CRACK.
"This court stands adjourned. Captain Whitfield... take your father's machine home."
The public gallery erupted into thunderous, standing applause.
Veterans stood at attention, saluting with tears running down their weathered cheeks; reporters scrambled for the doors; camera flashes illuminated the oak walls in blinding white strobes.
Margaret was led through the side administrative door by her attorney, weeping, her head down, completely and permanently severed from the life she had thrown away for fifty-five thousand dollars of dirty paper.
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I didn't look at her.
I reached down, took my seven-year-old grandson Benjamin by the hand, pulled Thomas against my shoulder, and walked down the center aisle into the bright, sunlit atrium of Asheville, leaving the ghosts of eighty years behind us forever.
hree years later.
The early-autumn sunshine of late October over the Blue Ridge Parkway was an endless, blinding sheet of hammered gold, washing the towering peaks of Mount Mitchell in long, shimmering ripples of amber, scarlet, and deep rose.
