I am eighty-one years old.

He had a good face beneath the meanness.

He looked like a boy who had spent his whole life being told he was the strongest person in the room and had never been given a reason to question it.

I looked at his name.

I looked at the patch on his shoulder.

Then I looked at the little brass crest pinned above his pocket, the one showing which battalion a soldier belongs to.

It was a blue shield with a white bird.

I said nothing.

I picked up my glass of water.

“What, are you deaf?” one of the others asked.

“I asked for some ID,” Sergeant Reese said.

He snapped his fingers twice.

“Now. Let’s see it.”

He had no right to ask.

A sergeant cannot demand papers from a visitor in the lunch line. That is a job for the military police.

Everyone in the room knew it.

I had a visitor’s pass.

It was inside my purse, attached to a blue string, with my photograph on it.

I did not take it out.

I have a stubborn streak my late husband used to call the eighth wonder of the world.

I had not come there to show my papers to a boy.

I took another sip of water.

My hand remained steady.

It is the one part of me that still does.

His face had turned red.

He had started this in front of two hundred people, and it was not unfolding the way he expected.

“That’s it,” he said. “You and me are taking a walk to the gate. Get up.”

I did not move.

He straightened.

He looked me over, from my white hair down to my church shoes, searching for something else to use against me.

And he found it.

On the collar of my gray coat, there is a pin.

It is small, and the brass has darkened with age.

It is a blue shield with a white bird.

The same as the one on his chest.

Mine is only fifty-six years older.

He stared at it.

Then he jabbed his finger toward it, stopping an inch from my throat.

“Where did you get that?”

I set my glass down.

“That’s my battalion’s crest,” he said. “Men bled for that. You don’t buy it at a flea market and pin it on your coat to get a free lunch. Take it off.”

“No,” I said.

It was the first word I had spoken to him.

“Take it off, or I’ll take it off for you.”

The girl at the next table stood.