"Laney tells me you're in logistics," Malcolm said.
"I drive a reach truck," Dad said. "Over at the distribution center off Alum Creek. Twenty-five years this March."
"That's terrific," Malcolm said. "That's really terrific."
Nobody said anything for a second.
"We should find our seats," Claudette said.
The ceremony itself I mostly do not remember, which is the thing everyone tells you and which I had not believed. I remember the justices in a row on the stage in their black robes, like a jury of crows. I remember that we stood, all four hundred of us, and raised our right hands, and that I looked down at my wrist to check that the quarter inch of white cuff was showing, and it was. I remember the words, or some of them. I do solemnly swear. Support the Constitution. I will not counsel or maintain any suit or proceeding which shall appear to me to be unjust. I remember thinking, absurdly, at the word suit, about the one my father was wearing, twelve rows behind me in the orchestra seats, where Claudette and Malcolm had been seated beside him because the families of the new admittees were sat together and there had been nowhere else for anyone to go.
I turned around once, during the reading of the names. I could see them in a row, Claudette with her chin up and her hands folded in her lap over her gloves, Malcolm with his long legs crossed, and between them, my father, in his enormous shoulders, sitting forward with his forearms on his knees and his hands clasped, watching the stage. He was watching it so hard. He looked like a man watching a ball game in the last inning. When the clerk read my name, Elaine Marie Hadek, I heard, over the polite pattering applause, one clap louder than the rest, a single hard flat crack of two palms like a board breaking, and I knew without turning around that it was his, and I felt my face go hot. I wish I could tell you it was pride I felt. It was not only pride.
Afterward the lobby was a crush. The families flooded out of the doors and down the staircase and everybody was taking photographs in front of the big state seal on an easel at the foot of the stairs. Claudette wanted a photograph. She had hired a photographer without telling me, a young man with a beard and a lens as long as my forearm.
"Just the two of us first," Claudette said, taking my arm, "and then with Mr. Wendt, I think, for the firm. Elaine, fix your collar."
I fixed my collar. We stood in front of the seal. The photographer said, Lovely, lovely, chin down a hair, and his shutter went off in bursts like a bird's wings. Over his shoulder I could see my father standing at the edge of the carpet by a marble column, his hands in the pockets of the old trousers, waiting. People moved around him.