SAN DIEGO _ Standing in a hotel parking lot at Legoland, Lindsey Stacy felt her cellphone vibrate. She looked at the screen, recognized the area code and smiled.
Kenton.
Her husband, a 34-year-old master technician with the Navy's bomb squad, was on a six-month deployment in Syria, fighting Islamic State. He was due home in three weeks.
Childhood sweethearts from a small farming town in Ohio, Lindsey and Kenton had been married for 13 years. They had four children, two boys and two girls, and they'd managed the hardships _ cross-country moves, frequent deployments, long separations _ that come with a career in the post-9/11 military.
This was his fourth combat tour in nine years doing one of the military's most dangerous jobs. He'd been on more than 50 missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, defusing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) buried in potholes, tucked inside culverts, hidden in cars.
Being gone this time, in the summer and fall of 2017, meant missing son Mason's sixth birthday and the trip to Legoland. At the hotel, the boy blew out the candles and wished that his dad could come home.
The next morning, when Lindsey's cellphone buzzed, she figured it was Kenton with the next-best thing: a birthday call from Syria.
It was Kenton's commanding officer. There'd been an explosion.
Nineteen months later, Lindsey still remembers how her heart sank right then, how even though she'd tried to prepare herself for this possibility, for this moment, she wasn't ready.
She wasn't ready for how much damage the bomb did to Kenton.
She wasn't ready for what it would take to keep everything together while he was hospitalized week after week after week.
She wasn't ready for how many people _ relatives, friends, strangers _ would step forward to help.
When she answered the phone, she didn't know it was possible to feel both cursed and blessed at the same time.
