That’s where I started this story. So you know already. You know that I stood up and my chair fell over. You know that Caleb froze. You know that the first officer was Ray Delgado, and that he took off his hat, and that he looked at my son and nodded.
Here is what happened next.
The doors opened again.
Two more officers came in. Then four more. Then they just kept coming.
They walked in a line, quietly, without hurrying. They didn’t come down the aisle. They spread out along the back wall of the gym, one by one, shoulder to shoulder. Then down the side walls. Then they kept coming, until there was a line of dark blue uniforms wrapping around three sides of the room.
I recognized faces. Some of them. Officer Hendricks, who’d fixed our gutter. Sergeant Pruitt, who’d driven the lead car at the funeral. A young woman I didn’t know at all. An older man with a cane, retired, who I remembered from David’s very first holiday party, sixteen years ago. Officers in uniform and officers in plain clothes, clearly off duty, wearing their badges on chains around their necks.
