Keep His Word
A story about what a promise looks like when it finds its way home
When you lose someone, time does something you are not prepared for. The days do not simply pass. They fold together in strange ways, so that three months can feel like three weeks and three years simultaneously, and you wake each morning into a brief and merciful blankness before the knowledge reassembles itself, as it always does, before you have fully opened your eyes. I have been waking up this way since November. I make two cups of coffee every morning still, the second one going cold on the counter while I stand at the kitchen window watching the yard, and I have not been able to make myself stop doing it. It is not delusion. I know Keith is not coming back. It is just that the hands do what the hands have always done, and retraining them feels like a concession I am not ready to make.
His boots are still by the door. I moved them once, three weeks after the funeral, and put them in the hall closet because the sight of them was making it hard to breathe. Then I moved them back. I am not sure what that says about me and I have stopped trying to analyze it. A grief counselor at the family support center on base told me that the objects we cannot move are usually the ones doing the most important work, and I have been holding onto that idea without being entirely sure I understand it. What I know is that every night I triple-check the front lock before I go to bed, because Keith always did that, always made that final circuit of the house before turning in, and the habit has transferred to me now the way habits do when someone you love performs them long enough that they become part of the architecture of the house itself.
His name was Keith Allen. He was thirty-four years old, a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps, and he had been my husband for seven years and my best friend for three years before that. He was the kind of man who remembered things: the name of your childhood dog, the story you told once at a party about your grandmother’s garden, the particular way you liked your eggs on Sunday mornings when the week had been hard. He had a quality of attention that made you feel, when he turned it on you, that you were the most interesting thing in whatever room you were both standing in. Our daughter Katie has his eyes, that same quality in them, that same capacity for full presence. Some days looking at her is the hardest thing I do, and some days it is the only thing that makes the rest of it bearable, and most days it is both at once.
Katie is seven years old. She is small for her age, which she is philosophical about in the way that small children are sometimes philosophical about things that adults would find maddening, and she has a collection of pink socks that she regards as semi-sacred, one pair designated for every occasion that matters to her. She wore them to her first day of first grade and to her grandmother’s birthday and to the school spelling bee in October, which she won, and she had already decided weeks in advance that she would wear them to the father-daughter dance in February. The dance had been on our family calendar since September, penciled in by Keith in his particular block handwriting, a small star drawn beside it the way he marked things he was looking forward to.
He had promised her. That is the word he used, promised, not just said or planned but promised, with the specific gravity he gave to that word, which was considerable. He had told her in the kitchen one evening while she was eating cereal and he was getting ready for PT, bending down to her level and telling her in the serious tone he used when something was important: I will take you to every father-daughter dance, Katie-Bug. Every single one. That is a promise. She had nodded with equal seriousness, the way she received his promises, as binding documents. She had been holding this one for five months when he deployed in the fall, and she had been holding it still when the casualty notification officers came to our door in November, and I do not know whether she understood in the weeks that followed what the promise becoming impossible meant, because she did not mention it again until the night before the dance.
