Sara had been too long a military wife to be able to ignore the phone--especially not today, when she had watched Jack walk away with...
Not today.
"Hello?"
"Sweetheart? It's Mom. Were you waiting for a call?"
Sara closed her eyes, hearing the echo of her own worry in her mother's familiar question. Military mothers-in-law developed their own habits.
"Not really, mom. It's all right. Dad called you?"
"Sara, he said..."
For years, all she'd talked to her mother about was Jack, and then about Charlie. Then she'd lost Charlie, and lost Jack. It had seemed like she was losing her mother, too, in the silences of the wife- and motherhood they no longer had in common.
"Mom, can we--I can't--"
A brief silence, and then her mother said, "So, did you get that truck running?"
Sara's eyes filled with tears of gratitude. "It'll do for now, yeah."