Hunny

Chapter 5: Becoming More Than a Force—Becoming Home

San Francisco, 1951–1953

When E.C. was called back up for Korea, Hunny didn’t cry in front of him. She helped him pack, kissed him twice for good luck, then turned and walked back into their Navy apartment like she already had a plan. Because she did.

She’d always been a woman who bent expectation to her will—but now she had a baby swelling beneath her skin and a husband drifting out to sea. Life didn’t soften her—it sharpened her. The world didn’t make room for her—so she built her own, brick by brick, even when her hands shook at night in the dark where no one could see.

Letters from E.C. arrived like rationed hope. Folded twice, postmarked with places Hunny could barely pronounce. She’d read them at the kitchen table with one hand on her belly and one foot tapping to the radio. Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she laughed too hard just to feel something. Sometimes she read the same sentence twice, pretending she didn’t need the reassurance. But she always carried on.

She learned to budget in quarters and stretch stew across days. She hung diapers and bed linens on clotheslines with clothespins that sometimes broke under the weight—but she never did. Her belly became a globe of defiance. Her baby already had her stubbornness.

The Navy wives invited her to a prayer circle once. She brought potato salad and didn’t bow her head. Instead, she said, “I pray every night for strength. And baby, I find it—right here,” pointing to her own heart like it was a compass no map could hold. This, of course, did not go over well with the Navy wives and was the last time she was invited to a prayer circle, which suited her just fine. She mocked their softness, but she prayed harder than any of them—just never where anyone could witness it.

When the baby came, it was storming outside. Rain hammered against the window like old ghosts coming to pay tribute. Hunny gave birth in a naval hospital, wearing lipstick with her mama’s tiny Bible tucked into the pocket of her nightgown. No family nearby. No husband. Just nurses who whispered, “She came in alone and seemed proud of it.”

And she was.

But she also gripped the bedrail so hard she felt her knuckles would split. Pride and fear lived side by side in her like twin heartbeats.

The labor was hard, and they gave her nothing to numb the pain. She would say years later that the Navy thought the first child should be born naturally. Lisbeth always thought she made the part up. Hunny said the pain was so unbearable she would NEVER have another. This one, this beautiful little girl, would be enough. Or so she thought.

When asked what the baby’s name was, Hunny smirked and said, “Still deciding. I’ve got to make sure it suits someone who’s gonna shake up the whole damn world. Because she certainly will.

Hunny chose Lisbeth. She named her after the girl in Old Yeller. She’d read the book, chin tucked into her palm, and fell in love with the girl’s grit and charm. “She had spunk,” Hunny said. “And she didn’t cry like a little thing when things got tough.”

”She held her child like royalty. Slept upright in her chair with one arm cradling the bundle of swaddled rebellion she’d made. But even then—holding the thing she had not even known that she wanted—she felt the old panic rise. Love made her fierce. It also made her vulnerable, and she hated that.

However, life with a newborn wasn’t the sweet, wonderful experience she had always envisioned. It wasn’t clean. It was spit up on silk, and lullabies hummed over cooling cups of coffee. Hunny still put on perfume—even if she didn’t leave the house. She flirted with the mirror just to remind herself she still had it, even when she felt like she was disappearing under the weight of responsibility.

She told stories to the baby about Arkansas, about her mama, about chasing E.C., about the time she almost got expelled for kissing a boy behind the school. She wanted Lisbeth to know she came from fire—but also from longing.

Motherhood didn’t shrink her into someone else. It expanded her into someone deeper.

But deeper didn’t always mean gentler.

She protected her child the way she had protected her siblings—fiercely, without hesitation. When a neighbor criticized her parenting, Hunny smiled and said, “I was born in a shack, baby. This child’s already got more love than I had walls—and that’s enough.”

But later, behind a closed door, she wondered if she was doing any of it right.

She missed E.C. in the quiet moments. When the city buzzed outside, and she had no one to share it with. When she read his letters and imagined the ocean between them swallowing her words before they could reach him.

She told everyone she was fine.

She told herself she was fine.

But she read every letter twice.

Still, she wrote.

“Baby’s got your chin. But my attitude,” she penned one day in loopy cursive.

“Come home. I miss dancing.”

She taped a photo of herself to one letter—hair wrapped in curls, baby in her arms, eyes saying I’m surviving. Come see me shine.

She wasn’t just a mother.

She was a home.

Warmth and fire. Softness and steel.

Contradiction wrapped in perfume and grit.

She didn’t lose Hunny—she leveled up.

Even if leveling up sometimes meant crying in the pantry so no one would see.

San Francisco changed after Lisbeth arrived. The light in the apartment seemed softer—less like fog, more like grace. The cries of a newborn echoed down the hallway.

So Lisbeth it was. A name with sweetness and steel.

But Hunny didn’t take easily to motherhood.

She fed her baby, bathed her, changed diapers in lipstick and high heels—but the patience? That was harder. She held Lisbeth like a glass she wasn’t sure wouldn’t shatter. She snapped over spilled milk. Cried over sleepless nights. Swaddled Lisbeth tightly, then walked away to regain her breath.

She loved her daughter. Fiercely. But love doesn’t always come with tenderness.

And tenderness didn’t come naturally to her.

But even with all that love—uneven, imperfect, but present—there was still a moment the apartment seemed to hold its breath for.

The day E.C. came home.

He arrived without warning, the way men do when they’re trying to outrun their own ghosts. One knock on the door—firm, familiar—and Hunny froze mid-step, a dish towel in her hand, Lisbeth fussing on her hip. For a heartbeat, she didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. Didn’t trust the world enough to believe it was really him.

Then she opened the door.

E.C. stood there in his uniform, thinner than she remembered, eyes darker, carrying the kind of silence that only war teaches. He smelled like rain and distance. Hunny didn’t fling herself into his arms. She didn’t cry or collapse or melt. She stepped aside, chin lifted, letting him walk back into the life she’d kept upright without him.

“Welcome home,” she said, voice steady as a steel beam.

She wanted to run to him.

She refused to give him that satisfaction. Afterall, he had left her. She knew it was the Navy and his duty, but she had to have someone to blame, and he was the perfect scapegoat. He had left her on her own to have this baby. To her, that made it obvious that Lisbeth was more her’s that she would ever be his. This was her reasoning and would only grow stronger with time.

E.C. nodded, swallowed hard, and then—only then—looked at the baby.

Lisbeth blinked up at him with those wide, curious eyes, the ones that held Hunny’s spark and something softer, too. E.C. froze. His breath hitched. His hands twitched like he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to reach for her.

Hunny watched him with a mix of pride and impatience.

“Well?” she said. “You gonna meet your daughter or just stare at her like she’s a ghost?”

That broke him loose.

He stepped forward slowly, like approaching something sacred. Hunny shifted Lisbeth into his arms with a practiced motion, but her eyes stayed locked on his face—measuring, judging, daring him to rise to the moment.

The baby settled against his chest like she’d been waiting for him.

E.C. exhaled, long and shaky. His shoulders dropped. His whole body softened around her.

“She’s real,” he whispered, voice cracking in a way Hunny had never heard.

Hunny crossed her arms, pretending she wasn’t moved.

“Of course she’s real,” she said. “I didn’t knit her.”

But the truth was, something inside her loosened. Not forgiveness. Not yet. But recognition. He wasn’t the man she’d imagined he’d be—not the hero she’d hoped for, not the disappointment she feared. Just a man trying to figure out how to hold a life he helped create.

Lisbeth reached up and grabbed his dog tags, clinking them together like tiny bells.

E.C. laughed—quiet, surprised, almost boyish.

And Hunny, watching the two of them, felt the apartment shift.

Not back to what it had been.

Forward into something new.

Something they would have to build together.

Brick by brick.

Day by day.

Love by love. If that were even possible for Hunny. Love had always been conditional for her. Love was earned!

E.C. saw it. Quietly. He stepped into the gaps Hunny couldn’t bridge. While Hunny stormed through days and conquered disappointments, E.C. cradled Lisbeth with softness Hunny had never known as a child and was not capable of giving.

He read stories in whispers, gave bottle feeds under moonlight, and rocked Lisbeth as she blinked open sleepy eyes and reached for his callused fingers. With E.C., Lisbeth learned what calm felt like. With Hunny, she learned what survival sounded like.

And somehow, between the two of them, she blossomed.

Neighbors still watched. Navy wives still whispered.

But Lisbeth didn’t hear any of it.

She heard jazz humming from the radio.

She heard laughter from her mother’s throat when Hunny twirled across the kitchen floor.

She heard love—uneven, imperfect, but present.

And one night, when Lisbeth was crying louder than usual, and Hunny was staring into the kitchen sink like it might swallow her stress whole, E.C. walked over and kissed her temple. Just once.

“She’s got both of us,” he said. “She’ll be strong like you. And gentle like me.”

Hunny didn’t say anything.

She didn’t need to.

She just reached for Lisbeth.

Held her differently this time.

Not like glass.

Like firelight.