“I give the orders here,” my mom’s colonel boyfriend yelled—until I calmly told him who I really was.

He had no idea that inside the bag I was carrying, there was a level of authority that would make him snap to attention and tremble. The September rain in Virginia Beach is never just rain. It’s a relentless gray sheet of water that tries to wash the pavement clean. I’d been driving for 4 hours, fighting the traffic coming out of Norfick. My windshield wipers fighting a losing battle against the downpour. All I wanted, all I craved was the silence of my childhood home.

I wanted to hug my mother, maybe drink a glass of iced tea, and sleep for 14 hours. I turned onto the familiar culde-sac, the tires of my sedan crunching over the wet leaves. That’s when I saw it. There was a truck parked in the driveway. Not just parked, it was dominating the space.

It was a Ford F-150 lifted high enough to require a stepladder, painted a matte black that screamed midlife crisis. It was double parked, taking up the center of the driveway, forcing me to park my modest sedan on the street, half in a puddle. I gripped the steering wheel, my knuckles turning white. My father had built that driveway. He always taught me to park to the side, to leave room for others.

It was a small thing, but in the military and in life, the small things tell you everything you need to know about a person’s discipline. Whoever owned this truck had none. I took a deep breath, grabbed my leather overnight bag from the passenger seat, and made a dash for the porch. The humidity hit me instantly, clinging to my skin.

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