You Know When All the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallan

This is a series of loosely linked short stories about the people who are left behind when troops go off to war. The relationships that they leave are not always the strongest, the longest, or the stablest, and this book looks at that, combined with the stressors that are inherent in the situation, and what comes out of that mix. It usually involves sex, usually infidelity, and then each party has to choose how to deal with that.
In “You Know When the Men Are Gone,” what matters most about any military family crisis is its order of magnitude. So yes, Kailani has to deal with a husband whose best response to being accused of infidelity is to claim feebly that there must be some mistake. (“Crazy, huh?”) But she lives in a world where life feels tentative every single day, where women must brace for the fact that men come home lovingly, abashedly, unhinged or not at all. She must come to terms with that reality. The Army’s boilerplate efforts to provide helpful guidelines for returning soldiers (“Take time to be charming!”) are no help at all.
The book does not focus on the negative. It’s just that life is tough at Fort Hood. Fears tend to be justified. In "Leave", Nick stalks his wife, and after several days comes to find out that his worst fears are true, his wife is sleeping with the single coach who has been helping her out with the chores in his absence. What to do with that knowledge?
Other stories in this brief, tight collection — and there’s not a loser in the bunch — include “The Last Stand,” in which Specialist Kit Murphy comes home to every soldier’s nightmare. He is married; he is wounded; and his initially chirpy wife is going to abandon him. So Kit goes out to a bar and destroys what is left of his injured leg by getting onto a mechanical bull. Because Ms. Fallon can be blunt without being heavy-handed, she ends the story as Kit tries to stand up one final time as Helena — with a blithe “We’ll talk soon. I promise” — walks out of his life.
Kit reappears in “Gold Star,” the final tale. He goes to visit a Gold Star wife, i.e. the widow of a soldier killed in combat, whose loss has earned her the right to certain perks. “Family members received a few special privileges like this lousy parking space,” Ms. Fallon writes, “but that meant the pity rising from the asphalt singed hotter than any Texas sun.”
Now equipped with a permanent limp and a prosthesis, Kit wants to thank Josie Schaeffer, the widow of a sergeant who has been mentioned several times earlier in the book. Sergeant Schaeffer is said to have saved Kit’s life. Kit, for his part, unintentionally lets the widow realize that the official version of how her husband died was untrue.
He awkwardly lets her sit on his lap. What does she want? Ms. Fallon keeps the answers to such questions simple, tough and true. Josie just wants to rest her face against the chest of a living, breathing man in uniform one more time.
A book to help put yourself in the shoes of military women--what would you do?