Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,42

to put things in order. The flowers he didn’t want. The trifolded American flag I set to one side on the kitchen table. I felt bad leaving him for the night. I didn’t see how he could stand to stay out there in the woods in that cold aluminum cave all by himself.

“Sure you’ll be all right?”

“I managed for two and a half years. I reckon I can manage the rest,” he said from the doorway.

For the remainder of the holiday, I ended up going to sit with him for a few hours every evening. After I cooked dinner for him, we would do jigsaw puzzles at the fold-down table. We didn’t talk much, not at first, but it didn’t feel as if we had to. It was okay just to be there. At the time I thought I was doing this as a favor to Jack, but I came to understand that I needed these visits as much as he did. There was no crying, no dramatics, and when we spoke of Tim it was in the familiar, fond way that you might speak of an old classmate you hadn’t seen for a while. We just were getting through it the best we could, I suppose, providing each other with the simple, undemanding presence of another person.

My parents, for their part, didn’t dare to protest my nightly visits. They sensed they didn’t have any say in the matter, even as I took food from my mother’s kitchen and carried it to Jack’s in my father’s car. At certain times in a person’s life, I believe, their will takes over their actions, making them as driven and unalterable as the weather. My parents could no sooner have stopped me from going than they could have stopped the rain. And anyway, what were they going to protest? The boy they hated had been blown to bits. They should’ve been overjoyed.

I visited Jack once more on the day I was due to go back to Sacred Heart. I made biscuits for breakfast, we had coffee, and before I left he handed me a lumpy manila envelope and a letter. “Tim wanted you to have these.” We hugged standing outside beside a picnic table on a pine-needled patch of ground in front of the trailer. The light fell just so, and his shadow lay across the ground just so, that it made me think of the color photograph of his wife and son on the wall above the kitchen table.

“I’ll visit again soon,” I promised. “Stay warm.”

“Go on, now,” Jack said. “Don’t keep the nuns waiting.”

• • •

I rested the side of my head against the cool window of the Greyhound as it hummed down Highway 19 past the familiar landmarks—the last Esso before the end of town, the McHugh fire-watch tower, the low white tanks of the Shell Oil depot receding in row upon row to the east. I remembered that first drive with my parents to Baton Rouge three years ago. It had been this same weather, the same season, the same gray frosted landscape. I remembered, too, before all this happened, how my school bus used to pass the Prejeans’s home every day in Zachary, and how I stared out the window hoping for a glimpse of the ailing and mysterious Suzy Prejean. And I remembered sitting in the revolving restaurant at the top of the Riverside Hotel with Chip Benton as we watched the lights of the city drift past outside the dark glass. All these things were in my mind as I opened the envelope on my lap.

Inside were Tim’s medals, the ones he’d won in Vietnam. I turned them over in my fingers. Already they had the look of antiques, like trinkets you might pick up at a yard sale. There was a small brass star attached to a red ribbon, and a round bronze token attached to a yellow ribbon, and another disk attached to a slightly different red ribbon. There were matching rectangular pins for each of these, and a few colorful cloth patches as well. I didn’t know what any of it meant. I opened the letter with some trepidation. It was six pages long, written on plain white paper, not the usual airmail kind. “Dear Laura,” it began.

Tim said how he sat down to write this letter because he had a bad feeling he might not see me again and he didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye and telling me how much