“Women don’t get call signs,” my retired Marine stepfather said at my brother’s commissioning dinner, smiling at a room full of officers like he’d just turned me into the joke again, and then I said the two words that made the laughter d.i.e so hard you could hear chairs scrape across the floor

He would come home smelling like diesel and salt, spinning me around while laughing. “Still here, Kin. Still drawing the lines,” he would whisper.

In 2006, when I was twelve, a Navy chaplain walked up our driveway on a gray Tuesday morning. I was tying my shoes for school when my mother opened the door and made a sound that haunted my dreams for years.

A high-pressure steam line had burst in the engine room of the USS Kearsarge, and my father was one of the four who didn’t make it out. People told us he died doing what he loved, but at twelve, I just hated that he loved something that could take him away forever.

I remember the hospital in Portsmouth being a blur of white lights and the smell of floor wax. My mother was a ghost in a plastic chair, and I sat next to her holding a brochure about military honors that I read until I knew every fold of the flag by heart.

The funeral was held at a cemetery overlooking the Piscataqua River under a sky that looked like bruised lead. I stood there in a black dress that felt itchy and stiff, watching the sailors in their whites move with a precision that felt like a dance.