He strode to the door, then turned back toward her. She was still at the table. "Sorry I disappointed you, Diane. And, well, thanks ... for everything."

Diane got up, walked swiftly across the tiny room to him, and kissed Kinsman lightly on the lips.

"It was my pleasure, General."

He laughed. "Hell, I'm not even a lieutenant yet."

"You'll be a general someday."

"I don't think so."

"You could have been a hero today."

"I'm not very heroic."

"Yes, you are." Diane smiled at him. "You just don't know it yet."

Unshaven, in his wrinkled uniform, Kinsman stood at his father's side through the funeral, rode silently in the cortege's limousine to the cemetery, and watched a crowd of strangers file past the casket, one by one, placing on it single red roses. His mother had detested red roses all her life.

As they rode back toward Russian Hill in the velvet- lined, casketlike limousine, Kinsman turned to his darkly silent father.

"I know I've disappointed you," he said in a low swift voice, afraid he would be cut off before he could finish, "and I also realize that you wouldn't be so angry with me if you didn't love me and weren't worried about me."

His father stared straight ahead, unmoving.

"Well ... I love you, too, Dad."

The old man's eyes blinked. The corners of his mouth twitched. Without moving a millimeter toward his son, he whispered, "You are a disgrace. Staying out all night and then showing up looking like a Bowery derelict. The sooner you leave the better!"

Kinsman leaned back in the limousine's velvet uphol- stery. Thanks, Dad, he said to himself. You've always made it so easy for me.

* * * 20

Neal McGrath drove him down 101, toward the Navy's Moffet Field, weaving his new Chrysler convertible through knots of traffic and past hulking, hurtling diesel tractor- trailers-

"You're sure you can pick up a flight back to Boulder?" McGrath yelled over the rush of the wind.

"Sure!" Kinsman hollered back. "The guy I rode out with told me he was going back late this afternoon."

McGrath shook his head as he carefully flicked the turn signal and pulled around a station wagon filled with kids. The wind pulled wildly at his long red hair.

"The family's going to be very disappointed that you didn't stay for dinner."

"Not Dad. He threw me out."

McGrath snorted. "You know he didn't mean that."

"Sure."