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across the dirt driveway toward his house. He’d given his entire life to the Navy. He had gone to sea, risked his life every day and every night for years flying off a carrier, and now they’d turned on him. Betrayed him for a stupid incident that was unavoidable.
    He noticed Katherine’s car was still there. She always left on the early-morning flight from Reno to San Jose every Monday to go to work. He frowned. “Katherine!” he called as the screen door closed behind him. “Katherine!” There was no response.
    He walked through the house and found nothing but empty rooms. He finally made it to the master bedroom; she wasn’t there either. He stopped to listen for sounds. He suddenly heard her in the bathroom making an odd coughing sound. He wasn’t sure whether to stand there and wait or do something else. He decided to go to the kitchen to get something to drink. He opened the refrigerator and took out a beer while he waited.
    When he had told her three days before that Gun had decided to board him, she assumed, as had everyone else, that it was just a formality. Nothing would come of it. He breathed deeply. Well, something had come of it. And all they had planned and counted on was out the window.
    Things had changed a lot since they met. She had been working for a large law firm in Palo Alto, doing corporate and securities work: high technology, cutting edge, dot-coms, IPOs, M&A, VCs, Paige Mill Road. She knew all the lingo. Very heady stuff. As someone two years out of law school, she made four times what he made flying fighters off carriers in the dark. Something out of balance about that, he had thought, but he tried not to dwell on the pay. After all, she worked killer hours and didn’t get to fly fast jets. So he figured it was a wash.
    He’d been stationed at an F/A-18 squadron that was based at LeMoore Naval Air Station in the central California valley when he wasn’t at sea.
    They’d met at a concert in San Francisco —Rage Against the Machine. They’d run into each other. Literally. She had stepped on his foot and turned to apologize. Her gaze had lingered just long enough for him to know it might pay to begin a conversation with her. They’d gone out for coffee after the concert, both deserting the friends they’d come with. She thought it was “incongruous” that a Navy pilot liked a band called Rage Against the Machine. That was the word she had used: “incongruous.” That’s when he knew he wasn’t dealing with just another good-looking woman. He wasn’t even sure what “incongruous” meant, but he was sure she knew, and he was certainly willing to learn. She told him it was odd, since the machine against which they were raging was undoubtedly, at least in part, the government, those who told others what to do, and he was part of that government. He smiled, then laughed. She frowned, then laughed.
    The first thing he’d been required to explain was why he was called Stick instead of Luke. He said that it was because he was tall and thin, but she had used that opportunity to tell him she thought the whole “call-sign” thing was silly, like some fraternity initiation rite. She had called him Luke, but smiled when she said it. He knew she thought that was a funny name, too. Once she found out that he’d grown up in Nevada and was
actually wearing
cowboy boots, the entire thing was even funnier to her. Funny in an inside-joke kind of way, where she was the only one who got to know what was so damned funny, and it was he who was funny, without intending it. His haircut was certainly something she didn’t encounter every day, very short on the sides and combed forward on the top.
    That first night as they drank coffee, Luke could see her evaluating everything about him. He realized that someone without a lot of self-confidence had no chance with her. But he didn’t care a bit what she or anyone else thought about his name, or his heritage, or his boots. If she didn’t care for