Sabrina
Copyright© 2026 by The Outsider
Chapter 33: Home for the Holidays
21 December 2024 – Bundesautobahn 64, Trier, West Germany
“I’m gonna miss Germany,” Tom remarked while looking out the passenger’s window of the rental car. He would miss the beauty of the West German countryside and its people.
“My tour’s not over yet, Tom. But it’s already been four and a half years since we graduated from college,” Sabrina reminded him. “Time marches on, and my PCS date is out there.”
“In the military, and uses a marching cliché,” Tom said to the invisible studio audience. “How cliché!”
“You’re going to stop with the jokes soon, I hope? You sound like my dad!”
Tom chuckled at that.
“How many of the Western European countries have we visited? All of them?”
“Not sure we’ve gotten to Germany yet...”
“I’m handling the jokes today, remember?”
“I’ll ‘remember’ as soon as you tell a funny one.”
“‘Funny?’ Like, us showing up at your next station or wherever and our personal belongings are nowhere to be found ‘funny?’” Tom asked.
“Would that include our cars, too? Yeah, that’d be hysterical! Stuck, probably in the middle of nowhere, without transportation. It is to laugh.”
“Seriously, we’ve made it to every Western country except Malta. We visited Oslo, Stockholm, and Copenhagen in the same week alone!”
“The ‘same incredibly busy and insane week alone,’ you mean. That was a poor decision, regardless of how much fun we had, Tom. Each country should have gotten its own week.”
“Not gonna argue with you there, Babe.” Tom looked around the car. “It’s going to be strange getting back into American-sized cars again when you do PCS.”
“It’ll be nice to have my pickup back, that’s for sure.”
“You thinking about getting that PPS fusion plant upgrade for your Crusher’s KMV-295?”
“I’m still considering it,” Sabrina admitted. “We don’t do the off-road, four-wheeling thing. I’ve found the -295 to be just fine for my needs, even during Colorado winters. How about you? Will you trade your gas-powered relic for a fusion plant-powered car?”
“Remind me again of the fuel that powers your beloved stealth fighters?” Tom asked while looking at the car’s roof and tapping his chin. “I’ll wait.”
“You waiting for my hand to impact the back of your head, à la that character from the military police procedural show? ‘Cause that’s what you’re gonna get.”
“Hilfe!” Tom yelled in German out of his rolled-down window. “Hilf mir!”
“That might be more effective if we weren’t on the Autobahn, traveling at speed.”
“My dumb luck that I marry a girl who can kill me with anything from her bare hands up to a four-hundred-million-dollar stealth fighter.”
“Does that include using sarcasm and a snarky tone? I’d hate for those to be left out.” Tom gave his wife a look. “I’m just sayin’. Dad spent a lot of time teaching me that.”
“Remind me to thank him next time I see him, okay?”
“Hell, he’ll tell you you’re welcome with the same sarcasm I use,” Sabrina reminded him. “You sure that’s what you want?”
“I should ask your mom to teach me that meditation thing.”
“Never too late to start, husband, dear.”
Sabrina rolled her eyes before slowing for a likely accident. Tom smiled back before he thought about how long their day would be.
“I shudder to think about how long we’ll be on the move today.”
They passed the crash and approached the Sauer Valley Bridge and the Luxembourg border.
“Between the flights, the layovers, trying to get out of Logan, and the drive to Lancaster, we have a solid twelve or more hours of traveling,” Sabrina replied from the driver’s seat. “It’s probably eight hours in the air alone.”
“Hmm,” he grumbled.
Sabrina shrugged as they rolled over the Sauertalbrücke and the international frontier.
“A one-hour flight to London, a three-hour layover, a seven-hour flight to Boston, figure an hour and a half to get our bags and leave Logan if we’re lucky, then an hour ride to your parents’ house,” Tom said after looking up the times on his tablet. “Close to fourteen hours, Sabrina. Fourteen! And it’s closer to fifteen if you include this drive to the airport! We have to be crazy!”
“Possibly,” she agreed, “but we haven’t seen our families since transferring to Germany, other than Alex and Anna’s wedding. It’ll be nice spending time with them before heading somewhere.”
Sabrina slowed as they approached the Wasserbillig border checkpoint. She handed their passports to a customs official and answered a few questions. The man did a cursory inspection before wishing them a good day and waving them on.
“That wasn’t so bad,” Tom commented.
“We’ll see how the Bundesgrenzschutz treats us on the way back.”
The West Germans were usually polite – especially to military members from the Western Allied Powers – but after almost one hundred years of ‘occupation,’ there was bound to be occasional friction. The West Germans wanted the British, French, and American forces out of their country. Conversely, the West Germans didn’t want to open themselves to attack from the East.
Their fellow Germans in the ‘Eastern Zone’ would do whatever their Soviet masters told them. The brutal repression of protests in other Warsaw Pact countries during the 1960s, ‘90s, and 2010s taught the East Germans that it was their safest course, even if the Soviets told them to invade the West.
“I doubt they will give us any grief. They have a ton of extra military backup they don’t pay for.”
“Well, it’s not theirs, but I know what you mean.”
Sabrina knew because the 22nd TFS at Spangdahlem was part of that military backup. A half-hour later, Sabrina searched for an open spot in the EuroCar rental parking lot.
“Why did we come here? Instead of going to Frankfurt?” Tom asked. “KLM versus Lufthansa?”
“Travel time was the same,” Sabrina shrugged. “I think we flipped a coin.”
She didn’t care as long as they got home to Massachusetts. They would spend Christmas and New Year’s with their families there. Sabrina wished they could have made the Keiolis Family Christmas last weekend.
“Do we still have time to grab some lunch before our flight to Heathrow?” she asked as they grabbed their luggage. “Or, should we wait until we get there?”
Tom checked his watch.
“That crash outside Igel put us behind schedule. We should wait.”
The KLM flight from Luxembourg to Heathrow was nothing worth mentioning other than that it happened. Like most pilots, Sabrina would have preferred to be at the airplane’s controls, but she got over it.
They spent part of their London layover lingering over their fish and chips meal at the Heathrow terminal. Tom commented that they could probably get the same food for half the price in Massachusetts. The best they could say was that it wasn’t terrible.
Trans-Atlantic first class on the KLM 747 certainly wasn’t terrible, either. Sabrina sighed as she sank into her luxury seat. The plush, oversized leather recliner featured personal climate controls and a personal entertainment system. Passengers could choose from the provided audio and video offerings or stream content from a tablet or laptop.
If a passenger wanted to sleep, they could do so inside an enclosed cocoon that extruded from the chair. The cocoon allowed them to sleep in total darkness and blocked out any outside noise. KLM was one of the first airlines to install these seats; none of the American carriers had them yet.
“Okay,” Sabrina commented while sipping her champagne after liftoff, “maybe I don’t mind not being at the controls so much this time.”
“A few more amenities on this flight than ones in your F-22, I imagine. Remind me why we flew coach when you were assigned to Spangdahlem?”
“Because the Air Force was paying then, Tom,” she reminded her husband. “I didn’t want to look like anything other than your average new first lieutenant, either.”
“True,” he admitted. “We did pay for the flight to Hawaii. But, there’s no way you’d ever look like an ‘average first lieutenant!’”
Neither had any difficulty falling asleep after an early dinner. Inside the pod, Sabrina felt like a little girl again, falling asleep in Sofu’s recliner surrounded by silence. A flight attendant woke them fifteen minutes before their descent into Boston’s Logan Airport.
“That was pretty good,” Tom remarked after debarking. The couple walked down the concourse toward the main terminal.
“It sure was,” his wife agreed as she tried to work a kink out of her back. “We slept. That’s definitely a win.”
They also counted escaping Logan with their bags in under an hour as a win. The airport limo turned into her parents’ driveway less than an hour later. Sabrina hadn’t put both feet on the pavement before her mother nearly tackled her.
“Hi, Mom!” she laughed while the two hugged. Sabrina saw her father shaking hands with Tom.
“Sabrina!” Keiko sniffled.
“Don’t worry, Mom. Tom and I are home for a whole two weeks!”
“It will not be long enough,” Keiko said while wiping tears away.
“It never is – DAD!” she cried as her father yanked her off her feet and twirled her around.
“Hi, Princess!”
“Dad! I’m an officer in the United States Air Force! I’m not ten!”
“You’re still our baby girl though, Princess!” Jeff said with a chuckle before putting her back on the ground.
“Yeah, yeah ... Can we go inside now? It’s a bit chilly out here this time of night.”
“I’ll help you with your bags, Tom, while the girls head inside and get drinks for us.”
“I think you’re pushing your luck with the ‘girls’ thing, Dad,” Tom warned. “They start raising eyebrows, and I will disavow all knowledge.”
Jeff tipped the limo driver himself. Jeff and Tom found their wives chatting in the kitchen after putting the bags in Sabrina’s old room. Knowing their husbands’ preferences, the women handed them each a beer.
“What’s the plan for the week, Dad?” Sabrina asked after her dad offered a toast.
“Why are you asking me, Sabrina? You know your mom’s in charge!”
Keiko smirked at Jeff.
“We are headed to your grandparents’ house in Enfield for Christmas Eve, and we will come home after breakfast on the twenty-sixth. Sobo and Sofu will join us for dinner tomorrow night. Thomas’ parents will arrive on the twenty-seventh.”
“It’ll be good to see them. Is everyone doing okay?” Sabrina asked her mother.
“Mother is well, but I fear Father is not doing as well as he would like us to believe,” Keiko replied with a frown. She saw the look on Sabrina’s face. “I know, Sabrina. It is not easy to hear, nor say – especially of one’s own father – but he is in his eighties.”
“Yeah,” she sighed, “I guess.”
“Anyway, you guys must be exhausted,” Jeff said as he drained his beer. “Do you want another drink before bed, or are you good?”
“I’ll probably fall asleep before I finish another drink, Dad,” Tom commented. Sabrina nodded in agreement.
“Well, Keiko and I won’t be far behind you. It’s way past our bedtime!”
Sabrina’s maternal grandparents arrived an hour before Keiko said they would, eager to see their granddaughter and her husband again. Sabrina’s eyes watered when she saw how frail Sofu had become since she saw him last.
“Sabrina, my time is coming,” he whispered during their hug. “I am not eager to leave your grandmother, nor the rest of you, but you know it is inevitable. My brothers have all passed on from this life. Only Sobo, my sister, and my sisters-in-law remain from my generation.” He brushed a tear from Sabrina’s cheek. “I am only slower than before. I still feel good for my age, and my mind is still sharp. I am grateful for the life I have had, the blessings I have received, and the time I was able to have with you and your brothers as you grew up.
“Not all grandparents can walk to their grandchildren’s house almost anytime they want. Come,” he added as he led her to the living room, “let us enjoy the holidays together.”
Later that night, Tom held his wife as they lay together in Sabrina’s old room. He felt her sorrow and tried to comfort her the best he could.
“God, Tom, what if we head back to Germany and I never see Sofu alive again?” she sniffed.
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