We had a marriage measured in returns — the ache of the leaving, the long gray middle of the deployment when I couldn’t say where he was and half the time didn’t know, and then the almost unbearable brightness of the homecoming, every one of them like a small resurrection.

People pity that, when they hear it.

They shouldn’t.

We loved each other across distances most couples never have to survive, and the love got stronger for the survival, denser, like a thing under pressure.

He wrote me letters he wasn’t supposed to write and I burned them after reading like I wasn’t supposed to keep them, and in every one, somewhere near the end, he’d draw the house — a stick-figure house with a stick-figure garden and two stick figures and then, in the later ones, three, four, a whole crooked row of them under a lopsided sun.

That was the future he was building toward, payment by payment, board by board, homecoming by homecoming.