Part 3 — The Coffee Can
Chester held the page close to his glasses and finished the sentence in his Pledge of Allegiance voice.
“The coffee can is under the back step, Imogene. The one I poured myself in 1976. Lift the loose brick.”
Randall stood at the bar with his hands hanging. For the first time since March, he was not holding a beer.
Chester drove us to the house himself. The back step was a poured slab with a single crooked brick set into the corner. He knelt, groaned, and tipped the brick up with his pocketknife.
Under it lay a hole lined with a plastic bag, and in the hole sat a rusty Folgers can with the lid taped down.
I took it into the kitchen and set it on the table. Randall stood in the doorway, and I asked him to come and sit beside me.
Inside the can was a savings certificate from the First National Bank of Las Cruces for eighteen thousand five hundred dollars, in my name alone. Beside it lay a folded paper in Cecils pencil.
I read it out loud for both of us.
“Imogene, this is yours. Randall, if you are reading over her shoulder, I forgive you before you ask. The tin was never the thing. Go and talk to someone at the VA. They helped me. They will help you.”
Cecil spent two tours keeping his mouth shut about what he saw, but he used his last pencil to say the one thing his son most needed to hear.
Randall put his face on the kitchen table and wept as he had not since he was a boy. Chester put a hand on his shoulder and said nothing.
The medals went back into their case that evening, one at a time, in the same order Cecil kept them. The purple ribbon last. Chester refused my money for them. He said the two thousand one hundred seventy-five dollars was a debt he owed a friend.
Randall called the VA hotline the next morning. It was a veterans family program, and it took spouses and sons. A counselor named Ms. Torres saw him on Wednesday. He went every week for six months.
He moved out of the back room in April, into a small place near the park, and he got a job at the hardware store. He brought me a six-pack of root beer the day he moved.
The survivor checks continued as before. He never again asked for a dollar.
On Veterans Day I took the medals out of the case. Randall and I polished each one with a dish rag.
He whistled through his teeth, without knowing he was doing it.