He texts me every August

I'm five foot five. Getting it out of the way first, because everybody else does, and they did it every day for six years.

Text came in on the twelfth at six-forty in the morning, which is my birthday. I was on 316 headed to a changeout in Dacula with a Goodman condenser sliding around in the back of the van. Happy birthday dude. Same two words, nine years of it now. Only this time there's a picture under it.

August in Gwinnett County means every attic I climb into is about a hundred and twenty-five degrees and I'm up there with a flashlight in my teeth looking at a coil some cat's been sleeping on. It's money.

Army was 2015 to 2021. Fort Riley, Kansas, which I'm not going to describe to you, and then Poland. Bemowo Piskie. Orzysz is the town down the road and there's a Biedronka and a kebab place that was open at hours that made no sense.

Okay so Hovde.

Hovde was in my section. Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Big guy, red in the face from about May on. Wife named Kayla and a kid nine weeks old when we flew out, which you learn in the first twenty minutes because it's the only thing he had pictures of.

They put us in one of the containers and handed out a stack of four-by-eights and said make two rooms out of it if you want. I'd been running a chop saw since I was seventeen, on install crews out of Norcross. So I built the divider and it was square, and everybody had a comment about a short guy and a saw. Hovde hung a poster of a Silverado on his side.

Eight months.

It started in February. We slept together most nights after that, right through to the end of it.

He had a coffee maker he took off a Danish guy and never gave back. He'd call Kayla at 0500 because of the time difference, and I'd lie there listening to him be nice to her through the plywood, and then he'd hang up and come around to my side.

Winter there, it gets dark at three-thirty in the afternoon and stays dark. We had a gym in a tent with a bar that was bent. We ran the same four things over and over. I pulled staff duty on Christmas and he brought me a plate from the DFAC, turkey and the yams with the marshmallows on top, and sat on the desk with me for four hours talking about a boat he was going to buy, and he never bought it, and I'd bet money he still talks about it.

We were out on a range in the mud two weeks in November and my knee went and he carried my stuff, and he made an entire routine out of it, the short guy bit, and I let him.

Best year I've had.

Retention came around in the spring. I had a window, and there was a guy at Carson who could've got me a slot with rank on it, and Carson's Colorado, which is a real place with mountains. I sat in a conex with the retention NCO and signed for three more, same unit, same section.

We came back to Riley and it went the way it goes. He ETS'd in November, and with the leave he had saved up he was really gone by the first week of October. Last time I saw him was in the lot behind the barracks, and he shook my hand and told me to drive safe.

We never talked about any of it. I still don't know if that's about Kayla.

The first text came the August after. I looked at it for a long time in the parking lot of the Publix on Peachtree Industrial and then I wrote thanks man. His number's saved in my phone as just Hovde. No first name, no nothing.

I got out and came home. Bought the van a year later and put my name on the side of it.

My mom's got a dry cleaner off Pleasant Hill. Saturdays I bring her lunch when I'm not on a call. I changed the belt on her dryer in the back last spring and she paid me for the part. She's never asked me one question about the Army. Not where I was, not why I got out. She asks me in Korean if I ate, and then she goes back to the conveyor and I let myself out.

So, the picture. The kid's standing on a dock holding a bass up with both hands, and it's not a big bass, but he's got it up over his head like it's a record. Packers shirt about three sizes too big on him. And he's got Hovde's face, which I wasn't ready for. Same thing around the eyes where you can tell he's about to laugh before anything's funny.

I sat at the light at Sugarloaf looking at it until the guy behind me laid on the horn.

I didn't answer till two in the afternoon. I was in a crawl space in Snellville with my shirt off because it was a hundred and four under that house, and I typed it with one thumb. Big fish.

Thumbs up came back. That was the whole conversation.

Then I finished taping the plenum and came out from under the house with gravel in both knees.