The Bronze Star Clyde Gave Back

I should say who Jarrod is, because I do not want anyone thinking I hated him.

Jarrod is Vernon’s son from his first marriage. His mother, Lorraine, died of cancer when he was twelve.

Vernon raised him mostly alone for six years, on a county road crew’s pay, and then I came along, and Jarrod was seventeen and polite to me in the way a boy is polite to a woman he has decided to tolerate.

He grew up. He did not turn out bad. He worked at the distribution center off the bypass, lifting and loading, and he was good at it. He fixed my porch steps once without being asked. He called his father every Sunday.

Then two years ago he hurt his back on that job, a bad one, two discs, and a doctor gave him a bottle of pills for it.

I know now what happened after that. Nobody tells you how fast it goes with a back like his and a job like his and a prescription that runs out before the pain does.

I did not know it then. I knew that Jarrod lost the job in the spring. I knew he gave up his apartment in August.

I knew that in September he asked if he could use our spare room for a few weeks, and that Vernon, who has never in his life told a child of his no, said yes before I could open my mouth.

“Between jobs,” Vernon told me that night, lying in the dark. “He’ll land on his feet, Nora.” I let it go.

A wife learns when to let a thing go and when to bring it back up. I let it go that time, and I have thought about it every day since.

I did not go to the sheriff. I want to explain that, because I know how it sounds. A medal was stolen out of my house.

The sensible thing, the thing my sister said later, the thing my neighbor Gwen said over the fence, would have been to pick up the phone and report it.

But I knew how it would go. A deputy would come out, a nice young man, and take down the facts in a notebook, and tell me the report would be assigned on Monday. It was Wednesday.

Every one of those days, the medal would sit in a glass case in a pawn shop with a price sticker on it, and any stranger with cash could walk in and take it home.

And there was the other thing, which was smaller and which I was not proud of. Jarrod was still Vernon’s boy.

If I put a deputy on his trail, I would have to explain it to a man who could not even answer me.

So I did what my mother would have done. I went and got it myself.

I took a picture with my phone of the photograph on the mantel, the one of Vernon in his dress uniform at thirty-one, the ribbon on his chest and his cap tucked under his arm.

I did not want to carry the frame around. Then I got in the truck.