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mother. After the legionnaires fired the shots at my dad's military funeral, they presented my mother with the flag and the gun shells too, telling her that her husband had not died in vain. I wondered if that helped.
    He had joined the army in Mississippi, then he was stationed in Virginia, where he met my mother. After they married and when I was two, he was shipped off to Korea. He came back a lieutenant. I was four. For years, it was just the three of us moving around from state to state. We were happy. In North Carolina we camped in the mountains. When we lived in Florida we went to the beach when we could. When I was nine, we moved to Pittsburgh, and it was perfect. We visited the libraries and museums at Carnegie Mellon and we took long walks along the Ohio, the Allegheny, and Monongahela rivers, all of us together. My dad had a steady income, and my mother worked on her graduate degree in art history. That was before he left for Vietnam. Then when his helicopter went down, it was as if
we
went down too. Boom. Simple as that—the happy
we
of our family was over.
    My mother kept the stack of letters from his war years and my dad's Purple Heart medal on the top shelf, even though everybody said she should have the medal mounted, framed, and hanging in some main room of our house. She kept my dad's army picture there on that top shelf too. It was framed in wood. In it he's almost too handsome, with his dark flattop, his Elvis half-smile, his ears sticking out from his army beret making him more real and more like a dad. I knew him only for a little while really, given his whole lifetime. I remember when he and my mom swung me between them on the beach we liked visiting when we lived in Tallahassee. We caught crabs there to boil and eat at night. My mother put the water on and my father and I put in the crabs. He taught me how to eat them. He taught me about other things too: helping out around the house, respecting my grandparents, being nice to my cousin Tine, helping others fit in. The summer before he left for the last time, we were cracking and eating crabs when he talked to me about honor and respect, duty and discipline. He told me I should always do what I said I was going to do and that I should always do the right thing.
    "How am I supposed to know what the right thing to do is?" I asked.
    He shrugged and smiled, then put his hand on my head, his fingers stretching across. "You'll just know."
    I ran my hand across the top shelf of my mother's closet and caught ahold of the bundle of old letters tied with blue ribbon—letters written by my mother addressed to my dad while he was overseas. My mother and I didn't talk about my dad much, or the exact details of how he died. I couldn't even say any of the words like
passed away
or
dead.
I thought to say those words would make it really so; so not to say them could mean that he was still alive.
    "I don't remember—did he ever write back?" I held the letters out for my mother to see and take.
    "He did. They're in there too." She pushed her chair back, took the bundle, and thumbed through the pages. She reopened a few and showed me.
    Inside the letters were locks of her hair, menus from restaurants, prayer cards, a page of poetry from a book.
    "He used to love to read in bed every night, especially to you. Remember? When I wrote him, I tried to keep things cheery."
    "He put
Ha
here. And look,
Ugh.
" I pointed out his handwriting in the margins of her letters.
    "It was like having a conversation," she said, tying the letters back up with the ribbon. She must have seen my expression.
    "You can have the picture," she said. "If you want."
    Sometimes I imagined what it would have been like if my dad were still alive. I thought of us picking him up after work at the barracks, or maybe after the war he would have gotten out of army life altogether. He'd come home with a briefcase, his tie loosened and his suit jacket slung over one shoulder, his tired eyes hidden