Homecoming

    September approached quickly.  This homecoming was going to be the telling moment.  Was this just a deployment mental crisis?  Was this real?

    One night, earlier in the month, I was looking over our checking accounts and saw an interesting charge, a rather large purchase.  It was to an online retailer for candles that had jewelry in them.  This was not for me, it couldn't be.  It was a very specific thing that was not my style.  I had never even heard of such a tawdry idea.  Who was it for then?  This couldn't be happening.  Was this the real reason?  Who was she?  Was he that brazen to purchase her something from OUR account?  Was this the shipmate who sent him pictures of them together while in port?  I denied he would ever go there.  I defended him to all of those who assumed he pulled the cliché deployment move and cheated.  "He isn't the type to do that."  I said and typed that response so many times I had convinced myself of it.  Truth is he wasn't the type, but at 19 years of marriage he was the type.  I wouldn't acknowledge the truth to this until I was sitting in my oldest daughter's first therapy session almost a year later.  

    Homecoming dates are set and changed, and sometimes changed again.  But my mind had already been made that the date didn't matter because we would not be there on the pier as the happy wife and kids eager to see our sailor again.  In words of my therapist, "he doesn't want a family anymore, then he doesn't get the family at the pier."  He had thoughts on this, I'm sure but he refrained.  I refused to pretend and the pier was NOT the place to see him.  He did say he wanted to take us to dinner and bring us the gifts from Greece.  Fine.  

    That evening he came "home" and wouldn't come inside.  He barely stepped foot into the garage.  He was done.  It was clear.  We went to dinner at our favorite Mexican restaurant.  The one we had gone to for years as a family.  That night would be the last time the four of us would dine there.  Sometime during the dinner I decided I couldn't hold it in any longer.  There was talk of those who "helped him" through the last months, they had been there before themselves.  He was omitting a lot and I knew it.  I asked about her.  Then I asked about the candles.  We were in public, I shouldn't have been afraid, but I was.  Afraid of him.  He was being faced with the truth that he denied for months.  He admitted they were for her, as a "thank you gift."  The anger in his face was something I had never seen before, not in him.  He really was the narcissist I was told he was.  My heart had somehow been smashed even more than it had been three months prior, but my eyes were now open.