Author's Note: I wish to express my unending appreciation to Literotica's Copperbutterfly for her editing skills in making my story better for you readers.
I will never forget the day my life took a jackrabbit turn to the left and went racing off. It wasn't the first time I had experienced a major hurdle in my life but it was probably the biggest one that came without warning.
Let me back up a bit and lay some groundwork. During my college years, I had met Anne and we began dating. The Friday after we had graduated on Sunday we got married. By then we had been living together for nearly two years and we knew we were compatible. We got along famously.
For three years, we changed jobs several times, each time both of us managing to better ourselves. Then Anne announced that she was pregnant and our joy was unbounded. By then she was just over two months along. Seven months later she delivered my first son, a bouncing baby boy that we named Daniel after his maternal grandfather. Although he was in ill health at the time, Anne's dad was the only living relative we had to use as a role model; I was an orphan raised as a ward of the state and never adopted.
The only bad thing about Daniel's birth was that there were complications during the birth. He was okay but Anne required a hysterectomy to stop the bleeding. That meant that Daniel was not only my first son, he would be my only son.
That was okay. He was a great son, at least in my eyes. He wasn't particularly outstanding at anything but very early he showed an interest in an enormously wide variety of subjects. As he got old enough, he got into Scouts and pee-wee football and t-ball, followed by Little League. His grades in school were very good, mostly A's with a few B's. Both his mom and I were very proud to call him our son.
Then we got bad news the year Daniel started junior high. Anne was diagnosed as having cancer. She endured weeks of treatment and was pronounced cancer free ... for exactly seven months. Then it came back with a vengeance. She died five months later, exhausted and in constant pain, relieved only by shots that dulled the impact.
Daniel and I became a family of two. He took care of me. I took care of him. Eventually things returned to normal and settled into a routine. I kept up with my work and handled the housekeeping chores in the evenings and on weekends with a lot of Daniel's help. Since Anne's father had passed away when Daniel was only three years old, we only had each other but we made a pretty good team.
Once he got into college, Daniel could not decide in what direction he wanted his life to go. He had difficulty making a choice of majors, so for the first two years, he took a course of general studies before deciding on a pre-med path. He didn't really want to be a doctor but would like to help in the medical profession some way.
The college Daniel had chosen was in a relatively small town, one that almost doubled in population when school was in session. They had a small professional fire department which was supplemented by volunteers. In his sophomore year, Daniel decided to join the volunteers and he was readily accepted after the required medical exams and completion of application forms. He trained, officially, with the pros one weekend a month and unofficially on many of the other weekends.
When one of the paid emergency medical technicians moved to a bigger city for more money, the city found it difficult to fill the position. Daniel applied to fill in until they could find someone and with his schooling and after taking a crash course to become state certified, he became a volunteer EMT.
One weekend Daniel came home on a visit and poured out his heart. He loved the EMT work and vowed that he had found his life's work. He was going to finish school and find a place where he could work full time in a job that would help people, just as he had always wanted.
In the meantime, he had met a young lady named Kathy, a very beautiful woman who was a year older than Daniel. However that didn't seem to matter to either of them. They dated for a while and when she invited him to move into her apartment, he did. As Anne and I had done years earlier, Daniel and Kathy married shortly after he graduated from college.
Although she was working, she gave up her job and they moved to another larger city, one that was far enough from me that we didn't get to see each other very often. However they had an opening for a reasonably well-paid EMT and lots of opportunities to help people., so they moved and Kathy found another job near their new home.
For most of two years, we would see each other for a few hours about every three months or on special holidays, when I would drive over to visit them or they would come see me. With Daniel gone, our house seemed like a sprawling mansion, far too big for me, and I thought about selling and moving into something smaller. However consolidating our things was painful to contemplate, especially since it would mean losing one more tie to my wonderful wife. So I simply kept putting it off.
September 11, 2001 was a shock to the whole nation. Daniel volunteered to go to New York to help with the massive recovery effort and when he came back weeks later, he was a changed man. His ready smile was gone, replaced by a consistent look of agony. He called me two or three times a week and I always had the feeling that he wanted to say something but just didn't know how to bring it out.
Of course the nation went to war against terrorists. First it was in Afghanistan, then Iraq. As the months went by, Daniel became more and more concerned. Then one day he called to say that he had enlisted because the military was always short of medical technicians and he felt it was his duty to serve his country. I didn't want him to go but how could I argue against that logic?
All too soon Daniel shipped out to Iraq. Kathy and I talked on the phone three or four times every week. If she got the rare phone call from Daniel, she'd tell me all about how he was doing. If she got a letter, which was fairly often, she read me all but the personal stuff. I know she wrote him often and so did I but it probably took several weeks for the mail to arrive.
One evening about three months after Dan's last visit home just before he went overseas, Kathy had just read me Daniel's last letter when there was a long pause before she continued.
"Dad?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm pregnant."
"Oh, Kathy! That makes me so happy! How are you doing?"
"I'm doing fine. I went to the doctor today for my first check-up. I'm just over three months along so the baby will be about two months old when Dan comes home."
"That is fantastic. What a present for him when he gets back!"
