This past Memorial Day, I drove her downtown at nine.
The white rope was there again. Strung along the curb in front of Ostby’s. The laminated signs every ten feet.
But they said something different now.
RESERVED FOR THOSE WHO SERVED. ALL OF THEM.
And in front of Ostby’s Hardware, right on the curb, where my mother had sat in her green lawn chair for forty-one years, there was already a chair waiting.
A real chair. Wooden. With a red cushion. Somebody had painted a small red cross on a white shield on the back of it.
Taped to the seat was an index card. In Mason Reed’s handwriting.
Saved for 1LT Lindahl. Please don’t move her.
My mother stood on the sidewalk and looked at it for a long time.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said.
But she sat down in it.
Mason came by about twenty minutes before the parade started. He had his clipboard. He crouched down beside her chair.
“Good morning, Lieutenant.”
“Oh, stop it.”
“Gus told me to call you that. Last fall. He said you outranked him and nobody in this town ever knew it.”
My mother sighed. “Gus Halvorsen was a corporal. Everybody outranked Gus.”
Mason laughed.
“There’s a seat on the float for you,” he said. “Front row. Gus’s chair. If you want it.”
My mother looked down Main Street toward the corner where the parade would start. Toward the old John Deere and the hay wagon with the straw bales.
She was quiet for a long time.
“No,” she said finally. “Thank you. But I think I’ll stay here.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” She smoothed her red cardigan over her knees. “That’s Gus’s chair. Let it ride empty this year. People ought to see it empty.”
Mason nodded slowly.
“Yes ma’am.”
So that’s what they did.
When the veterans’ float came by at the end of the parade, the front chair was empty. Somebody had laid Gus’s garrison cap on the seat. And a small folded flag.
And as the hay wagon passed Ostby’s Hardware, every single veteran on that float turned in their chairs and looked at the curb.
My mother stood up.
She put her hand over the little pin on her cardigan, the way she has every Memorial Day of my whole life.
And this time, every one of them saluted her back.
Then the people on the sidewalk did something I don’t think anyone planned. They didn’t clap. They didn’t cheer. They just stood up out of their lawn chairs, one after another, all along both sides of Main Street, and stayed standing with her until the float had passed.
When it was gone, my mother sat back down.
She folded her hands in her lap.
“Well,” she said to me. “That was nice.”
“Mom.”
“It was. It was very nice.”
“Mom, you’re crying.”
“I know I am, Carol.” She took a tissue out of her cardigan pocket. “I’m eighty-two years old. I’m allowed.”
I sat down on the curb beside her chair. Right on the concrete, the way I did when I was seven. I leaned my head against her knee.
She put her hand on my hair.
Down the street, the band was playing. The fire trucks had their lights on. The Dairy Princess was waving. Somewhere behind us, the bell over Ostby’s door rang as somebody went in for coffee.
“Mom,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask.”
“The notebook. With the names. One hundred and fourteen.”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever write your own name in it?”
She was quiet for a while.
“No,” she said. “Why would I? I came home.”
I didn’t say anything.
But that night, after she’d gone to bed, I took the little brown notebook out of the footlocker. I turned to the last page. The one after all the names.
And in my best handwriting, I wrote:
Lindahl, Margaret. Harmon, MN. Came home. Never asked for a chair. Should have had one all along.
Then I closed it and put it back on the top shelf behind the Christmas wrapping, where it belonged.
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