THREE LETTERS BY TUERE T. S. GANGES

It didn’t matter that he had that good boy haircut when I liked the guys with kinky dreads or a full-blown ‘fro. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t exactly one of us, “us” being a bunch of smart assed militants at a private university staging protests against the government, or at least George H. W. Bush being a keynote speaker at graduation. And it didn’t matter that he had three initials on his arm that he’d gotten while in Kuwait in honor of the girl who was supposed to be waiting for him. What we had was something on a different level…yeah…what we had was love.
K was supposed to be waiting for him like he was waiting for her. It wasn’t like the lady airmen weren’t giving him signals, making it known that if he wanted to get it he could. See, he was, is, and always will be a one-woman man. She had his head all swollen up, making him think he was her man and just as soon as he got back from Desert Storm, she’d rock his world like a Mark-19 grenade launcher. So he was cool. Wrote her letters everyday, bought her gold jewelry when he had a chance to go into Bahrain, and got her initials on his arm because he knew she’d be there long after the wrinkles of his skin got big enough to flop over it.
Lucky for me, he was wrong.
I could tell that when he promised me the world, he’d have it gift wrapped. I didn’t even look at her letters, couldn’t tell you more than the K. He wouldn’t mooch off of me, didn’t feed me empty promises, and always seemed to be just where he said he was. Her letters might have been on his arm, but my entire given name was branded on his heart, okay?
And then there came the marriage proposal. That was a no brainer; it felt like we were almost married anyway. But something about the ex’s initials on my husband’s arm started to eat away at me. I joked around about not saying “I do” until he did something about the letters. He wanted to pick a design that would cover it but it wasn’t a priority since he’d served his four years and was inactive, money was tight.
A few months before the ceremony, I reminded him by asking if he’d figured out what his new tattoo would be. He admitted he hadn’t given it much thought, but most definitely would. That was fine, I told him, but there’d be no wedding if her initials were still there. I thought I was being funny, I mean, I said it in my joking voice and everything. But would I really skip out on the man I loved because of a tattoo that we could take care of eventually? No, I decided. The tattoo wasn’t that important. I just didn’t tell him that.
The day before the wedding, the initials were still there and I’d have to say he was a little bit panicked. With all the craziness I was going through with my mother who hated the dress I had made, the tattoo was the last thing on my mind. I would have tattooed The Lone Ranger’s mask across my face and fled to Vegas at that point. But he talked to me with his warm flannel robe voice and I knew I’d laugh all the way to the Alter. He said he’d see me at the wedding and he went off with his cousin, the best man.
I found out later that they didn’t try to go to a go-go bar, or any kind of bar. They found a tattoo parlor on a really busy night and waited for hours. When the place was about to close, he told the tattoo artist about his situation, he would be marrying the love of his life in a matter of hours but still had another girl’s initials on his arm. Tired, and probably with cramped fingers, the tattoo artist took pity on him.
The next day, he was exhausted and his arm was sore, but he married me anyway. I didn’t know he covered the tattoo and I didn’t ask.

Tuere T. S. Ganges reads, rests, and writes in Baltimore, Maryland when her husband, two children and two pets do not have other plans for her. Her work has appeared in Shine: The Journal and Flask and Pen. She would like the Milspeak readers to know that instead of a trip to the Bahamas, she and her husband got matching tattoos as their honeymoon

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