The Brother Who Called Me A Dropout
There was one Thanksgiving I think about more than the others. I was maybe twenty-eight, already an officer by then, already doing the work, and my father spent most of the meal telling a cousin from Kentucky about Brett’s selection, and then he gestured at me with his fork and said, “This one had his shot and walked away from it, so we don’t count on him for much,” and everyone at the table laughed the small uncomfortable laugh you laugh when the man at the head of the table has decided something is funny. I had flown in that morning from a place I could not name, on maybe four hours of sleep, having spent the previous night on a problem that would have turned my father’s hair white if he had been cleared to hear a word of it. I passed the potatoes and I laughed along with the rest of them, because that was the deal I had made with myself, and because the alternative was a truth I was not allowed to say out loud in my own mother’s dining room. I drove back to the airport that night and I sat in the rental car in the long-term lot for a while before I went in, and I did not cry, but I came close, and I remember thinking that a man can get used to almost anything, even being the fool at his own family’s table, if he tells himself often enough that the work is the thing that matters and the credit is not.
I kept coming to things anyway. I do not fully know why. My mother, I think. And some stubborn, hopeful, stupid part of me that kept believing there would be a day. So when the invitation came for Brett’s Trident ceremony out at the naval base in Coronado, I flew across the country and I came, and I found out when I got there that no seat had been saved for me in the family row. My father had reserved four. Him, my mother, Brett’s girlfriend, and an empty one for a family friend who was going to try to make it. Not one for me. I got a visitor pass at the gate and I stood against the back wall, and that is where Brett found me after he crossed the stage, and that is where he said the thing about finishing.
What Brett did not know, what none of them knew, was what had happened that morning.