Free Blue Stars by Emily Gray Tedrowe Page B

minted warrior. One didn’t make a scene.
    Because that’s all it would amount to, Ellen thought dully as she drove back to the hotel. Her careful plan, her passionate arguments, her letter. It wouldn’t do any good. It was too late. Mike might hear her out but ultimately it wouldn’t matter. A time when Ellen might have been able to change his mind had passed, if one had ever existed. He was in it now, and she was too much of a coward to make a scene.

 
    6
    Eddie had been gone five weeks. His division went from Germany to Kuwait to Baghdad. He’d called and e-mailed when they were still in the Green Zone, but now he was out in Sadr City and she hadn’t heard from him in over a week. Lacey wasn’t worried; right now the Mahdi army, controlled by Moqtada al-Sadr, was mostly calm. If Mookie stayed quiet, the army could make progress on stabilizing the slum, which she knew was one of the worst in Baghdad. No plumbing, no electricity, sewage running raw through the streets.
    At the computer in her kitchen, Lacey clicked past a photo of young boys jumping up and down in their blue rubber sandals. They were waiting for the food trucks to arrive. She focused on the next series of pictures—Second Brigade, First Army guys out there with new Iraqi soldiers. These were taken before Eddie’s unit arrived, but they showed what would be his main mission: training Iraqi soldiers to find explosives, quell insurgent fire, and provide on-the-ground support for any coalition movements.
    “What a nightmare,” Lacey muttered, thinking about Eddie’s anal-retentive nature in contrast to the haphazard Iraqi discipline and organization. One photo showed an Iraqi man getting a retinal scan. He was applying to be a neighborhood guard. But so many of these guys had untrustworthy backgrounds—connections to insurgents, hostile to Americans—it was a risk just letting them do the grunt work. They were broke, desperate. They’d say anything to get a job. And then turn tail, inform to the Mahdi army, if that would get them more money. Lacey glared at the man holding open his eye for the camera. She checked a couple other threads, but not much was going on. Weekends tended to be slower on the boards.
    “Otis!” she yelled in the direction of the bathroom, shower still running. “Let’s go already!” Was he masturbating in there? But that would take two minutes, not twenty—wouldn’t it? Lacey wished someone could have a talk with him about all that guy stuff, with pointers for when and where. She was fine with male hormones in theory, she just didn’t want to think about them in her bathroom.
    Before she shut down the Internet, Lacey swung through the chat rooms at www.marriedtothemilitary.com, an anonymous online forum for military wives, girlfriends, and anyone else who had the army in their business. Most of the questions were about care package protocol (no sweets, no glitter, hide the porn) or on-base questions about housing and paychecks. There was one thread, though, that Lacey couldn’t stop thinking about. It had started several days ago when a poster who called herself “InfidelGirl” confessed that she was thinking about cheating on her Marine boyfriend. The board had erupted with outrage and scorn, blasting InfidelGirl as a homewrecker, a bitch, a slut, and a thousand more epithets that had brought the board moderators in several times to remind everyone to keep it civil. I haven’t done it yet, InfidelGirl wrote. And maybe I won’t. I’m just lonely, and at least I’m honest enough to say it. He’ll never know, anyway.
    She just wants attention, Lacey told herself. No update from InfidelGirl. Probably it’s all fake. Some people have nothing better to do, right? Lacey shut the computer, feeling vaguely dirty.
    Finally Otis was out and dressed. Lacey noticed he was wearing a short-sleeve shirt over a long-sleeve one. Was that a thing now? But with his short-sleeve tighter and the long sleeve one baggy, the look