explains what I felt.
She was in her service dress uniform.
Dark blue. The ribbons and decorations that I had seen hanging in her closet my whole life but had never inventoried — I was looking at them now, in the auditorium light, arranged on her chest with the specific order and precision that meant something to people who knew what they meant. She walked the way she always walked, which was without performance, with the controlled awareness I had grown up watching, with the expression that other people read as
unsmiling and that I knew meant she was completely present in the moment she was in.
She was looking for me.
She found me.
Something in her face — small, specific, the version of her expressions that was only available to people who had been watching her face their whole life — communicated: I’m here. You’re all right.
I was not entirely all right in that moment, but I was going to be.
I stood up.
The freshman section around me was doing the thing that nine hundred teenagers do when something
