The Welcome Home at the Elevator

“I should have been in the road at ten o’clock. I heard about it Thursday at the diner. I sat in my truck outside the hall for two days.”

He took one step toward my son. “I don’t have a good reason. I have a reason. It isn’t good enough.” Cole did not say anything.

“Your grandfather left me out,” Calvin said. “Or I thought he did. I was fifty years old and I read a letter in a driveway that told me I’d already been paid.

I decided that the only way I could stay standing was to be angry at somebody who was still here.”

His voice cracked on the last word. “That was your father. That was you, by the end.

You were a kid in a recruiter’s office who didn’t know what he did wrong, and I shook your hand in a parking lot and never said a word to you.”

He held out the flag. “I’m sorry, Cole. I would like you to have this. Not as a gift, because it isn’t mine.

As a way of saying you were right to come home to a place that loved you. I just wasn’t one of the people standing in the road.”

For about five seconds nothing happened. Then Cole stepped forward. He took the flag out of his uncle’s hands, carefully, with both of his, and held it against his chest.

“Thank you,” he said. Calvin nodded. He did not seem to have anything left. Cole shifted the flag into the crook of his left arm. Then he held out his right hand.

Calvin looked at it like it was something he had forgotten how to read. He took it. They shook hands.

It was an ordinary handshake, firm and short, two men in a gravel lot with the wind blowing across them. My brother’s shoulders came down about two inches.

“Grandpa said to keep my boots dry,” Cole said. Calvin laughed. It came out as a sound he did not seem to expect. “He said that to me every day of my life,” Calvin said. “Right up until I left.”

“I heard you were a good mechanic.” “I was fine.” “Grandpa told me you were better than him on carburetors.” Calvin looked at my son.

“He never said that to me.” “He said it to me. At the hospital. Twice.” I do not think my brother had a thing left in him after that.

He stood there with his hand still half raised, and his mouth working, and tears running down both sides of a face I had seen cry exactly once before, at the graveside, behind a pair of sunglasses.

I stepped forward then. It was the only thing I had planned to do, and I had not known I would do it until my feet moved.

I did not say anything. I took the paper plate out of Sheila’s hand. It held a sloppy joe, a scoop of Gloria’s potato salad, and one of the rolls. I handed it to my brother.

“You haven’t eaten,” I said. He looked at the plate. He looked at me. “I don’t deserve this, Phil.” “Probably not,” I said. “Eat it anyway.”