"I tried."
"You taught me to splice. You taught me to — every weekend. Every weekend for nineteen years." He was crying now, finally, and he didn't care. "That was him. That was you doing what he said."
"That was me loving you," his father said. "The orders just told me where to start."
Lucas turned and put his face against his father's shoulder, against the olive shirt, the way he hadn't done since he was very small, and his father put his arm around him, the right arm, the old ink pressed against the white of the uniform, and held on.
They sat like that for a long time. The sailboats went on tacking back and forth across the bay. Up on the lawn a band was packing up, and somebody was laughing, and somebody's grandmother set off her air horn one more time.
When Lucas finally sat up and wiped his face on his sleeve, his mother was standing on the grass at the top of the riprap with her silver camera in one hand and her shoes in the other, and beside her, holding his white cover under his arm, the admiral.
"Is it safe?" Elena called down.
"Not really," his father said.
"Good," she said, and came down the rocks barefoot and sat on Lucas's other side and took his hand. And the admiral, after a moment's hesitation, came down too, carefully, in his good shoes, and sat on the granite in his dress whites a little way off, which Lucas was fairly sure was not something rear admirals did.
"I've told that story to every class I've ever spoken to," Reyes said after a while. "Nineteen years. I've been telling it wrong. There's a citation in Washington, sir, that says you were lost going back for Bost, with my name on the bottom of it. And a Silver Star citation for Michael Chardi that says he died helping evacuate the hold. Neither one of them is right."
"No."
"Then we're going to fix them," the admiral said. "Both of them. And I think, if you'll let me, we're going to do it out loud."