Now, for the first time, I wondered whether home could become something else.
Not a place where everyone understood me perfectly.
A place where they were willing to try.
Before I left, Dad followed me to the driveway.
I placed my overnight bag in the car.
He stood awkwardly with both hands in his coat pockets.
“Claire.”
I turned.
“I’ve been thinking about something.”
“Dangerous.”
He smiled faintly.
“You sounded like your mother just then.”
“I’ve been told.”
He looked toward the house.
“I don’t expect you to forgive twenty years because I figured out I was wrong during one dinner.”
I leaned against the car.
“I don’t think forgiveness works like a receipt, Dad.”
“No.”
He nodded.
“I suppose not.”
He pulled one hand from his pocket.
In it was a small brass key.
“What’s that?”
“The display case.”
I stared at him.
Ethan’s famous display case.
Dad looked embarrassed.
“I’m taking it down.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
“Ethan earned those medals.”
“I know that too.”
“Then why?”
“Because I realized something last night.”
He looked through the front window toward the living room.
“I made one wall in that house a museum to one version of success.”
I said nothing.
“I’m moving Ethan’s things to the study.
Properly.
I asked him this morning.
He likes the idea.”
“What are you putting on the wall?”
“Family photographs.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“All of us?”
“All of you.”
“Even Madison?”
He pretended to consider.
“She is under review.”
From the porch, Madison shouted, “I can hear you!”
Dad smiled.
Then the smile faded.
“I want a photograph of you in uniform.”
My first instinct was resistance.
Twenty years too late, some stubborn part of me thought.
He seemed to see it.
“Not because you’re a colonel.”
That surprised me.
“Then why?”
“Because it’s part of who you are.”
He swallowed.
“And I should have wanted to know that part before a general explained it to me.”
I looked at him.
There are apologies that attempt to erase the past.
