It went about as I'd predicted. Eventually they just stopped communicating with me, even when I reached out to them. I learned later that Dad died in oh-four of a heart attack, and Mom went last year from the same thing. They never returned any of my letters. I wrote twice a year. I just kept busy at a local salon, while Jenny worked her desk at the medical group.

Jenny's parents were out of the country when I came home, and I never met them the two weeks we were together before that, so we didn't meet 'til July of ninety-eight. They were surprised, but not half as much as Jenny was!

In the mean time, Rich and Heather were getting into the swing of being new parents. Rich loved being 'Mister Mom' to Faith and ran the house like his own personal fire team! Shortly after she was born, they started looking into moving. There were too many sad memories lurking around the home she grew up in, and Rich wanted a place that would be all their own.

So two weeks after I said goodbye to Jenny, Heather, and Rich, I was saying goodbye to Jack and Erica, too. I was being shipped off to Okinawa, which left me so far from everyone else it wasn't worth trying to get home to see anyone. I poured myself into my job and counted the days. All I had to get me though it was the memory of those blissful two weeks and the occasional phone call that I made off base.

In the interim, Erica graduated with a degree in Psychology, and she and Jack were getting ready to start their new life.

Later on, when Jack and I were talking, everyone else being busy, he told me about Judith and what all happened between them that day. I wanted Jack to know that no matter what, I would be there for him and Erica both. There's not a lot of things you can count on in this world, but I think my friendship with Jack and Rich could be counted as one of them.

Most of the time, you think you know what's going to happen in life. Things like Thanksgiving come around and you... you expect certain things. Turkey, stuffing, football, napping on the couch, talking and laughing with family and friends... You know, the predictable things that are why we have things like Thanksgiving in the first place. To take time together with the people we love and make a memory.

Sometimes things happen that you don't expect though, and would and could, never see coming.

The bedrooms were all on the second and third floors, each with their own private bath, with two bathrooms on the main floor. The attached garage had chauffeur's quarters, as well as a machine shop... and that was just the house!

The property itself was almost beyond description. Forty-five acres with a private pond, apple orchard, woods, walkways, green space, equestrian trails, and, oh yes, lets not forget the 'barn'! The three-story barn with heated stalls and tack room and its own laundry! The second floor was a home for stable workers. Kitchen, living area, bathroom, with the three bedrooms on the third floor, and all of it surrounded by forestlands and fields that were donated to the state as a preserve. It was truly magnificent!

When we first arrived, I thought Heather was trying to show off, but she was just as warm and friendly as she'd always been. She was just very proud of her family home.

Jack got a job managing a dry-cleaners in Palo Alto, meanwhile Rich was busy finishing his degree. With Heather and Rich graduating shortly after he and Jack were officially shifted to the Reserves, a full year ahead of Erica's graduation and sixteen months before the end of my cruise, we all knew it meant big changes were coming in our lives. Rich had talked about taking an office job somewhere in LA so he could be close to Jack, Erica, and his parents, but he never got into any details. I guess he was just stalling.

I remember the last dinner we had all together that summer. It was at Heather and Rich's apartment because it was bigger. I'm pretty sure Jack knew what was coming, but it didn't make it any easier to take.

Jack told me about his plan for the weekend of March twenty-third, ninety-six. He'd thought of everything, but needed Heather and me to help pull it off. So we spent four weeks between Jack burying his mom and the weekend of the twenty-third plotting, scheming, and basically having a blast planning the surprise of a lifetime for both Erica and Richard. Rich almost caught us once. He walked into the shop while I had stuff out he shouldn't see, but he could be a bit oblivious at times. He never had a clue!

Rich once told me that he thought Jack didn't know how to plan ahead... that he seemed incapable of thinking more than five minutes into the future. He thought Jack was wasting his time and opportunities by not going to college on the government dime. We'd earned it, so why not take advantage? The truth is Jack did have a plan for what he wanted to do, he just had different priorities than Rich. He thought love and happiness, even in total poverty, were better than living in the lap of luxury...

...but Jack did know how to plan.

I learned a lot about Rich, too. She didn't talk as animatedly about him as she did Jack, but she knew all his secrets! I don't know what it is about being a beautician, but women will bear their souls to us the way guys do with a bartender. They tell us things they won't even tell their shrink!

For Jack's part, he was just so damnably, blissfully, innocently, ignorant of Erica's feelings toward him it was hard to watch! It wasn't that Jack didn't see her that way because she was younger, but because of something much more basic. She was his best friend's sister, and that made her almost like his own. It's a little creepy if you think too hard about it!

Jack wasn't one to look a gift horse in the mouth, though. Erica loved him, and had loved him through some of the worst times of his life. He wasn't about to let that get away, no matter who she was.

Not that I was sleeping around a lot, mind you, but I went on a few dates, mostly with college girls. I never risked dating a fellow W-M. While Rich and Jack were running cover for me, I couldn't count on any of them having similar arrangements. We also never went anywhere that was near the base.

If I had a date, which was rare, it was always somewhere remote and out of the way... never any of the usual places the Hellcats or anchor-clankers might go. The only times we'd go places like the Warf or any place we could get seen it was the three of us, sometimes with a girl Rich was seeing, but never with a girl Jack was seeing. That wasn't often and never the same girl more than once, for any of us!

By ninety-four, things got easier with 'don't ask, don't tell', but we kept up the pretense of Jack being my boyfriend because it just made things easier. For me, anyway. Most W-Ms got hit on all the time, but once it got around that Jack and I were an item, I was off limits. Grunts had no qualms about hitting on W-Ms if they we're seeing a civi or were even married to one, but they'd rarely turn on a fellow member of the Corps. I felt bad for Jack, though. It made his success rate with the ladies track nearly to zero.

Even when it looked like maybe Jack had a shot at a terrific girl, something would always screw it up.