The sign said his full name, first and last, in marker on the back of a piece of cardboard, and the man holding it was about seventy and in a wheelchair with an oxygen line under his nose. He looked at me for a long few seconds and then he said, You’ve got his walk. His name is Emmett. He was my father’s door gunner in 1969, and he has lived in a VA facility outside Phoenix since 2013, and he has no family left at all.
Twenty-two visits. Saturday morning to Sunday night, no car and no hotel because he took a cab straight to the facility and slept in the chair in Emmett’s room, twice a year, for eleven years. He never told my mother what it was. He never told me. Emmett said my father had been coming since before the miles account existed — that the first visit was 2006, that there were closer to forty trips in total, and that he’d once flown out in a week when he’d had pneumonia and sat there in a mask.
Emmett didn’t know he’d died. Nobody had any reason to call him. I stood in that terminal and had to tell a man in a wheelchair that the person he’d been waiting for since April wasn’t coming, and he took it the way men of that generation take things, which is to say he said okay and then didn’t say anything for about a minute.
I stayed the weekend. Sunday night I flew home in 14A and cried somewhere over New Mexico, quietly, in a middle-aged way. The April ticket is booked. Emmett has the number of the facility’s front desk written down for me in shaky capitals and he calls on Sundays now, and he tells me things about my father I have no other way of ever learning — that he was funny, that he was frightened of everything, that in 1969 he wrote letters home he never mailed. Twenty-two flights. He never once mentioned it, and I don’t think he thought it was remarkable, and that’s the part I can’t get past.
