My father hadn’t spoken to me in twelve years, and at my grandfather’s graveside his first words were “Still passing out aspirin for the Air Force?” loud enough for the honor guard to hear. Twenty minutes later a four-star general went by every big shot there, stopped an arm’s length from me, and saluted.
He’d looked at my black dress first, then the plain bag in my hand, and the left side of his mouth went up.
That was the hello.
He said the aspirin thing at full volume.
Lewis Rafferty never once in his life insulted somebody quietly. What would be the point.
The chaplain stopped shuffling his notes.
Two rows of folding chairs went still.
We were maybe forty minutes from lowering my grandfather into the ground.
Major General Isaac Rafferty, retired. Eighty-six years old. Two wars and a bad hip.
And his own son had turned the committal into what every Rafferty thing turns into eventually.
A show.
Men from Dad’s firm filled the second row. A state senator stood by the flag for the pictures. Somebody’s aunt worked through a tin of mints the whole service, one click at a time.
I hadn’t worn my blues.
I’d held them up in the motel mirror that morning and hung them back in the closet. I didn’t want one minute of today to be about me.
“Hi, Dad,” I said.
He looked me over like he was pricing a used car.
“Look who made it. The family doctor. Anybody got a headache, form a line.”
A guy from his firm laughed way too fast.
My little sister Sydney didn’t wait her turn.
She’d been filming the flag for her stories. She brought the phone down to look at me.
“Didn’t know they let you off base, Em.”
“They do for burials,” I said.
The smile went sideways on her for half a second.
Not much of a win.
But a lot of wins are just the other person running out of material.
Vonda, my stepmother, walked right past me to her seat.
She didn’t look over. Looking would’ve cost her something.
Fine.
I quit expecting anything from these people somewhere around my second deployment.
I was there for Grandpa. Then the airport. That was the whole plan.
Then a black sedan rolled up the service road and stopped.
Nobody said anything.
Everybody felt it anyway.
The honor guard squared up before anybody gave an order. The senator stepped off the path. Men buttoned jackets they’d left open all afternoon.
A tall man in Air Force blue came up the grass with two aides a few steps behind.
Four stars on each shoulder.
General Kwame Guthrie. Vice Chief of Staff.
Even Dad knew that face.
His chin came down an inch.
Guthrie looked over the crowd one time.
He went past the retired colonels in the front row. Past the men from Dad’s firm. Past the senator, who already had his hand halfway out.
Dad stepped onto the grass with his arm straight out, pointing at the chairs.
“GENERAL. LEWIS RAFFERTY. I’M HIS SON. THE FAMILY IS RIGHT HERE.”
Guthrie didn’t turn his head.
He kept walking until he was an arm’s length from me.
Then he raised his right hand to his brow and held it there.
Out of uniform, I’m not supposed to return it.
My right hand went flat against my leg anyway. They drill that into you at nineteen and it never comes out.
“Lieutenant Colonel Rafferty,” he said, and it carried to the back row. “Good to see you, ma’am.”
Behind me Vonda made a small sound.
Sydney had both hands over her mouth.
Dad’s arm was still out. Pointing at nothing now.
“Your people from the Erbil ward still ask after you,” Guthrie said.
This time nobody pretended to look somewhere else.
Dad stared at me like somebody had handed him the wrong file.
Guthrie shook my hand. Dry, hard grip.
“I came for Isaac,” he said. “He called me in March. He spent most of the call on you.”
That went in deeper than anything Dad said all day.
Because Grandpa and I hadn’t really talked since my residency.
Guthrie went to stand by the casket and the chaplain started over from the top.
Nobody heard a word of it.
Dad caught me afterward, out by the cars.
“How the HELL do you know Kwame Guthrie?”
He was shorter than I remembered. Or I’d just never stood this close to him as a grown woman.
“You meet some people on the worst night they ever had,” I said. “Sometimes it’s the worst one you ever had, too.”
I left him standing there and went down to the end of the row.
The wind off the flats in Abilene smelled like cut grass and diesel.
Gravel crunched behind me.
Guthrie had two coffees from the urn by the chapel. He gave me one and didn’t say anything.
Then he held his other hand out, palm up.
Grandpa’s watch.
The steel one, with the cracked bezel.
It hadn’t been off his wrist since before I was born.
Tucked under the band was a slip of paper, folded small. My name on the outside in Grandpa’s square block capitals.
EMILY.
Nobody else ever wrote it like that.
And standing there with the coffee going cold in my hand, I knew Grandpa hadn’t brought me back to bury him.
He’d brought me back to START something.
The slip under the band
I set the coffee on the trunk of my rental and worked the slip out from under the band with my thumbnail.
It had been folded four times. The creases were soft, like somebody had opened it and closed it a lot.
Inside, same capitals, pencil pressed hard enough to dent the paper.
IT WAS NEVER YOU. ASK MARY ABOUT THE BLUE BOX. I’M SORRY I BELIEVED HIM. — I.R.
I read it twice. I turned it over. Nothing on the back.
“When did he give you this?” I said.
“Two weeks ago. The hospice out on Buffalo Gap Road.” Guthrie was looking at the watch, not me. “He took it off himself. Took him a while with the clasp. He wouldn’t let me help.”
“Was anybody else there?”
“Your father was in the hall. On his phone, mostly.” He drank some of his coffee. “He came in once. Isaac put his hand over the watch until he left.”
The wind kept pushing the slip flat against my fingers.
Him. There was only one him it could be.
Guthrie had a plane waiting at Dyess. He shook my hand a second time and walked back to the sedan, and one of the aides had the door open before he got there.
I looked up the row of cars.
Vonda was standing by the family limo with her purse in both hands, looking straight at me.
Galveston, 2014
The last real conversation my father and I had was in a hospital cafeteria in Galveston, over a tray of enchiladas that had gone cold.
I was thirty-one and four months from finishing residency. He’d flown down on the firm’s plane to offer me a job.
Medical director, Rafferty Field Services. They supplied clinics to bases overseas. He wanted a doctor on the letterhead, and he wanted the doctor to be a Rafferty.
“Three hundred to start,” he said. “You’d never have to touch a patient again.”
That was supposed to be the good part.
I’d signed with the Air Force two weeks before. I told him so.
He put his fork down and wiped his mouth with the napkin, slow.
“You walk out of here in that uniform, you don’t have a family to come home to.”
So I didn’t come home.
Grandpa was the one I minded losing.
He was the one who stood me up in his driveway the summer I was nineteen, the week before I left for officer training, and made me salute the garage door until he quit wincing. Thirty-four years in. He couldn’t hear out of his left ear after Vietnam and he hated the phone, so he did everything by mail. He answered every letter he ever got, the day it came, in block capitals. And he wrote the date he read it in the top corner. READ 6-2-01. He did it on electric bills.
So when he went quiet, I took it as an answer.
That fall he broke his hip on the back steps at the ranch. Dad sold the ranch and moved him into the back bedroom on Elmwood Drive. Sydney posted the moving truck.
Every December after that I bought a card at the base exchange, wherever I was, wrote him a full page, and mailed it to Elmwood. Twelve Christmases. Twelve cards.
Not one came back. Not one got answered.
I called the house twice. Vonda picked up both times and said he was napping.
Vonda did all the mail on Elmwood. She sorted it at the kitchen island every afternoon and drove the outgoing to the post office on Thursdays, because Grandpa couldn’t drive anymore. Anything worth keeping went into a blue Dillard’s shoebox with a label in black marker. Taxes. Warranties. Sydney’s report cards. She had a closet full of them in the sewing room.
Up at the limo, Vonda saw me coming down the row of cars.
She got in and shut the door.
Elmwood Drive
The reception was at the house, because of course it was.
Dad had caterers. He had the senator out on the back patio and a big photo of Grandpa in uniform on an easel by the fireplace, angled so it caught the window. Under it sat a smaller one of Dad shaking Grandpa’s hand at some firm dinner.
I almost didn’t go.
The slip was in my bag, folded the way he’d folded it.
Dad was holding court by the bar when I came in. He saw me and pushed his voice up a notch so the room would get it.
“There she is. Came all the way from wherever for the reading of the will.”
There was no reading of the will. Nobody does that except on TV.
A couple of the firm guys laughed anyway.
Vonda was at the kitchen island fanning out napkins. Same island. Same spot she’d sorted the mail for twenty years.
I stood across from her and put the slip down on the granite, open.
She looked at it a long time.
“I don’t know what he meant,” she said. “He wasn’t himself at the end, Emily.”
She squared the napkins. They were already square.
“He was himself enough to write that.”
“He wrote a lot of things.”
Dad came in from the living room with his drink and read the slip upside down. He stopped on BLUE. You could tell, because he stopped chewing his ice.
“Morphine since February,” he said. “He told the night nurse she was Mamie Eisenhower. He wrote notes to the TV.” He picked up the slip with two fingers and handed it back to me. “Hospice keeps calling about his crap. I told them to toss it. That’s what this is, Em. Crap from a dying man.”
Sydney had followed him in. Phone up, like always.
“Can you not do this today?” she said. “Seriously. Not today.”
“I asked Vonda a question.”
“And she answered it,” Dad said. He smiled past me at the room. “You’ve got a flight. Make it.”
The burn barrel
I went down the back hall toward the bathroom instead.
Then I kept going.
The sewing room was the last door on the left. It still smelled like dryer sheets and the potpourri Vonda had kept in a dish on the windowsill since I was in high school.
The closet doors were open.
Blue Dillard’s boxes floor to ceiling, labeled in black marker, stacked by year. TAXES 2019. TAXES 2020. CHRISTMAS LISTS. SYD DANCE.
The top shelf had a gap at the end. A clean rectangle in the dust where a box had sat for a long time.
“She’s not gonna tell you anything.”
Sydney was in the doorway. She’d put the phone in her back pocket, which I’d never seen her do.
“Where’s the box that was up there?”
She looked at the shelf. Then at me. Something went back and forth on her face and settled.
“Dad cleaned out Grandpa’s room Tuesday. Like, the day after.” She crossed her arms. “He did a bunch of stuff in the burn barrel out back. Papers. I didn’t ask.”
Grandpa died on a Monday.
“You didn’t ask.”
“Em, he’s been handling everything by himself for twelve years. Where were you?”
I didn’t have an answer that would fit in that doorway.
I went out the back door, past the patio and the senator and a guy from the firm vaping by the grill, across the yard to the corner by the fence where Dad always burned brush.
The barrel was still warm on one side.
I tipped it toward me with my shoe. Gray paper ash. A melted binder clip. The spine of one of Grandpa’s old field manuals, with half the title left.
At the bottom, one corner of blue cardboard that never caught. Black marker on it.
Two letters. EM.
Buffalo Gap Road
I changed my flight that night from the motel. Two hundred and eighty dollars to fly Wednesday, and a voicemail to my commander asking for two more days of leave.
At seven-thirty Monday morning I was at the hospice front desk in jeans.
The nurse on the desk was a short woman named Beatriz with reading glasses on a beaded chain. I told her who I was.
She took the glasses off.
“You’re the doctor,” she said. “The one in Iraq.”
“Erbil. Yes.”
“Honey, he told everybody on this hall about you. He told the man who fixes the ice machine.”
I had to look at the ceiling for a second.
I asked about his things. She said they’d called the son three times and the son said throw it out, but they don’t throw anything out for thirty days. Policy. She went in the back and came out with a white plastic bag. PATIENT BELONGINGS printed on it, his name on a sticker.
Pajamas. His reading glasses. A Western paperback with the cover torn off. His good comb.
Under all that, a thick bundle of envelopes with a rubber band around it. No box.
I sat down on the bench by the front windows and took the rubber band off.
The top one was a Christmas card. A cardinal on a branch. My handwriting on the envelope, Isaac Rafferty, 4410 Elmwood Drive, Abilene, Texas. Postmarked Ramstein, December 2014.
It had been slit along the top, clean.
In the corner, in pencil, in block capitals: READ 3-11-26.
The next one was from Lackland, 2015. READ 3-11-26.
Erbil, 2017. READ 3-11-26.
All twelve of them. Twelve years of cards, and he’d read every one on the same Wednesday in March.
Under the cards were envelopes in his hand. Stamped, every one. Addressed to me care of the Air Force Personnel Center in San Antonio, which is how a man who did thirty-four years finds anybody in uniform. Not one had a postmark. Not one had ever been through a machine.
Twelve of those, too. One a year. All of them handed to somebody on a Thursday.
A yellow sticky note was stuck to the last envelope. Round, slanted handwriting I’d seen on a hundred shoebox labels.
He said burn them. I couldn’t. I’m sorry. M.
The kitchen island
Dad’s Tahoe was in the drive on Elmwood when I pulled up. So was Sydney’s car, and two trucks from the firm, because there was a lunch for the out-of-town people before they flew home.
Sydney opened the door with her phone in her hand.
They were all in the kitchen. Dad at the end of the island with a plate. Vonda at the sink. Three of the firm guys, including the one who’d laughed at the graveside.
I put the bundle down on the granite. Cards on the left. His letters on the right. I opened the oldest one from the right-hand pile and turned it around to face Dad.
EMILY. YOUR FATHER TELLS ME YOU HAVE ASKED THAT I NOT WRITE. I AM WRITING ANYWAY. THAT IS WHAT STAMPS ARE FOR.
Dad read it. He put his fork down.
“Where’d you get this?”
“Hospice,” I said.
“That’s his property. That’s the estate’s property. You don’t get to walk in my house and dump a dead man’s mail on my counter in front of my people.” He looked at the firm guys like they’d back him up. “He had a broken hip in 2014, he was on painkillers for a year, he wrote all kinds of things. You know that. You’re the doctor.”
Nobody said anything.
“And if something didn’t go out,” Dad said, “Vonda did the mail. Vonda handled all of it. That’s on Vonda.” He turned. “Vonda. Tell her. Tell her you mailed what he gave you.”
Vonda turned the water off.
She dried her hands on the towel on the oven door, both sides, and hung it back up.
“I didn’t mail them, Lewis,” she said. “You told me not to.”
“Vonda.”
“You told me to put her cards in the barrel. Every Christmas. You said it was better for Dad if he thought she’d quit.” She didn’t look at me. She looked at him. “I put them in a box instead. And his too. I took the box to him in March, because he was dying and he kept asking why she never wrote.”
“Vonda, shut up.”
“You went looking for it Tuesday. I saw you. It was empty, Lewis. It’s been empty since March.”
Dad laughed. Nobody else did.
“I was protecting this family,” he said. “She walked out. She picked a uniform over her own father. What was I supposed to do, let him sit there waiting by the mailbox for somebody who left?”
He was shouting by the end of it. Same voice he’d used at the graveside.
The guy who’d laughed set his plate down very carefully and said he had a flight. The other two said they’d ride with him. Nobody shook Dad’s hand on the way out.
Sydney had her phone up. The little red dot was on.
She looked at it. Then she stopped the recording and put the phone face down on the counter.
“Is that true, Dad?”
“Syd, don’t.”
She didn’t ask again. She went and stood beside him anyway.
“He’s still my dad, Em,” she said.
I gathered the cards and the letters back into one stack and put the rubber band around them.
Vonda took her purse off the hook by the garage door and followed me out.
December, San Antonio
The week before Christmas I was back on base, in my blues, with Grandpa’s watch on my left wrist. The bezel’s still cracked. I wind it every morning before PT.
A card came from Vonda. The return address was an apartment on the south side of Abilene, not Elmwood.
Sydney hasn’t called. Her stories are all Dad’s new boat.
I’ve been reading Grandpa’s letters one a night, oldest first, at the desk in my quarters with the lamp on.
Tonight was 2016.
EMILY. ANOTHER YEAR. YOUR FATHER STILL SAYS NO. I WOULD LIKE TO HEAR HOW YOU ARE ANYWAY. THE HIP IS FINE. THE DOG DIED.
I read it twice. Then I took a pencil out of the drawer and wrote in the top corner, in capitals, the way he taught me.
READ 12-18-26.
If there’s somebody you quit writing to because they quit answering, it might be worth one more stamp.
For more family stories where one painful moment reveals much bigger truths, read I Was Holding His Custody Papers. Nineteen Dollars Was Left In The Cookie Tin., My Mother-In-Law Wanted Me On Her Bills, Then My Husband Said Too Much, and The Night Before I Left, I Had My Son Against His Mother’s Refrigerator.
