That was the first crack in the cover, that April morning, though none of us understood it yet.

My family had spent a decade being faintly embarrassed by the modesty of my marriage.

And now two soldiers had come to say my modest husband had died in service to his country, and my mother’s first clear question, once she understood, was whether there would be a payout.

The funeral had been held up all that time — there were reasons, classified reasons, the kind of reasons my family had spent a decade being annoyed they weren’t allowed to know — and it had finally happened yesterday.

Yesterday.

And here was my father, this morning, informing me that four months and one day was the outer limit of his patience for my sorrow, that I had been granted a reasonable mourning period and had now exceeded it, and that the decent thing, the considerate thing, would be to take my sadness somewhere it wouldn’t lower the mood over the sweet potatoes.