“I know.”
“I’m going to try to be the two hundred and nineteen.”
“You don’t have to — ”
“I know.
That’s why.”
Gil Farrow sent a letter in July.
Not to me — to the state bar, withdrawing from the estate case and, he wrote, “from the practice of family litigation generally, effective immediately.”
He enclosed a note for me, one line.
“I read your Exhibit C six weeks late.
I won’t be late again.
— G.F.”
I keep it in the pantry door.
Lindsay has not come.
Lindsay sent a text that said “I hope you’re happy,” and I have decided to read it the way I read my mother’s face at the courtroom door — as a person deciding whether to say something and not, which is at least a decision.
My parents have not spoken to me.
That is not a change.
What changed is that I stopped waiting for them to.
I am back at sea now.
Not deployed — a training rotation, six weeks, the Atlantic, with a JAG office the size of a closet and a porthole I can see the horizon through.
I did one more thing before the rotation.
I drove to Newport.
Eleven years ago, my grandmother had sat alone in the front row of a commissioning ceremony there, in her Sunday pearls, and cried through the whole thing.
I stood at the edge of the parade ground for a while.
Then I took out a postcard — I’d bought it at the gate — and wrote on the back, in pencil, “Front row. Still just you,” and I mailed it to a house that had been sold, and I know it came back, and I know exactly where the estate attorney put it, because I asked him to.
Inside the pantry door.
With the pins.
On Sundays, I wear the pearls.
Nobody on a Navy ship knows what they are.
That is exactly right.
Last week, a seaman apprentice came to my office.
Nineteen.
His command had decided he was difficult.
He sat in my one chair and looked at the deck and said, “Ma’am, my family thinks I’m — they don’t really know what I do out here.
They think I’m drifting.”
I looked at him for a long moment.
Then I opened my desk drawer, took out a postcard — a blank one, from Yokosuka, the last of a stack — and slid it across.
