Behind the door was a sign. A cardboard sign taped inside the screen door of our first house, hand lettered in marker. Welcome Home Frankie.
I made that sign in 1970. I had forgotten it until the daughter pulled the photograph out of her purse.
My husband Hank and a boy named Frank Doyle served together in Vietnam. Frankie had nobody back home. No parents, no girl, nothing. Hank used to show him my picture and tell him the door was always open. When you get home, you come live with us until you figure it out. So I made the sign and Hank took a picture of me standing in front of it, and he mailed it to Frankie. He said it would give him something to come home to.
Frankie never came. We waited for months. Hank wrote to him and the letters came back. After a while we stopped talking about it. Hank always said he hoped the boy was all right.
His daughter, Beth, told me the rest in the hallway. Her father came home in 1971 in rough shape. The war stayed in him. He drank for a while. He said he could not show up at our door like that, not after everything Hank told him. He was ashamed.
So he kept the picture instead. Beth said he told her once that on the worst nights he would take it out and look at that sign, and it was enough to get him through till morning. He got sober in 1979. He got married, had Beth, worked at a paper mill for thirty years. And he kept that picture in his footlocker the whole time.
He never came to the door, but the door kept him alive anyway.
I kept the door. That was what he was saying. He was telling Hank he kept it, all those years.
I went back into that room. He still thought I was somebody else. He still thought maybe he was talking to someone from long ago. I took his hand and I told him, Frankie, it is me. The door was always open. You were always welcome. Hank wanted you to know that.
He stopped apologizing. He just held on.
He died that night. Beth said it was the first time in four days he was quiet.
Beth asked if Hank was buried at the national cemetery, and he is. Her father had the right to be buried there too. So she made the arrangements. They are two rows apart now. I put a small flag on each of them on Veterans Day.
Beth and I talk every few weeks. She sent me the picture. It is framed on my mantel now, next to one of Hank in his uniform.
And I made a new sign, the same as the old one, and taped it inside my screen door. Beth laughed when she saw it. She said her dad would have loved that.
He finally made it home. It just took him fifty five years.