"Nineteen years," Elena said. "Nineteen years, and nobody has ever come up to you in a gas station and asked you if you're a dead man."
"There's a first time for everything."
"Then let it be today." She finished the second turn of the cuff and smoothed it flat. "Your son is graduating. He has worked for this harder than he's ever worked for anything, and he is going to look for you in that crowd, and he is going to look at your arms, because he always does. He looks at that tattoo like it's a promise you made him. Don't you dare hide it from him today."
He let go of her hand.
She did the other sleeve to match, and when she was done she stepped back and looked at him the way she'd looked at the boat he'd rebuilt for her the summer they were married, critically, lovingly, already seeing the places where the paint would need touching up.
"There," she said. "You look like a man who fixes things."
"I am a man who fixes things."
"I know." She picked up her purse and the folded program the base had mailed to the house in April, and the little digital camera Lucas teased her about because nobody under fifty owned one anymore. "Come on. If we're late, he'll think you changed your mind."
* * *
He had not changed his mind. That was what he kept telling himself in the car, on the bridge, through the gate at Naval Station Newport, where a young master-at-arms with acne on his jaw checked their licenses and their invitation and waved them through with a crisp, bored courtesy that made Carter's chest ache. Samuel J. Callaway, the license said. Stonington, Maine. Date of birth correct, everything else a careful forgery that had been made by people very good at forgeries, in an office in Virginia with no sign on the door.
The boy at the gate did not look twice at him. Why would he? A grey-haired civilian with a sunburned neck and a wife in a blue dress. He was the kind of man you saw at every graduation on every base in America: somebody's father, a little thick through the middle, a little stiff getting out of the car.
They parked in a gravel lot near the water, and he stood for a moment with his hand on the warm roof of the Subaru and looked out at Narragansett Bay, flat and silver and full of sailboats. The air smelled of salt and cut grass and diesel from somewhere, and for a second he was twenty-two again at Little Creek, sweating through his khakis on a morning just like this one, waiting to be told what kind of man he was going to be.
"You okay?" Elena asked.