ROCK HILL –  Monday after school Kayleigh Reinke, age 8, went to the roadside mailbox at her house in Rock Hill. Inside was the stuff of her mother’s life, and her mother’s fiancée’s life, and a mailer from a home improvement company. It was addressed to “current resident,” or “Gavin Reinke.”Kayleigh ran inside, in tears, and showed her mother, Carole Reinke the letter. Carole fumed, held her daughter, and held back her own tears.Because Gavin Reinke is dead. Gavin Reinke died in a war. Gavin Reinke died in Iraq – more than five years ago. And, he never lived in Rock Hill.”It just devastated us,” said Carole Reinke. “We think about him every day, we will always love him, but how do you explain this to an 8-year-old girl?”You can’t. The company’s representatives told her after she called, furious, that they likely got the name and address from records companies buy for mass mailings.So many people on the phone kept saying to Carole, “I understand.”"How can they understand when a little girl’s daddy dies in a war on the other side of the world and he has been gone five years and she is 8 years old trying to deal with it?” Carole asked. “They can’t.”Carole Reinke isn’t from Rock Hill, and her husband wasn’t from Rock Hill, but Rock Hill is now her home. A meeting with a long-lost high school sweetheart who lives here, and now is her fiancée, brought Carole to York County. It also brought Kayleigh, one of those few thousand American children who have to explain at school, in why the Daddy is not at a school function.Kayleigh has to tell people at St. Anne Catholic School – after sleeping with a pillow-type Army “Daddy Doll” that has a picture of her dad on it, after looking at a poster of her dad each morning before school that came just before he died – “My dad got killed by the bad guys. In Iraq. He was a soldier.”Gavin Reinke was a staff sergeant from Colorado, who served in the combat engineers. He earned two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart and other decorations.On May 4, 2006, as Carole explains it because it is in her head every day of her life: “My husband was killed by what they call an IED. An improvised explosive device. A roadside bomb.”Gavin Reinke was 32 years old when he died. He left a widow at home near a Missouri Army base who became deathly afraid afterward of answering a knock at the door because of the knock that announced her husband was dead.Carole and Gavin met line dancing years before in her hometown of Nashville, Tenn., barely talking much that night, as he prepared for war and she prepared to become a teacher. Gavin couldn’t dance to save his life.”I gave him my number, he was tall and handsome and smart and charming, he didn’t write it down, and I thought well, here is a guy who can’t dance and asked for my number and I will never see him again,” Carole recalled.Gavin called Carole at 8 the next morning. He wrote love letters and sent flowers. He courted Carole in a way that went out of style generations ago. They were married by 2000. Carole continued to go to college while Gavin stayed in the Army.Kayleigh was born in 2003.. She was three months old when Gavin was deployed to Iraq the first time. Gavin came back almost a stranger to his daughter, as all soldiers are who miss children growing up.The couple bought their first house. Gavin was deployed again in November 2005. He was two weeks from coming home on leave when a soldier knocked on the door to tell Carole her husband was dead.Carole and Kayleigh tried to live on in Missouri, but people would always bring up Gavin and say, “I understand.” They moved to Oklahoma, where another war widow who lost her husband in the same Iraq bombing lived. They tried Florida where Carole’s sister lived.”We were trying to figure out where our place was in this world without Gavin,” Carole said. “It is not like ‘Army Wives’ on TV or the movies. You have to live a life and the part of that life is gone.”Kayleigh says of when she was younger, “It was hard without my dad.” Andrew Dys 803-329-4065