The Longest Yard Sale Read Online Free PDF

career.
    It wasn’t a glam job like flying fighter jets. Since the end of the Cold War, the career field led nowhere. The best way to get a promotion was to get into another field, which wasn’t great for morale. Missileers worked varying shifts, going out to the missile sites, then deep underground, where huge, steel blast doors locked them within a dingy space full of noisy equipment and speakers that continuously blasted codes. They spent the night with a crew partner, taking turns sleeping. Since the early ’90s, crew partners didn’t have to be the same sex. I had a friend who joked about her husband spending the night with another woman a month after they’d married. It was his crew partner, but more than one crew team had ended up in a relationship.
    â€œDid he know his officers were cheating?”
    â€œHe says he didn’t. I believe him. But since he was at the top of the food chain and the troops were his responsibility, he got the blowback.”
    â€œWas he fired?” Being fired in the military wasn’t the same as being fired in the civilian world. It usually meant being removed from your current position and sent to another base with less responsibility. It almost always ended any possibility of future promotions. CJ had always said Bubbles was a fast burner—meaning he was getting promoted “below the zone,” or early. He’d made colonel early and was on the fast track to becoming a general.
    â€œYes. Now he’ll never make general.”
    â€œHe must be really disappointed.”
    â€œHe’s had a great attitude. He started a financial planning company with a civilian he knows from Hanscom. They both have a couple of months left until they retire.”
    CJ, of all people, knew how disappointing it was to have your career end under a cloud. He’d retired quickly and quietly after one of his troops accused him of fraternization and said she was having his baby. By the time the truth came out, CJ was already out of the air force and the chief of police in Ellington. A lawyer had approached CJ about suing to get back in, but CJ was content with his new job.
    â€œHow’d he end up here?”
    â€œHe wanted to come. His kids are with his ex-wife, Jill, in Nashua. His parents are in Maine. Bubbles had planned to come back to this area eventually, anyway.”
    â€œAt least something worked out for him.”
    â€œI didn’t come here to talk about Bubbles,” CJ said.
    I grabbed the bottle of wine and poured the rest of it into my glass. “I’m sorry about the traffic.” I took a drink. “No. Actually I’m not. It was a great event, and Nancy was really pleased. There are other events that cause traffic problems in Ellington. It just goes with the territory, right?”
    â€œIt was a great event. I’m happy for you. But that’s not why I’m here. I want to talk about us.”
    Damn, I was afraid of that. “We’ve talked about us. You agreed we’d date. That we’d date other people. That we’d take this slow.”
    â€œFor how long? That was six months ago. We were happy.”
    â€œIt’s me, CJ. I have to figure out why it was so easy for me to turn my back on nineteen years of marriage. Why I wouldn’t even listen when you said you didn’t sleep with Tiffany.” I stood, slamming the kitchen chair into the cabinet behind it. CJ followed me into the living room. I plopped into my grandmother’s rocking chair so I didn’t have to sit next to him on the couch. It sat by the window that overlooked the town common. “Until I figure that out, I can’t come back.”
    â€œAre you really pulling the ‘it’s me, not you’ crap on me?”
    â€œI don’t want to hurt you again.”
    â€œYou are hurting me.”
    I looked out the window over the common toward Great Road. The lights blinked out in Carol’s store.