He set down his glass and looked Doug dead in the eye. Then my son said, “Doug, go out to my truck. Passenger side, floorboard, the blue tote. Bring it in here.”
Doug laughed and said he was not going out in the cold on a dare.
My daughter went. She has always been the one who goes.
In August of 2013 they cleaned out my mother’s house after we moved her to the home. Doug organized it, and I want to be fair, somebody had to, and it was four days of work and a thirty-yard dumpster in the driveway. Fast decisions get made in a house like that.
The blue tote is what Vince pulled out of that dumpster on the Thursday morning pickup.
My father’s flag. The one off his casket in 1988, folded, in the triangle case with the glass cracked. My parents’ wedding album. My brother Denny’s Little League jacket, and Denny died at nineteen and my mother kept that jacket in her cedar chest for forty-one years.
Vince was on the back of the truck that morning. He saw the corner of the flag case going into the hopper and he hit the stop and climbed in.
He has had it in his garage for twelve years.
He never said a word. Not to me, not to his mother, not to his sister, and not to Doug, because he figured somebody had made a mistake in a hard week and there was no point in making a person live with it.
He was going to give it to us at some point. He told me later he could never find the right day, and every year the not-saying got heavier, and then a man stood up at our fortieth anniversary and made a joke about what he takes out.
My daughter opened that tote at the table.
She was the one who had labeled the boxes in 2013. She recognized her own handwriting on the lid of the album, the word ATTIC, and she put her hand flat on it and did not move for a long time.
On top of the flag was an index card in Vince’s handwriting, which he had written the night he brought it home and had never had cause to show anybody.
Found Grandpa’s flag on the Green Ridge route, 8/22. Not telling anybody. Whoever threw it out is going to feel it the rest of their life, and nobody needs that. Keep it dry, give it back when it will land right.
Doug read it standing up. Then he sat down and put both hands over his face, and my grandson took the flag case out of the tote and held it in his lap the whole rest of the meal like it might get away.
Doug apologized in my kitchen, later, and it was not a small apology and it was not a fast one.
He rides with Vince now. Twice, so far, at four-thirty in the morning, on the Green Ridge route, and he came back the first time and said he had no idea how many people wave.
The flag is on my mantel. The album is at my daughter’s. Denny’s jacket went to my grandson, who is nineteen this year.
And I quit letting it ride. Twenty years I laughed with the table, and my boy was carrying my father’s flag in his garage the whole time.