PART 2
“Birdie” was what my father called me.
He was a sergeant in the Army. He left for Vietnam when I was twelve.
He never came home.
I was thirteen when two officers knocked on our door in Duluth. My mother fell to the floor. I stood in the hallway holding the letter I was going to mail him that day.
Nobody called me Birdie after that. I wouldn’t let them.
I called 911 from the creek. It took the rescue team ninety minutes to reach us. The dog wouldn’t leave his side the whole time.
They flew him to the hospital in Duluth.
Broken hip. Severe hypothermia. Dehydration.
“Another two nights out there,” the doctor told me, “and he wouldn’t have made it. That dog kept him alive. Body heat and biscuits.”
His name was Harold Tate. He was 84.
Three days later, they let me see him.
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.’”
He looked at his hands.
“Two years ago, I found you. I bought the cabin by the fire tower. I came into your diner every Tuesday. Black coffee, two eggs. I never had the nerve to say a word.”
I knew him then. The quiet man in the corner booth. Always left a twenty.
“Then my memory started slipping,” he said. “I took Duchess for a walk and got turned around. Fell by the creek. And she wouldn’t leave me.”
I opened the envelope with shaking hands.
It was my father’s handwriting.
“Birdie, if Harold gives you this, it means I’m not coming home. Don’t be sad forever. Be a teacher. Be kind to strays. And never let anybody tell you that you can’t.”
I hadn’t cried in front of anyone since Ed’s funeral.
I cried in that hospital room for a long time.
The county inspector did come on Friday.
So did the local news.
And so did half of Ely. The VFW. The high school hockey team. People I hadn’t seen in years.
The line went out the door and down the block.
The inspector ordered a coffee, ate a biscuit, and left without writing anything.
The VFW post voted to cover my rent increase for the next two years. “For the woman who found one of ours,” their commander said.
Glen Hobart doesn’t come in anymore.
Nobody misses him.
Harold lives in the assisted living home two blocks from the diner now.
Every Tuesday, Rudy drives him over. Black coffee. Two eggs.
Duchess lives with me. She sleeps on Ed’s side of the bed.
And every morning at 6:40, she sits by the register and waits for her biscuit.
Now she eats it.
THE END.
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Sometimes kindness takes fifty-eight years to come back to you. But it comes.
If you were Dot, what would you have said to Harold first? Tell us in the replies.