My mother slapped me twice at my own engagement party and threatened to expose my secrets—then a general called me “Captain,” federal agents seized my sister’s phone, and a message from my father who’d been dead for six years appeared on the screen.
Chapter 20
Hollis Grant testified before a federal grand jury for three days in January, and the indictments came down in March — seven people, three companies, four contracts, and a two-hundred-page criminal complaint that names Meridian Shield Corporation forty-one times and Thomas A. Barrett, General, United States Army, once, in the first paragraph, as the decedent.
I read that complaint on a bench outside the courthouse. I read the entire thing, all two hundred and eleven pages, because I wanted to see what my father looked like in the language of the United States Government after six years of being dead, and I found him on page one, and I sat there for a while and then I folded the corners down and gave it to Brynn.
The Airworthiness Foundation got its first grant request eleven days after the incorporation papers were stamped: a widow in Texas, three children, a helicopter that came apart over a training area in Arizona, an inquiry that was going to take two years. Chen and I read the letter together in the fluorescent room. The woman’s handwriting was round and careful and she had underlined the phrase I do not believe the finding. I mailed back a check and a letter with one line in it: Keep your hands flat on your knees.
Ethan and I got married on the thirty-first of May on his grandmother’s porch in Savannah, because the Willard was, in his words, “a rental we are never going to get a refund on and I don’t care.” Forty people. My mother sat in the third row, on the aisle, in a blue dress, and did not speak to anybody, and left after the cake. Brynn stood beside me and held my bouquet while I said my vows, and when the justice asked who gives this woman, she said, out loud, before anybody else could get the words out: Her father does. I’m standing in for him.
There is a photograph of that moment. I have it framed in the hallway outside my office. In it, my sister’s chin is up and my face is doing something I don’t recognize, and behind us the dogwood that Ethan planted the spring we bought the house is just starting to come green.
My mother and I talk on the phone on Sundays. That is what we have. I am not going to tell you it became more than that, because it did not, and because I have decided not to lie to you. She came for Thanksgiving. She brought a rooster spoon rest from the house on Sycamore Street and set it on my counter without being asked, and I let it stay there for a week, and then I put it in a cabinet, and I did not tell her.
Some things you keep. Some things you put in a cabinet.