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.
My younger sister Megan moved through the room with the quiet purposefulness of someone managing an event. She leaned close to relatives, murmured things, laughed softly at the right moments. She had a way of making herself central to any gathering without appearing to try, which was one of her genuine skills, and she had been deploying it since childhood. I watched her and felt the familiar mixture of things I always felt watching Megan: a tired kind of recognition, and something older underneath it that I had never fully named.
Robert Chen arrived around four o’clock with a briefcase and the expression of a man carrying weight he would have preferred not to carry. He had been my father’s attorney and friend for thirty years, and the careful neutrality he wore walking through that door told me everything about what was coming. The room rearranged itself around the dining table with the instinctive gravity of people who understand that money is about to be discussed.
