The Friday I Drove Dad to Rolla

I did not know what to say to that, so I did not say anything.

“Fern from church called this morning,” she said. “Her husband’s in the Legion here. They got the newsletter too, because Augustin’s on the roster. She saw it before I did. She called to say how proud I must be.”

Bonita stopped. I waited.

“She asked if I was there,” Bonita said. “She asked me what it was like when that man saluted him. And I had to tell her I stayed home.”

There was the consequence, right there, and nobody had done it to her but herself.

Half the women in her Sunday school class had husbands in that Legion post, and every one of those husbands had that newsletter on his kitchen table.

I did not gloat. I want to be clear about that. There was nothing in me that wanted to.

I felt sorry for her, if anything, the way you feel sorry for anybody who misses something good and finds out after.

“Bonita,” I said, “he’ll go again next October. I’m taking him. There’s room in the truck.”

She did not answer that. She said, “Your father’s out in the garage,” and she said it gently, which was new, and then she said goodbye, which was newer, and hung up.

The Bulletin Board

The newsletter went up on the bulletin board at our Legion post in town that same week.

Somebody cut out the picture and pinned it in the middle, over the fish fry flyer and the flag retirement notice.

Dad told me men stopped him at the bank and the feed store to say they had seen it.

One of the old farmers he has known fifty years shook his hand in the cereal aisle at the grocery store and did not say anything, just shook it.

Fern stopped him after church the next Sunday, Dad said, and told him he looked like a movie star in it.

Bonita was standing right there next to him in the vestibule with her pocketbook over her arm.

Dad said Bonita did not say much of anything that day. But that afternoon, he said, she went down in the basement and was gone a long time, and when she came up she had his Army things in the box, and she set the box on the kitchen table.

She did not say a word about it. She just set it down and went back to her ironing.

Dad opened it after supper and found his old discharge papers, and two pictures of the squad, and a letter my mother had written him in 1967.

He called me that night and read me the first line of that letter over the phone. I will keep the line to myself.

It was the first time I had heard my mother’s words in years, and Dad’s voice broke on the second sentence, and mine did too.