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Angi drove the short distance from their house to the Trigger Gate. They lived off base in a small house on a circle of small houses surrounded by towering Douglas Firs, every home inhabited by a family, civilian or military, whose livelihood depended on the fleet of eight Trident submarines that called Bangor, Washington, home: Ohio, Michigan, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Alaska, Nevada, and Henry M. Jackson. And while Angi and Danny lived off base, they were barely off base, just a few hundred yards from the gate, and within earshot of the enormous cranes of the distant Delta Pier, whose endless beeping they heard day and night as they rolled back and forth on their railroad tracks, preparing boats for their next patrol. As she pulled up to the gate, the young sailor in dress whites saw the gold bar of her windshield’s sticker that denoted an officer, snapped to, and saluted her as she passed.

She was to meet the Soldatos at 48 North, the base’s all hands restaurant. It was part of the “upper base,” a complex that included the exchange, the commissary, the chapel, and the gym: almost every place that Angi ever needed to go. Not only were the submarines invisible from the upper base — you couldn’t even see the water, separated as it was by most of the base’s 7,000 heavily wooded acres. The piers were a much different, grittier world, wet and slightly dangerous, guarded by men in fatigues with guns, populated by workers with hardhats and tattoos. Crewmen weren’t even allowed to wear their working uniforms, their cotton khakis and dungarees, on the upper base, which looked more like a community college campus than it did a port for eight ships of war. Some of the old salts, in the most derisive words they could muster, accused it of looking like an Air Force base.

It was a lunch she’d put off as long as possible. Cindy Soldato had been calling with increasing frequency, her heart (perhaps) in the right place, but her attention could be suffocating. Angi was the only pregnant wife in the wardroom at the moment, and Cindy could focus her considerable energy upon her, generous with her advice about everything from filing military health insurance claims to breast feeding. In one week, her own mom would arrive from Knoxville, and Angi wondered if she would be able to survive all the mothering she was about to endure.

When she walked into the restaurant Cindy and Mario were deep in conversation, always a funny contrast to see them together. Mario was small, dark, highly animated, his hands moving with every phrase, leaning forward toward her. Cindy on the other hand was a fair Southern belle with perfect posture, her hands folded neatly in her lap as she listened with a look of rapt attention that looked like it might have been practiced in front of a mirror. Cindy had met Mario when he was one of a group of midshipmen at the Academy drafted to escort Virginia debs to some kind of cotillion. Early in Danny’s tour, at a wardroom party, Angi made the mistake of mentioning they were both from the South. Cindy’s smile had tightened and she didn’t respond: the old prejudice of the plantation south against those from the mountains endured, even in a Navy town along the Pacific Coast, even with a woman who’d scandalized her family, she liked to boast, when she married an Italian Catholic from Cleveland. Mario saw Angi walking toward them and stood.

“Angi!” He looked down at her belly unabashedly.

“Angi, please sit down,” said Cindy, actually pulling a chair out for her. “How are you?”

“Fine, fine,” she said. “I feel really good. I was sick a few days last week, but thankfully that phase appears to be over.”

“Good!” said Cindy and Mario together.

“About the worst side effect I have now is really weird dreams. And I’m tired— but that may just be laziness.”

They laughed. A waiter came by and took their orders: they all ordered chef salads. Mario’s phone was sitting on the table, every few seconds it would emit a short staccato buzz. He glanced down at it every time, but it never seemed worthy of much attention, he didn’t even pick it up.

“It never stops,” he said, noticing her interest. “They code the messages: a short little buzz like that means I need to see it but it’s not a crisis. Anything really important gets the ‘danger signal’: five short, rapid blasts.”

“You must come to resent that little thing.”

“Not at all,” said Cindy. “It’s because of that phone he can pay for our lunch!”

“It’s true,” he said. “In the bad old days, I would have been afraid to leave the pier, afraid something would happen and they wouldn’t be able to find me.” The phone buzzed once on cue, and they laughed again. He read the screen. “The Seattle Seahawk cheerleaders are going on base for a fundraiser…they want me to set up a tour of a boat for them.”

“Don’t give the tour yourself, Mario.”

“Why not?” he said, indignant.

“You’re an old man. Let some poor JO do it.”