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.
This was not one of them.
Dad was not asking me to pretend.
He was simply trying to become someone different going forward.
