• “Come on,” she said.
• “Absolutely not.”
• She laughed. “You fly military airplanes.”
• “Exactly. Machines with rules. Checklists. Instruments.”
• “Evie.”
• “I don’t dance, Clare.”
• “You did when I was little.”
• That memory hit me like a wave.
• Clare, about six years old, standing on top of my feet in the living room in Avon. Me home on leave, twenty-five years old, still in my flight suit. Moving her around the room to some old Motown record of Mom’s. Mom sitting on the couch laughing so hard she had to wipe her eyes.
• And Dad, in the doorway, with a camera. Still kind enough back then to take pictures.
• Before control swallowed everything.
• Before Mom got sick.
• I took Clare’s hand.
• The guests moved back to give us room.
• We danced badly. Terribly, actually. Clare stepped on my shoe twice. I nearly tripped over her train and took us both down in front of two hundred and fifty people.
• For three minutes, neither of us cared about anything.
• That was my real victory that night.
• Not the rank. Not the letter from the Air Force. Not my father’s humiliation.
• My little sister, laughing against my shoulder again.
• At the edge of the dance floor, my father stood and watched us.
• He looked old. Truly old. For the first time in my life, Gerald Ulette looked like a seventy-five-year-old man.
• And alone.
• I didn’t feel any triumph. Only distance.
• Some losses deserve grief.
• Others just have to be accepted.
• Near midnight, Clare found me outside on the terrace.
• The country club lawn stretched out into darkness past the lights. You could hear crickets. Somebody laughing down by the parking lot.
• She’d taken off her shoes. She was carrying them by the straps.
• I had mine in one hand too.
• “Very dignified, General,” she said.
• “That information is classified.”
• She smiled. Then she got serious.
• “I have one more thing.”
• “Please don’t tell me you found more legal documents.”
• “No.” She laughed. “No more legal documents. I promise.”
• She was holding a small white box. The kind jewelry comes in.
• She opened it.
• Inside was a photograph.
• Two girls.
• Me at twenty-six, in my old blue Air Force T-shirt, home on leave. And Clare at seven, with a gap in her front teeth.
• We were sitting on the hood of Dad’s old Volvo station wagon in the driveway, eating ice cream cones. Mine was chocolate. Hers was strawberry, dripping down her arm. We were both laughing at something outside the frame.
• I stared at it.
• “I thought he got rid of all of these,” I said.
• “So did I.”
• “Where did you find it?”
• “In Mom’s things.”
• Our mother, Anne, died of ovarian cancer when Clare was nine. I flew home from Turkey for the funeral. Three years later, Dad married Margaret. And Mom’s things went into boxes in the basement, and the boxes went behind other boxes, and nobody talked about her anymore.
• Clare turned the photograph over.
• There was writing on the back. Blue ink. A little faded.
• My mother’s handwriting.
• My knees nearly gave out.
• I held it under the terrace light and read it.
• My girls. If they ever forget how much they belong to each other, remind them.
• I couldn’t breathe.
• Clare was crying.
• “It was in the same box as the letters,” she said. “Right on top. Like it was waiting.”
• I looked at her.
• “She knew,” I said.
• “She knew us,” Clare said.
• For fifteen years, my father had tried to define family as obedience.
• My mother left behind a different definition.
• Belonging.
• I touched the edge of the photograph.
• “Can I keep it?”
• Clare shook her head.
• My heart dropped.
• Then she smiled through her tears.
• “You get the original,” she said. She reached into the box and lifted out a second photo underneath. “I already made myself a copy.”
• I laughed. Then I cried. Then I did both at once, standing barefoot on a country club terrace in a navy dress at midnight.
• Clare leaned her head against my shoulder.
• Inside, the music had gone soft and slow.
• Through the glass doors, I could see my father sitting by himself at table one. Everyone else had drifted away from him. He was holding his wine glass but not drinking it.
• He looked out toward the terrace. Toward us.
• Our eyes met through the glass.
• For once in my life, I didn’t look away.
• Neither did he.
• There was no apology in his face. Not yet.
• Maybe there never would be.
• But there was something there I’d never seen him allow himself to show me before.
• The knowledge that he’d lost.
• Not to the Air Force. Not to my career. Not to some imaginary rebellion by an ungrateful daughter.
• He’d lost to his own choices.
• I didn’t go back inside to comfort him.
• That wasn’t my job anymore.
• Clare squeezed my hand.
• “You’re coming for Thanksgiving,” she said.
• “That sounds like an order.”
• “It is.”
• “You know I’m technically very hard to give orders to.”
• She grinned at me.
• “Major General?”
• “Yes?”
• “Please come home.”
• That word caught somewhere between my ribs.
• Home.
• Not Dad’s white colonial in Avon. Not the house with the changed locks. Not the corner office at Ulette Insurance that he kept warm for sixteen years for a daughter he never really knew.
• Her.
• I looked down at my mother’s photograph in my hand. Two sisters on the hood of a station wagon. Knees touching. Laughing at something the camera never caught.
• Then I looked at the woman standing next to me.
• “I’ll be there,” I said.
• Clare rested her head on my shoulder again.
• We stayed out on that terrace until the band started the last song of the night.
• And when we finally walked back inside, she didn’t walk ahead of me.
• I didn’t walk behind her.
• We crossed that ballroom side by side.
• 

    >>PART 7