I opened it with my thumbnail, and the paper inside was lined, torn from a pad that had a feed store’s name at the top. He had written it in pencil. I read it out loud from the chair, because Duane asked me to, and I did not trust myself to stop.
“Jodi. If you are reading this I am not in the chair anymore and you found the key. Good girl.
“The jacket still fits. I checked in March. I would like to be buried in it if the Legion boys say it is allowed. They will say it is allowed.
“The flag is your grandfather’s. It never had a wall to hang on and I never found one. You find it one. You are better at that kind of thing than I am.
“The letters are your grandmother’s. Read what you want. Burn what embarrasses me.
“I was never a good talker. Every time you drove up you brought me a pie and I said it was fine, and it was always the best one. Your mother knew that I knew. Now you do too.
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“Dad.”
Nobody in that hall said a word, and I heard Fran Mikulski start to cry.
Irv Feldman, who had come in quietly by the side door, took a cigar box from under his coat and set it on the table next to the flag. He did not say a word. He stood with his hands folded in a room of veterans who were not his, and he nodded once.
“Thank you,” I said to him. It came out in pieces. “Thank you for not throwing it away.”
He shook his head.
“Ma’am,” Lyle said. “I couldn’t have.”
What Craig Brought
I did not expect to see Craig Steffen again, and I certainly did not expect him at the funeral home on Thursday night.
The visitation ran from five to eight. At a quarter to seven there was a stir near the door.
He stood in the vestibule in a clean flannel shirt with his work coat folded over his arm. He was holding something wrapped in a moving blanket, a long flat shape the size of a bread box.
Duane was out of his chair before I could move. “Craig, this is not the time or place.”
“Duane,” Craig said. “Let me say it once.”
“Mrs. Mertz, I have no right to be here.”
“No,” I said, “you don’t.”
“I know that.” His voice was thick. “I came to tell you what happened, and not as an excuse. And then you can tell me to go.”
He told it standing up, with the blanket against his chest.
In 2022 a tenant had died in apartment 3A. A good woman, a retired school bus driver. Her family had come from Minnesota and decided the stuff in her apartment could wait. They did not pay rent, and they did not answer calls, and they did not clear it out.
“Four months,” Craig said. “Four months it sat there full of her furniture, and I could not rent it, and I could not touch it, and I missed two payments on the building. I nearly lost it.”
“My mother’s in memory care in Marshfield. It’s sixty-three hundred a month. I own that building and nothing else. A man dies and the rent stops, and I am the one who pays.”
“So I made a rule. Twenty-four hours. Everything out, so nobody’s ever got a reason to stand in a room full of furniture and tell me they’re not ready.”