They'd fought about it in August, on the drive to Bangor to catch the bus. Lucas had been stewing for weeks and it came out wrong, all at once and too loud.
"You could just say it, you know. That you don't want me to go."
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't say anything. That's the whole point. You never say anything." He'd been looking out the window at the blueberry barrens going by, red already at the edges. "Mom said you were a SEAL. Years ago. Before. You never even told me that yourself, I had to hear it from her. You've got that thing on your arm and every time I ask you about it you say you knew some guys. Knew some guys. Like it's a bowling league."
His father's hands had tightened on the steering wheel. Ten and two. He always drove ten and two.
"I knew some guys."
"Was it because of him? Because of my dad?" The other dad, he meant, though he never said it that way. The father in the photograph on the bookcase in the living room, in the plain wooden frame his stepfather had made: a big man in a dark green T-shirt grinning on the deck of a ship, squinting into the sun, with Lucas's own ears sticking out on either side of his head. Special Warfare Operator First Class Michael J. Chardi. Lost at sea, Arabian Sea, March 2007. Lucas had been seven weeks old. "Because he died doing it? Is that why you got out? Is that why you don't want me to go?"
For a long time his father hadn't answered. A logging truck passed them going the other way and the car rocked in its wake.
"Your father," his father said finally, and his voice was strange, rough, "was the best man I ever knew. And I don't want you to go because I'm afraid. That's all. That's all it is. I'm just afraid."
And then he'd pulled into the bus station in Bangor and gotten Lucas's duffel out of the back and hugged him, hard, longer than he usually did, and said, "Call your mother," and driven away. And that was the most they had ever said to each other about any of it, in nineteen years.
Lucas had been to the memorial once. In October, on a long weekend, he'd taken a bus from Newport down to Virginia Beach by himself without telling anybody. He'd stood for an hour in front of the black granite wall at the Naval Special Warfare memorial with the wind coming in off the Chesapeake, and he'd found his father's name, and touched it, because that was what you were supposed to do. MICHAEL J. CHARDI, SO1. And beside it, because the names were arranged by date and then by rank, two others from the same day, the same ship, the same black water. ANDRE L. ODUYA, SO2, who had been in the engine room with the chief when the sea came in. And above both of them, at the top, the officer.
CDR DANIEL R. CARTER.