Then another.
Then five more.
By the time the string quartet started playing again, our table in the back corner had fourteen chairs around it.
Then twenty.
Then men started dragging over whole tables. Pushing them together. Tablecloths and flower vases and coffee cups and all.
By eight-fifteen, half the gymnasium was in the back corner. By the bleachers. Around an eighty-
one-year-old man in dress blues and a nine-year-old boy with syrup on his chin.
The admiral pulled up a folding chair.
He sat down next to me.
He didn’t go back to the podium.
Part Fourteen: Breakfast
We ate breakfast.
That’s all. We just ate breakfast.
Pancakes and eggs and bacon and orange juice. The admiral got up and went to the buffet himself and came back with a plate piled high.
“Navy chow,” he said. “You never pass it up.”
Caleb laughed. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh in a week.
