"Then I'm in good company."
Reyes turned around then and saw Lucas standing there in the aisle, three feet behind him, in his dress whites with no diploma in his hand. He looked at him for a long moment, the same searching look he'd given him on the stage, and Lucas saw him finish the sum.
"Chardi," the admiral said quietly. "Michael Chardi's boy."
"Yes, sir."
"I knew your father. Only for three days." He glanced back at Carter, then at Lucas, and something in his face shifted, something complicated and grieving and full of wonder. "I think maybe you've had two of them."
Then he walked back up the aisle and up the steps to the podium, picked up the blue diploma cover where he'd left it, and came back down the steps with it, and put it in Lucas's hands, there on the grass in front of the front row, and shook his hand, and held on to it.
"Congratulations, Midshipman Candidate," he said, loud enough for the announcer to hear, and the announcer, God bless him, picked up his card and cleared his throat and read out the next name as if nothing had happened at all.
* * *
They found each other afterward on the seawall below the parade field, where the lawn ran down to a strip of granite riprap and the bay slapped at the stones. The caps had gone up and come down, and Lucas had walked straight through the crowd without stopping. He'd gone to the water, because that was what he'd been taught to do when he didn't know what else to do, and he sat on the warm granite in his dress whites with the diploma cover on his knees and looked out at the sailboats until he heard footsteps on the stones behind him.
His father sat down beside him. Not close. A couple of feet away. He'd rolled his sleeves down. Lucas noticed that, and for some reason it was the thing that finally made his throat close.
"Roll them back up," Lucas said. "Mom'll kill you."
After a moment his father unbuttoned the right cuff and folded it back, once, twice, and then the left, and they sat there while the wind came up off the bay and riffled the water.