The Bronze Star Clyde Gave Back

The shadow box by Vernon’s recliner hung open, and the glass dangled from one hinge like a loose tooth.

I stood in the living room in my coat with the hospital bag still on my shoulder and could not make my eyes understand what they were looking at.

Behind the glass there should have been a medal. Instead there was a square of faded blue felt with four little pin holes in it, and a paler rectangle where the sun had never reached for thirty-five years.

It was a quarter to noon on a Wednesday, the twenty-eighth of October.

I had driven home from Louisville to get Vernon a clean pair of pajamas, his reading glasses and the good razor. That was all I had come for. I had been gone since Sunday.

Sunday was the stroke. Vernon had been in the recliner with the Kentucky game on low, and he said, “Nora, my arm is asleep,” in a voice I did not know.

By the time I got around the coffee table, the right side of his face had slid down like wax. I do not remember dialing 911.

I remember the paramedic’s boots on my kitchen floor, and I remember that Vernon’s eyes never left mine the whole way down the driveway.

Hardin Memorial kept him two days.

On Tuesday morning they moved him to the Robley Rex Veterans hospital in Louisville, to the stroke unit on the fourth floor, because he is a veteran and because the doctors there know what to do with a man who gave the Army five years of his life and then thirty more to the county road crew.

Vernon is sixty-six. I am fifty-eight. We had been married fourteen years that October. He is the gentlest man I have ever known, and right now he cannot say so, because the words are stuck behind a door in his head.

I looked at the empty felt and I knew without being told who had been in this room. “Jarrod,” I said out loud, to nobody.

Then I thought of Tuesday night, of Vernon squeezing my hand twice with his good one and pointing toward home while I promised to bring his glasses. I had thought he wanted the television. He had wanted his frame.

The dog tags were gone too. They had hung off the lower corner of the frame on their little ball chain since before I met him, the way a man hangs his keys on a nail. Now there was only the nail.

Jarrod’s duffel bag was not at the foot of the spare room bed where it had been all month. His charger was still in the wall. His good boots were gone.

I stood in that doorway a long time. The house was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator.

My phone buzzed in my coat pocket and I jumped. It was a text from Jarrod, which made me laugh once, a sound I did not like.

Dad doing ok? Cant make it up there today. I read it twice. Then I put the phone in my pocket, set the pajamas on the sofa, and went back out to the truck.