When I was growing up, the military existed in our house mostly as a collection of photographs stored in a cedar box and a few habits he never explained.
Shoes lined up beneath the bench.
Keys always in the same bowl.
Never sitting with his back to a restaurant door.
He had died eleven years earlier.
There were questions I had stopped asking years before that.
Samuel looked genuinely confused.
“I assumed you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That he was a Ranger.”
The hallway suddenly seemed too narrow.
“My father was infantry.”
“Yes.”
“He never served in the Regiment.”
Samuel looked at me for several seconds.
Then said quietly,
“Victoria, he absolutely did.”
Denise lowered her clipboard.
I stared at Samuel.
“No.”
“I served with him.”
“When?”
“Nineteen eighty-seven into eighty-nine.”
That was before I was born.
Barely.
“He never told me.”
Samuel’s face softened.
“There may have been reasons.”
“What reasons?”
“I don’t know.”
“You served together and you don’t know?”
“I knew your father as a soldier. I didn’t know everything about him as a man.”
The answer was reasonable.
I hated it anyway.
Samuel reached into his wallet.
For one strange second I thought he might produce some old photograph.
