Throw Like A Girl by Jean Thompson

giving himself time to think. “What made you come up with that idea?”
    â€œIt’s a good opportunity. It’s worked out pretty well for Jack, and we could decide if either one of us wanted to make a career of it. We could be stationed together. Not right away, but somewhere down the line.”
    â€œWhat does Jack think about all this?”
    â€œHe’s open to the idea.” She had not yet told him.
    â€œAnd your little girl?”
    â€œShe’s good with Jack’s folks. One or the other of us could come back on leave from time to time. And once we got stationed together, we could have her with us.”
    He was too smooth to make fun of her outright. He was going to be patient and reasonable. He hiked his chair so that it was a scant inch closer to hers. He must have become a recruiter because he liked to convince people of things, persuading them with his big handsome head and body. He said, “It’s hard on the spouses. Always is. And here you are with a baby. Of course you miss Jack and you want to be with him and this seems like a good way to go about it. But the Army’s a lot more than that. A good four years more, if nothing else.”
    â€œI remember the terms all right.”
    â€œNo offense, Kelly Ann, but can you do even one push-up?”
    â€œI can manage.” She’d tried and she’d wound up with her face in the carpet more than a few times. But she was getting better. “I can train, just like Jack did.”
    â€œRun two miles? Carry a full pack?”
    â€œIf you think I can’t do anything at all, just say so.”
    â€œThat’s not it.”
    â€œWhat it sounds like.”
    â€œSay you go through basic and your AIT, there’s still no guarantee you’d be posted anywhere near each other.”
    â€œI thought your job was to sign people up.”
    â€œKelly Ann, there’s no pleasure or anything else in it for me if you take your oath and then show up right back here after three days.”
    â€œHow about you just walk me through it.”
    She made him lay it all out for her, the enlistment bonus, the commitment, the training, the family policies. He displayed the list of lying, glamorous careers open to her: public relations specialist, animal handler, meteorologist, flight medic, intelligence analyst. “What am I most likely to get?” she asked him.
    â€œTroop support. Clerical, maybe. You could end up driving a truck. Or in food service.”
    â€œI guess somebody has to do it.” She wasn’t going to let him scare her off with his dismal talk.
    When she left, she had a plastic bag full of applications and brochures, all the slick colored paper the Army printed up to sell you on itself. That evening she dug out her old running shoes and a pair of shorts and drove over to the high school. There was nobody else around. She set her water bottle on one of the bleachers and started a slow jog around the rubber track that circled the football field. In one corner near the fence, a killdeer had built a nest. It ran ahead of her for a little ways, pealing and dragging its wing, to lead her away from the eggs. After the third lap it decided she wasn’t a threat and left her alone. Kelly Ann got a stitch in her side after half a mile but she thought that wasn’t bad for a start. Nobody was going to expect much of her, and that would be some advantage.
    When she e-mailed Jack about enlisting, the answer came back almost right away: “ARE YOU CRAZY????” She knew if she kept at it, she could talk him into it. Of course he’d be worried about Tara, he’d say that a child needed its mother even more than its father. But most of the time Tara seemed to belong to Jack’s parents as much or more than to her. It was almost as if she’d had the baby for them and wasn’t going to get her back for a while anyway.
    Crazy was pretty much what everybody thought, including her