the stipend that arrived every month and the absence of nasty medical school debt accumulation. But now, here he was being saluted and called sir and shining his boots not nearly as often as he should.

 
“How was your day?” she managed to ask and was relieved when he waited to fill her in and instead scooped her into his arms.
 
They were the same height. She had been so glad about that. At 6’3” and not wanting to date or marry someone shorter than her, her selection pool had already been significantly shrunk. Thank goodness he was her height. Both 6’3”. She had always worried about finding a guy her height. Who would have guessed she would find him at her tiny Christian school when she was in the third grade. Despite his military cut, it was easy to see that at 31, he still had a full head of brown hair. He also had the most amazing crystal clear green eyes she had ever laid eyes on. The same brown hair and gorgeous green eyes she had noticed when she was nine.
 
“How’s my babe?” He asked, and it wasn’t surprising to either of them when she started crying again. “That good, huh?” he joked, trying in vain to lighten her mood. She forced a grin and the deep crying that she knew would come out sometime soon, dissipated – for a moment at least.

“I had a good morning,” she said as she shuffled my feet across the living room and sank onto their new sofa. Ten years of marriage, and they had finally bought furniture – a new sofa, loveseat, and chair as well as a dining room table which cost more than their first car. The furniture was a padding – a gift to give themselves since they couldn’t get what they really wanted. “And then, I’m not sure what it was. A commercial or something. It just set me off. I started crying. And I couldn’t stop.”

 
John sat down across from her and started untying his boots. He looked up only to tell her again that he was sorry she was so sad and he wished he could do something to help. He mumbled something about whether she was enjoying the new furniture, and she nodded even though it wasn’t really believable nor important.
 
What she couldn’t put into words was how the new furniture was a part of the problem. Everything was new. Everything was foreign. She was grieving their fourth failed attempt at invitro fertilization and the realization that they may never be parents in a home that didn’t feel like her own. Back in Minnesota, when the calls would come in that another attempt had not been successful, she could curl up on her old brown couch and cry. She could eat ice cream at the kitchen counter while John cooked her Indian food in the kitchen they had designed and gutted and rebuilt together. She could take a hot bath in her own bathtub or swim in our condo’s pool. She could go for a run on sidewalks she knew (or, if it was too cold, a treadmill she knew). She could visit with her friends and find support and encouragement in comfortable and familiar ways.
 
But here she was in a new town, on a military base, in a three bedroom house which was larger than anything they had ever owned. There was new furniture and unpacked boxes and the walls were all the same pale yellow. They had decided not to paint them when the housing Nazis told them that when we left in three years, they would just have to prime them all back to that drab yellow color anyway. They still owned their condo in Minnesota and were renting it out. They didn’t need to do work to a home they didn’t own and knew they would be leaving in three years again anyway. So they took a vote. It was unanimous. No painting in this house. No projects that were not vital to their lives. The walls stayed yellow. Drab yellow. Not exactly a color that evoked a sense of happiness in the midst of another round of grief.

Oh and the worst thing of all was that other than John, Wendi’s list of people she knew in the area was pretty limited. Her husband promised that they were planning some meet-and-greet activities that would help the spouses connect. But for now, there was nothing and no one.

She had met a few people – neighbors mostly. And not surprisingly, she had yet to meet anyone who did not have children in their home. Everyone on this beautiful base bordering the bay seemed to have a young someone. “These military bases,” Wendi had told her husband over spaghetti during their second week at Eglin, “are breeding grounds.” John smirked. She smirked back. “I mean it,” she continued, winding some spaghetti onto her fork and holding it in front of her mouth while she went on. “Nearly everyone who lives here is between the ages of 20 and 40 – the perfect age for getting pregnant and doing so excessively and with great vigor.”

John nodded. “Yeah and add to that insurance coverage for everyone. Free housing.”

“Right. Families move a lot and the significant other doesn’t bother to find work for a short period of time. People aren’t shacking up because the military won’t pay for that. Oh, and long deployments meant big celebrations upon returning home.” She sighed and stuffed the mound of spaghetti into her mouth.

 It was a recipe for disaster for this infertile girl. During any introduction to any neighbor the questions came out in a completely predictable succession. “Are you military? Is your husband military? Do you have any kids? Well drink the water here and you’ll be prego pronto.”  

If only water was the answer. If only it were that simple.

Wendi started to tell these things to John and then decided better of it. For one, he’d heard them before. And for two, she was too emotionally spent to bother trying to explain something that she didn’t quite understand herself.

Instead, she let her husband lead her to the office and back to that broken computer desk chair. He plopped down in it, and as it made a terrible groaning sound, he laughed under his breath.

“What?” she said, knowing exactly why he had laughed.

“Nothing,” he said back. She rolled her eyes and he pulled up a folding chair next to him. “It’s just, well, you are such a cheap-skate.”  

She started to argue but then realized it was pointless. He was right. She had been incredibly blessed when they left Minnesota to have two of her freelance jobs offer to keep her on, twenty hours each, via telecommuting from their new home on Eglin Air Force Base in the panhandle of Florida. You’d think that sitting in the same place eight hours a day would encourage her to invest a little bit of her earnings into a new desk chair. But not Wendi.

“I’m Dutch. Remember?” she sighed back.

 
“That you are.”

Wendi let the comment fall and turned toward her husband. “So,” she said.

“So,” he said back. “Are you ready for your surprise?”

She nodded, having no idea what surprise he could give her while she was sitting in her old broken chair. He leaned over her and began sliding and clicking the mouse eagerly, a boyish grin spread wide across his face. His clicking led them to YouTube and a video on a page she had never seen before.

“Well, here it is,” he mumbled and clicked play.

In the moment he clicked the button and the video started, Wendi’s simple world as she knew it was transformed. A tiny little puppy with newly emerging black spots began pouncing across the screen, traipsing through the grass, playfully frolicking amidst the legs of his breeder.

“What is this?” she asked, terribly confused as the puppy jumped and grabbed onto the breeder’s legs.

“It’s your puppy.”

“My puppy?”

He nodded. A little male Dalmatian with spots galore. “They call him Pisser,” he laughed as they watched him play with some shoelaces before the video came to an end and he pressed play to watch it again. “But we can change that. Obviously.”

And for the first time in weeks, she smiled.

P.S. And while this can't be in my blog, for those of you who are interested, here is the video my husband played for me way back in 2007!