Chapter 10 - The Salt on the Stone
By five o'clock, the parade deck was empty again.
The white plastic chairs had been stacked six-high on wooden pallets and hauled away by two green tractors from the maintenance yard.
The fog had come back off the bay, thick and grey, smelling of wet reed grass and old coal smoke from the power station up the river.
I sat on the low stone wall near the sea-gate, holding a paper bag with two cold ham sandwiches that Mrs. Gable had shoved into my pocket before we left St. Michaels.
My uniform jacket was unbuttoned at the neck. The Medal of Honor sat inside my pocket, wrapped in the same piece of greaseproof paper that held the sixteen-year-old boy's Timex watch.
I hadn't given the watch to the lieutenant colonel at the gate.
I was going to keep it until Monday, when I went back to the yard to look at the engine housing again.
A car stopped on the gravel behind me.
Not the General's Suburban. An old Buick—a ninety-eight LeSabre with a rusted rocker panel and a missing hubcap on the rear left wheel.
The door opened with a long, dry creak that sounded like an ungreased hinge on a barn door.
Charles Carter got out.
He wasn't wearing the blazer anymore. He had an old coat on—a light grey trench coat from the nineties that was three sizes too large for his shoulders now, the belt dangling loose around his knees.
He didn't walk like a CEO. He walked like a man who was worried about the ice under the leaves, his feet coming down flat and careful on the wet river stone.
He stopped three feet away from the wall.
He didn't look at me; he looked out at the bay, where the red navigation buoys were starting to blink their evening signals through the grey mist.
"Your mother had a medal like that," he said after two minutes of silence. "From her father. For the Marne."
"I know," I said.
"She kept it in a velvet box under the silver tea set," he said. His voice was thin, small, like paper being dragged across dry wood. "She used to take it out when the boys were sick. She thought... she thought if she held it while they slept, it would keep the fever down."
He reached into his trench coat pocket and pulled out a small, heavy object wrapped in a white handkerchief.
He didn't offer it to me. He set it down on the stone wall six inches from my ham sandwich.
I unrolled the linen.
It was his watch—the gold Patek Philippe he had bought when his first company cleared five million in profit back in eighty-two. The one he had worn every day of my life, the one he tapped with his gold ring when he wanted people to stop talking at the dinner table.
The crystal was cracked down the middle.
"It stopped at eight o'clock last night," he said softly. "When you walked through the door."
"You can get it fixed in Baltimore, Dad," I said. "There's a shop on Charles Street."
"No," he said. He looked at his own hand—that white, soft hand that had never held a mechanical wrench or cleared a jammed line at three hundred feet. "The mainspring's gone. The man said it's not worth the metal to open the case."
He sat down on the wall beside me—not close, but near enough that I could smell the faint, stale scent of bourbon and cedar wood that always stayed in his clothes.
His knee touched my left leg—the good one.
"Amanda's going to sell the house," he said after a long time.
"I know."
"She said it's too big for one person."
"It is too big, Dad."
He looked down at his boots—the black calfskin shoes that were now grey with salt from the river walkway, the leather water-spotted around the seams where the polish had failed.
"Evelyn," he said.
"Yes, Dad?"
"Did... did the President ask about the family?"
I took a bite of the cold ham sandwich. The bread was dry, but the meat was salted well, and it tasted of Mrs. Gable's kitchen and the warm lard she used for the crusts.
"He asked if you were here," I said.
"What did you tell him?"
I looked out at the water—at the dark, flat line where the Severn met the bay, and at the single SAR helicopter hovering two miles off the point, its yellow searchlight sweeping the black waves for something that had been lost in the night.
"I told him you were busy, Dad," I said softly. "I told him you had a lot of things to take care of at home."
My father didn't answer.
May you like
He reached out, his long, thin fingers trembling as they touched the corner of the paper bag sitting between us on the stone.
He didn't pick it up. He just let his fingers rest there, against the grey grease-paper, while the rain began to fall again—light, sharp, and cold—turning the white stone of the wall into the color of wet iron.
