He was propped up in bed, thin and pale, but his eyes were clear.
“You look just like him,” he said. “Same chin. Same stubborn face.”
Then he asked the nurse for his jacket.
From the inside pocket, he took out a plastic sandwich bag. Inside was an old photo and a yellowed envelope.
The photo was two young soldiers on a sandbag wall, squinting into the sun.
One of them was my father.
The other was Harold.
“We were in the same unit,” he said. “He talked about you every single night. Birdie this, Birdie that. Birdie’s going to be a teacher. Birdie can out-fish any boy in Minnesota.”
He pushed the envelope toward me.
“He wrote this two days before he died. He asked me to bring it to you if anything happened.”
“Why didn’t you?”
His eyes filled up.
“I came home in pieces, Dot. I drank for twenty years. By the time I got sober, I was ashamed. I didn’t know how to knock on your door and say, ‘I’m the one who lived.’”
