“But you are my real daughter.”

I put my face against his arm and I wept, and could not stop for a while.

Walt had never once tried to take the place of my father, who had died when I was very small.

He had never made me call him Dad.

He had simply been there, for everything — taught me to drive in an empty parking lot on Sunday mornings, sat in the bleachers at every track meet I ever ran, waited four hours in the cold outside the testing center the day I sat my Navy commission exam.

When my mother used to tell me the military was no place for a young woman, that it was unbecoming, Walt would say, mildly, without looking up: “Leave her be, Sylvia.