The church smelled of old wood and too many competing perfumes, and by the time we made it back to my mother’s house in Albany, everyone was exhausted in the particular way that funerals exhaust you, which is not the tiredness of the body but something deeper and less recoverable. People I hadn’t seen in years moved through the living room with the careful solemnity of people who had dressed up for someone else’s grief and were now looking for the polite moment to leave. Reheated casseroles sat on the dining room table. Someone had brought a bundt cake. The house smelled like the kind of food people bring when they don’t know what else to do.
I sat in the corner still in uniform. Not to make a statement. I had flown directly from Fort Bragg and hadn’t had time to change, and given that everything else about the day felt slightly surreal, the uniform seemed as appropriate as anything else. My father had served two years before I was born. He had understood what it meant to put something on and carry it.
