PART 2 — THE DOG TAGS
The man in the pressed Army uniform stood up at Easter brunch, a set of dog tags in his fist, and the whole table turned to look.
Mr. Preston, he said, my grandfather was Walter Reyes. He set the dog tags down in front of Prestons plate. And I think everybody at this table should hear who was holding his hand the night he passed.
Walter Reyes had no family left at the end. No visitors, no phone calls, no one to sit with him. No one but a night nurse at the VA home in Charleston who stayed past every shift, every single night of his last month, so that a man who gave everything for his country would not die alone.
The woman Preston called a babysitter for old folks had held a dying veterans hand through the night so he would not have to face the dark by himself.
The grandson had been overseas, he told the table, unable to get home in time. When he finally came back, the staff told him his grandfather had not been alone after all. One nurse had made sure of it. He had spent a year tracking her down to say thank you, and the pastor had finally brought him to the right table.
He looked at Tasha. My grandfather wrote your name in his last letter, he said. He called you the kindest person he ever met.
Preston, the insurance executive who had bragged an hour before that his assistants make more than Tasha, could not meet the young soldiers eyes.
Tasha just passed the deviled eggs, the way she had passed them all through his joke. Then she wiped her eyes and said Walter had been a gentleman to the very end, and that it had been her honor.
The airman picked the dog tags back up and pressed them into Tashas hand. He wanted you to have these, he said. He told the nurses so.
Seventeen years Tasha has worked nights at that home, lifting and bathing and feeding men the world forgot. Easter brunch was the first time anyone at her own family table understood that the world had not forgotten them. She had been remembering them all along.