We walked a block and a half down to the bank. There was a little patch of sidewalk free behind the crowd, in front of the ATM. Mom unfolded her chair and set it down and sat in it and folded her hands in her lap.
From there you couldn’t really see the parade. Just the tops of things going by. Flags on poles. The ladder on the fire truck. A Shriner’s hat.
“Mom, let me go talk to him.”
“No.”
“I’ll be nice. I’ll just tell him—”
“Tell him what? That his mother’s old lady used to be in the Army? Half the people in this town have somebody who was in the Army. Your grandfather was in the Navy. Your uncle Dick was in Germany.”
“That’s not the same and you know it.”
She looked at me.
“How would you know whether it’s the same, Carol?”
I didn’t have an answer.
She was right. I didn’t know. I’d never asked.
So I stood beside her chair in front of the ATM and drank my coffee and looked at the backs of other people’s heads while the parade went by.
The band went past. The Harmon Hawks, in maroon and gold, playing the same Sousa march they’ve played every year since I was in it. Then the color guard from the VFW post. Then the fire department, all three trucks, with the lights going and the sirens off. Then the Girl Scouts. Then a convertible with the Dairy Princess in it, waving.
Then I heard a tractor.
The veterans’ float is always the last one. It’s always the same: Dale Ostby’s old John Deere pulling a hay wagon with straw bales and folding chairs and bunting, and every veteran in the county who’s still able to climb up on it.
This year, there were twelve of them.
Old men, mostly. Two Vietnam guys in their seventies. Some Korea. One World War II, Ernie Bakke, who is a hundred and one and was strapped into his chair with a seatbelt somebody had rigged out of ratchet straps.
And in the very front chair, closest to the tractor, sat Gus Halvorsen.
Gus is ninety-four. He was in Korea. He was a dairy farmer east of town for sixty years. He’s got a voice like a gravel pit and he’s been the unofficial head of the VFW post since before I was born. Every year he rides in the front chair of that hay wagon in his garrison cap and waves at every single person on Main Street like they’re his own grandchildren.
He was waving now. Big slow waves. Left side, right side.
Then he turned his head and looked down the sidewalk toward the bank.
And he stopped waving.
I saw it happen. I was looking right at him. His hand froze in the air. He leaned forward in his chair. He was looking past the crowd, past the rope, past all the folding chairs with the veterans in them.
He was looking at my mother.
Sitting alone in front of the ATM.
His face changed. I can’t describe it any other way. It just changed.
He turned around and banged his fist on the side of the hay wagon. Hard. Three times.
Dale Ostby looked back from the tractor seat.
Gus pointed.
Dale stopped the tractor.
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