The Name He Left Off the Wall

Jeff at the End of the Bar

The quartermaster was a man named Jeff Lowry, about sixty, with a Marine Corps tattoo gone soft and blue on his forearm. He was standing at the far end of the bar counting the till into a bank bag.

“Help you?” he said.

“I need the veterans’ membership application,” I said.

He paused with a stack of fives in his hand. Then he set them down, reached under the bar, and came up with a different form.

“You’ll need your 214,” he said.

I unfolded it and laid it on the bar. Jeff read it. Then he read it again, slower, running his thumb down the column with the dates.

“Balad,” he said. “Twice.”

“Twice,” I said.

He nodded once, the way men who have been somewhere nod at each other. He did not say thank you for your service. He did not say anything soft. He just slid the form over and handed me his pen.

“Annual’s forty dollars,” he said. “Or you can do life, but that’s a bigger check.”

“Annual’s fine for now,” I said.

I paid him in cash, two twenties. He wrote me out a receipt on a little carbon pad and then dug in a drawer for a white membership card. He filled in my name with his own pen and handed it over.

I stood there a second holding it. It was such a small thing, a card about the size of a business card, and it made my throat tight.

Behind me, Harold Pike watched from his table with his glasses in his hand. He did not say a word. He did not look angry. He looked like a man who had just seen the furniture moved in his own living room and was not sure who had done it.

Tom at the Kitchen Table

My husband, Tom, teaches shop at the high school. That afternoon he had been in his classroom teaching sophomores how to keep their thumbs away from the band saw, which he says is ninety percent of the job.

We had lived in that river town for six years, on the West Virginia side of the Ohio. It was Tom’s hometown, and when he got the teaching job, I said yes to the town the same way I said yes to him.

That night after supper I put the receipt on the kitchen table between us. Tom picked it up and read it, then turned it over as if there might be more on the back.

“Harold Pike tried to put me in the Auxiliary,” I said.

Tom set it down. He has big, square hands with a scar across one knuckle from a table saw thirty years ago, when he was the sophomore.

“You want me to go down there with you?” he asked.

I loved him for asking. I also knew exactly what would happen if he did. Harold would be polite to Tom, and Tom would be polite back, and every man in that hall would decide I needed a husband to fight my battles.

“No,” I said. “I want to go to the next meeting.”

Tom looked at me for a long second and then nodded. “Then go to the next meeting,” he said. “And tell me if you need a ride home.”