Part 3

Chad said the association had "full authority under the deed restrictions." Deputy Villanueva said that wasn't the same thing as a court order, and asked the men to stop digging. Chad's face went tight. "Fine," he said. "We'll be back with paper." He got in his truck, and the crane pulled away behind him. The neighbors went back to their garage sales. A few of them came over first and squeezed Grandma's hand. Most of them didn't. One of the workers had already pried the coffee can loose from the edge of the concrete. I carried it inside like it was a bomb and set it on the kitchen table on a dish towel. It was an old Folgers can, the big kind. The lid was sealed all the way around with roofing tar. It took me ten minutes with a butter knife to get it open. Inside was a plastic bread bag, folded over three times and tied with a rubber band. And inside that was a photograph and a piece of paper. The photograph was a little square print, the kind the drugstore used to develop, with a white border. Stamped on the border in tiny letters were the month and year it was printed. SEP 67. It was my grandparents. Standing on this same porch. Grandpa Jimmy in his Army khakis with his arm around Grandma, both of them squinting and laughing. She was very pregnant with my father. Grandma made a sound in her throat. She picked up the photo and held it against her chest. The paper was a page torn from a small notebook. The pencil was faded but you could still read it. I read it out loud because she couldn't. "October 14, 1967. Opal. Raise it every morning I'm gone. The morning I come home, we'll take it down together, and I won't ever leave again. Jimmy." My grandmother sat down at the kitchen table. And for the first time in my life, I watched her cry. I held her for a long time. Her shoulders felt so small. "He never told me," she said finally. "He put up that pole two weeks before he left. He told me to raise the flag every morning while he was gone. I thought it was just one of his ideas. I never knew he wrote it down." "Grandma," I said. "Why didn't you ever stop? After?" She wiped her eyes with a paper napkin. "He came home in March of 1968," she said. "In a box, with a flag on it. They gave me that flag folded up, and a sergeant said, 'On behalf of a grateful nation.'" She looked out the window at the pole. "That wasn't coming home, honey. That wasn't him. He said, 'The morning I come home, we'll take it down together.' He never came home. So I never took it down." Fifty-eight years. Every morning. Because a twenty-four-year-old boy asked her to. That evening, at sunset, I helped her lower the flag. She showed me how to fold it the right way.