My husband Marcus came home from his second deployment with both of his legs and none of the things that used to make him laugh. He was thirty-four years old and he sat in the recliner by the window for most of that first winter and looked outside at nothing in particular and answered my questions in the short, careful sentences of a man rationing his words.
I worked the day shift at a grocery store. We had two daughters, eight and eleven. We lived in a house that needed a new roof and had a truck that needed brakes and had a VA benefits process that moved at a speed that felt specifically designed to break the people it was meant to help.
I am not a person who asks for help easily. Neither is Marcus. We had always handled things ourselves because that was how both of us had been raised and because pride is a very efficient painkiller until it stops working.
In February, I broke down in the cereal aisle at the grocery store where I worked. I was stocking shelves on my break and something gave way in me very suddenly and I sat down on the floor between the Cheerios and the granola and cried in a way I had not cried since Marcus had come home and I had realized that the man who came home was not entirely the man who had left.
My coworker Linda found me there. She sat down on the floor beside me and did not say anything for a while, which was exactly right.
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