Homefront: Stories

By Victoria Kelly

Inspired by Victoria Kelly’s experiences as the wife of a fighter pilot during three wartime deployments, this collection follows women whose lives have been impacted by war and military service as they struggle with their fragile ideas of home. 

In “Prayers of an American Wife,” a Navy wife grapples with loneliness when she discovers that her neighbor, also a Navy wife, is having an affair while their husbands are deployed on the same aircraft carrier. Tensions rise in “The Strangers of Dubai” as a soldier on leave tries to buy his wife a souvenir from an Afghan vendor. After attending eight funerals with fellow military wives whose husbands died in the Iraq war, the protagonist in “Finding the Good Light” divorces her Navy husband and tries to start a new life as a movie star. These, along with the eleven other stories in this collection, explore the emotional landscape of the resilient women who remain on the homefront.

Kelly’s stories offer readers an intimate, eye-opening look into the sacrifices and steadfastness of military family members.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Release date: Jan 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9781647791452

Victoria Kelly

Victoria Kelly received her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her B.A. Summa Cum Laude from Harvard University, and her M.Phil. in creative writing from Trinity College Dublin, where she was a US Mitchell Scholar. She is the author of the poetry collection When the Men Go Off to War. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in the anthologies Best American Poetry 2013 and Contemporary American Poetry, as well as Alaska Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and North American Review. She lives in Virginia with her husband and daughters.

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Cover Page for Homefront

Praise for Homefront: Stories

"If you’ve given up on the power of the short story, this book will change your mind for good. In Homefront, Kelly gives us characters tied together by a proximity to war, but it’s truly America’s story, in the hands of a master of the genre."

—Karin Tanabe, author of The Sunset Crowd

"Victoria Kelly leverages her skills as a writer with her own experiences as a fighter pilot’s spouse to capture military life from fourteen unique and engaging perspectives. Homefront is beautiful, heartbreaking, and unflinchingly honest."

—Ward Carroll, author of Punk’s War, YouTuber, and retired naval aviator

"Victoria Kelly has penned gorgeous short stories in Homefront that encompass the deep nuances within families affiliated with the military. Written tenderly and respectfully, each thought-provoking story is a page-turner and a new experience, allowing me to take a breath and dive into the intricacies and important daily lives of her characters."

—Tif Marcelo, USA Today bestselling author of In a Book Club Far Away

"In a market overwhelmed by male voices and perspectives, Homefront adds important diversity to the literary landscape and does so in a powerful way. Kelly’s writing is exceptional, the characters are interesting, the writing about military culture is convincing, and the storylines are thoughtful and well-paced. Every aspect of Homefront is authentic."

—Caleb Cage, U.S. Army veteran, author of Desert Mementos: Stories of Iraq and Nevada

"The stories that comprise Homefront wrestle with classic dilemmas of desire and regret, hope and loss, in new and often wrenching ways. In this superb, eminently readable collection, Victoria Kelly cements herself as one of our great chroniclers of the war and peace found in contemporary American life."

—Matt Gallagher, author of Daybreak and Youngblood

The Battle Born Series

Caleb S. Cage, Series Editor

From 1864, when it joined the United States at the height of the Civil War, Nevada has played an important role in the nation’s wars, the training of its soldiers, and the development of its military technologies. The books in this series explore the lives, families, and literature of the soldiers who have served the state and the nation. Series editor Caleb Cage invites fiction, creative nonfiction, and scholarly works from any geographic area that engage with the issues at the heart of the American military.

Gunning for Ho: Vietnam Stories

H. Lee Barnes

Acceleration Hours: Stories

Jesse Goolsby

Desert Mementos: Stories of Iraq and Nevada

Caleb S. Cage

Minimal Damage: Stories of Veterans

H. Lee Barnes

Remembering Korea: A Boy Soldier’s Story

H. K. Shin

American Commander in Spain: Robert Hale Merriman and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade

Marion Merriman and Warren Lerude

A Private War: An American Code Officer in the Belgian Congo

Robert Laxalt

Homefront: Stories

Victoria Kelly

Homefront

Stories

Victoria Kelly

University of Nevada Press | Reno, Nevada 89557 USA

www.unpress.nevada.edu

Copyright © 2024 by University of Nevada Press

All rights reserved

Cover design by TG Design

Cover photography: Shutterstock.com by Kim Ruoff; Maxy M; Kryuchka Yaroslav; and aspen rock.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA ON FILE

ISBN 978-1-64779-144-5 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-64779-145-2 (ebook)

LCCN 2023942820

For Nate–

I wish I knew you then. And for Alida, Rose, Everly, Lexi, and Carter — No matter how old you get, you can always come home.

Contents

A Note from the Author

Finding the Good Light

Prayers of an American Wife

The Strangers of Dubai

The Whispering Gallery

All the Ways We Say Goodbye

The View from Bonnell Lane

A Home Like Someone Else’s Home

Tonight Everything Will Be Quiet and Still

Waiting for the Creel

The Chimney

The Wedding

Rachel’s Story

What Happened On Crystal Mountain

Little Angels, Little Dolls

Acknowledgments

About the Author

A Note from the Author

I wrote these stories over ten years when I was the wife of a fighter pilot, during his three wartime deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. During the first deployment, my greatest challenge was the loneliness of being a newlywed alone in a new city. By the third, I was the mother of two toddlers, living in a hotel room after my house was flooded by a hurricane. I grew up a whole lot.

These fourteen stories follow women whose lives have been impacted by war and military service in direct and indirect ways—from a Navy wife who discovers that her neighbor is having an affair while their husbands are deployed to a student who makes an unexpected connection with a German concentration camp survivor. The themes of loneliness, identity, guilt, and love were all emotions I grappled with during that time.

From the outside, I might have seemed like the perfect military wife. But nothing’s ever what it seems. War, from the time of Odysseus and Penelope, has always taken its toll on families. My grandfather was a medic in Nagasaki after the atomic bomb fell. I never met him; he turned to alcohol to cope with what he’d been through and died in his forties. My own first marriage eventually ended in divorce.

When I started this book, I was a new wife, living near the naval base in Meridian, Mississippi. I had just graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I finished the stories four cities and too many homes later to count. Still, that old military life—the good and the bad—echoes through the years. My oldest daughters’ father, remarried now, just finished a year-long deployment to Africa. I also married again, to a former Marine sniper platoon commander who fought in Ramadi during some of the most dangerous conflicts of the Iraq War. I’ve learned that no matter what role you played—pilot, soldier, officer, mother, spouse—you never really leave that life behind.

These stories and the people in them are fictional, but they wouldn’t exist without the many real experiences that shaped them. They were some of the most meaningful adventures of my life.

Finding the Good Light

Diane was twenty-seven when she was cast in her first movie, an age considered old in the film industry. And she felt it; in the years before that, she had already lived a whole life, and so had her cast mates, most of whom were even older than she was. Some nights while they were filming, they sat around in one of the tiny trailers, drinking from plastic cups of beer and wondering how it was they’d all ended up in the backwaters of Floribama, trying to be movie stars.

The film was about the Depression years when Claudette Colbert made It Happened One Night with Clark Gable, and Diane was cast as Claudette. It was a tiny movie from a tiny studio based forty-five minutes outside of Hollywood, and there was a lightheartedness among the cast, an unspoken acknowledgment that they were never going to be able to pull off such a show believably, so why even worry about it?—they were, after all, unknown actors playing famous actors playing characters from one of the most famous movies of the prewar years. Bill, who played Clark Gable, was a veterinarian from Philadelphia, and Vincent, who was cast as Paramount director Frank Capra, had come straight from the community theater of White Plains, New York. All of them had been discovered in one way or another by Romey Layfield, the director, who said their never having been on-screen before would help people suspend their disbelief.

For budget reasons, the whole thing was filmed in Alabama over the course of one hot, dusty summer, so by the time the movie premiered in nine theaters, and then nine hundred, and then—to everyone’s amazement—nine thousand, Diane had only been to California one time, to sign her contract before the whole thing began.

She didn’t have an agent or a résumé longer than one line, and she hadn’t been able to get another acting job after the filming ended, before the movie came out and people learned her name. But then, suddenly, they were calling her—wealthy, important people from Los Angeles and New York, journalists and clothing designers and theater directors who had turned her down for half a dozen roles in the weeks before. She was offered ten jobs in the period of two days, and she didn’t know who to say yes to, so she jotted down the directors’ names on a yellow legal pad by the phone and said she would call them back.

The first time she was followed by a photographer, it was right after The Girl from Saint-Mandé was picked up by Regal Theaters, and she was living in a tiny apartment across from a church in Morristown, New Jersey, where she’d grown up. Her parents were long dead by then, and the aunt who’d raised her had moved to Naples, Florida, but she still felt a strange attachment to that New Jersey town—its parks and panederías and even the luxury condominium building that had replaced Epstein’s department store. And she liked the heavy, solid permanence of the gray stone church across the street, which always had a candle lit near the altar.

It happened while she was in the parking garage of Century 21, on her way home from buying a dress for a friend’s party. It was late, after the store had closed, and she had emerged alone into the dark garage when she thought she heard something behind her in the stairwell. It was starting to be the time of night when people didn’t go out in certain neighborhoods in Morristown, and she was frightened when the man, tall and dressed entirely in black, appeared behind her. She was sure he was going to mug or rape her. But then, instead of attacking her, he pulled out a camera and took her picture, and the shot—her stricken, doe-eyed expression of terror—appeared the following week in Life & Style. She took the magazine into the supermarket bathroom and studied the photograph. It would have been thrilling if it had been any other picture. But it was strange, and almost worrisome—how stunningly, trustingly childlike she appeared. And she realized that this was what people saw when they looked at her—someone who hadn’t yet been tainted by the drama of drugs or money or sex, someone whose best years weren’t already behind her. This was why they loved her.

---

• • •

It was only a matter of time, of course, before the truth got out—that she had already been married and divorced; that she’d been to eight funerals—eight—of women whose husbands had died in various explosions on the ground or in the air over Iraq; that her parents had been vacationing in Mexico City during the earthquake of 1985, when she was just a year old, and never made it back.

She met Jack when she was nineteen, just out of high school and on a trip to Pensacola to look at condominiums with her aunt. Jack was twenty-two and in the first weeks of flight school. The war in Iraq had just started, and he was so full of energy, so swollen with life that she almost believed he could give her back all those years she’d lost after her parents died. In the Navy, even officers married young, and within four months they were dancing their first wedding dance on a beach outside the base, celebrating with her aunt and Jack’s mother and father and a handful of his flight school classmates.

She remembered to show her pink ID card in the commissary before the cashier had to ask for it, figured out how to budget on Jack’s ensign’s salary, and learned to lie and say she wasn’t a military wife on her job applications so they wouldn’t know she’d probably be gone in another year. Most important, she settled easily into the wives’ groups. She liked the other women; most of them were bored like her, and they called one another a lot, mostly for no reason, and went to movies and played tennis at the courts on base on the weekends.

After three years and four moves, Jack had his wings and was flying over Baghdad. They began talking about children when he got back. But almost as soon as he was home, he was gone again, to Key West for the next round of workups, and then he went back over the ocean, this time to Afghanistan. She read about SAM sites in the news and every night while he was gone, when she came home from her job selling dresses in a bridal salon, she always expected to see the chaplain and the other wives standing on her doorstep. Midway through, she got the call that it had happened after all, but to someone else’s husband, and a few hours later she found herself in the sad huddle on some other woman’s driveway. Nothing was the same after that.

One miscarriage, two deployments, and seven years after their wedding day, her husband came home from Afghanistan to tell her on the tarmac, full of remorse, that he’d met someone else on the aircraft carrier, a female flight officer just out of the Academy, and he didn’t want to be married anymore, not to her at least.

She had been an officer’s wife, had gone to parties with admirals. But standing alone in the foyer of their house after he had gone, she understood with sudden clarity that all she really had was a high school education and a string of retail jobs on her résumé.

---

• • •

Romey found her sitting at a Waffle House midway between Virginia Beach and Naples. When he told her he was casting for a movie, she tried not to look him in the face. I don’t think I’m the person you’re looking for, she said, sliding a little closer to the outside edge of her booth in case he tried to sit down next to her. She’d heard about men like him.

Yes, he insisted. You’re exactly it. He seemed nervous and excited, and she asked him what he was doing at a Waffle House in South Carolina if he really was a Hollywood director.

I’m visiting my son, he said. He lives here.

I’m actually on my way to Florida, she told him, wishing he would leave. And I’m not an actress. I’m sorry.

He waved his hand. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to act. I can’t pay you very much anyway. He caught himself. "But I will pay you," he added.

Pay me for what, exactly? she wanted to ask.

But he didn’t seem like he was after sex. He was around the age her father would have been if he had lived, and he stood there in front of her table with his shoulders slightly hunched, as if he was trying not to take up too much space. When she noticed he was wearing sneakers with white gym socks and pants that stopped at his ankles, the way she knew her father would have dressed if he had aged past thirty-two, she felt a warm, complete swelling of affection toward him, like the air expanding inside a balloon.

A few hours later, she met him in his hotel room to talk about the script. She was still dubious about his intentions, but he didn’t try to hit on her, and he really did have a script laid out on the wooden coffee table.

Claudette Colbert, he said. Diane hadn’t heard of her, but he showed her a picture, and she looked up at him in disbelief. She really did look like Claudette Colbert. Why had no one told her before? She had never really thought of herself as beautiful, but here was this woman who had been famous, and people had loved this woman, and this woman looked like her. And she thought, giddy, I’m going to be in a movie.

Two weeks later the divorce papers had been filed and she was driving out to California to go over the contract.

---

• • •

In the end, instead of signing with one of the big studios after she became famous, she agreed to do another of Romey’s films. There wasn’t a question of anything else, really. He had saved her, and not in the way Jack had saved her. He was just honest with her from the start: that he wasn’t famous, and she probably wouldn’t ever be famous either, and neither would Bill or Vincent or the rest of the cast. They were all just trying to be a part of something they could look back on and say, I did that, I was there.

But by the time she signed with Romey for the second film there were rumors that The Girl from Saint-Mandé would be nominated for the SAG awards, she had appeared twenty-two times in the supermarket tabloids, and she was being regularly followed by photographers. They went through her trash and published a list of which junk foods and which health foods she ate, which birth control pills she was using, and how she was paying only $700 a month for a studio apartment in the rundown Latino section of Morristown, New Jersey, when there were a dozen new yuppie townhomes four blocks away. They loved her for being down to earth. Her aunt called from Florida and said all the ladies kept asking her why Diane didn’t have an agent yet, and why she hadn’t done any commercials or signed any endorsement deals, and why she hadn’t moved to California or New York. You shouldn’t stay in that apartment. We’re worried about you. It’s not safe in that neighborhood.

I like living outside the city, Diane said. I can go in on the train when I need to audition, but it’s not so crazy out here.

Do you have two locks?

Yes, she lied. I have three.

What nobody realized was that she was still trying to live on the $15,000 she’d gotten from the divorce and the little bit of money she’d made from The Girl from Saint-Mandé, because Romey’s new project wouldn’t start filming until the spring. No one knew that she spent her days running the lines over and over again