In December, Daniel's branch manager at Human Resources Command called about his next assignment. There was a first sergeant position open at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, with a battalion getting ready to deploy in the spring. It was a career-making slot, the kind that put a man on the promotion list for master sergeant, and Daniel had wanted one like it for ten years. The branch manager said the slot was his if he wanted it. He had until the first of the year to decide.
He drove up to Pocahontas State Park that weekend by himself and walked the lake trail in the cold for four hours, and thought about it.
He could take the slot and take his family with him. A new post, a new house, a new start, away from the oak stump and the new step and the pegboard. Lots of marriages did that, moved to get away from their own ghosts. Some made it. He could take the slot and go alone, which would be its own kind of answer. Or he could turn it down and stay. Staying meant, almost certainly, the end of his chance at master sergeant, and it meant living with all of it every day, in the same house, on the same porch.
It was on the lake trail, somewhere around the third hour, with ice forming in the shallows, that he understood the real choice wasn't about Kentucky at all.