“We love you, Dad.”

The auditorium came apart.

Eight hundred people rose to their feet, and the applause hit the high ceiling and came back down like weather, and strangers all around me were reaching to shake my hand and grip my shoulder and wipe their own eyes, and I barely felt any of it.

My bad knee had stopped hurting.

The cheap camera slipped out of my hands onto the seat cushion.

And I stepped out into the center aisle — one shaky step, and then another, and then I was not stepping carefully anymore, I was walking, straight down the middle of that auditorium toward the stage, and I did not care about the ceremony or the order of things or the rules of where a man in the audience is supposed to stay.