The man who folded the letter into the flag was Master Gunnery Sergeant Hector Nava, retired, who had stood next to Ramón at Khe Sanh in 1968 and had not seen him since 1970. Patty Reyes drove me to his house on Fillmore Street, and he opened the door in his old green cap and stood at attention before he said a word. He was seventy six years old. His hands were rough as saddle leather. He said that three days before Ramón passed, my husband asked a nurse to call a number he had been carrying on a card in his wallet for fifty one years.
Ramón had written the letter himself, at the VA, in Spanish, in pencil, over two nights. He did not want me to find it before the service, Hector said, because I would have read it too early and cried in the wrong place. He asked Hector, who volunteered with the honor guard in Amarillo, to fold it into the flag in the van before the ceremony, between the second fold and the third, and to date it the week after, so that I would have words for the hardest week. Hector had done it. He had waited four years for me to find it. “Mrs. Garza,” he said, “a Marine does not open a letter that is not his.”
I took the letter to my kitchen table in Amarillo and read it by the light over the stove. Ramón wrote that he was sorry for the nights he woke up shouting, that his heart had been left in a place called Khe Sanh and the rest of it had been given to me. He wrote that the photograph was of himself and two friends, boys of nineteen, the last day they were all together. And at the end he wrote, in the square print I knew from fifty one years of grocery lists: Esperanza, do not let them move you out of your house. Keep the flag on the mantel. And tell Ricky his father was proud of him.
A letter folded into a flag gave one retired nurse aide the length of a single weekend to bring her son back to the truth in Amarillo.
I gave my terms to Ricky and Brandy at my kitchen table, with Patty Reyes beside me and Hector Nava in the doorway in his green cap. The flag would go back on the mantel by the end of that evening, in its case, with the cracked glass replaced at the cost of Brandy. The crucifix of my mother would hang again on the wall of the hall, and the recliner of Ramón would be brought back from the curb, if the garbage men had not taken it. And if they wanted to stay in my house, they would pay rent, and treat my husband as part of it.
Brandy tried to say it was only decluttering. Then Hector spoke, very quietly, from the doorway. He said that he had carried a folded flag at eleven hundred services, and had never once seen a widow lose hers to a donation bag. Brandy fell silent. Ricky had been staring at the photograph of three Marines on the table. He picked it up with both hands. His face crumbled. He said he had let his wife throw away the only thing his father had left that was not furniture. “Mama, I am so sorry,” he said. “I was afraid of her.”
Brandy snatched the letter and the photograph from the table, meaning to run out the front door and drop them in the dumpster behind the Goodwill, and she bolted down the hallway and across the yard to the gate with the words of Ramón crumpling in her fist, while Ricky sat frozen and Patty rose with her mouth open. Hector Nava did not hurry. He took his cap from his head and put it back on, and said that he knew what Saturday it was in Amarillo.
It was the Saturday before Veterans Day, and the parade was coming down Polk Street, as it had come every year since Ricky was on the shoulders of his father. A color guard, a high school band, three Korean War veterans in a jeep, a hundred riders on motorcycles with flags. Brandy stepped out of the gate into the middle of the street, and the parade rolled past her on both sides. She could not cross it. She stood, a woman with a letter, as the whole city of Amarillo went by saluting. A small boy on the curb saluted her too.
Brandy stood there for forty minutes, until the last motorcycle passed. When she came back through the gate she had stopped crying and started listening. She gave me the letter without a word. The next morning she went to the Goodwill herself and bought back the case, the crucifix and a recliner that was not quite the same but close. Ricky carried the flag to the mantel in both arms, the way he had carried it at the service. He stood at attention before it, and saluted, and I noticed Brandy watching him from the doorway.
In the name of Ramón, who passed in 2021, I started the Ramón Garza Folded Flag Fund. It pays for display cases, flag repairs and rides to VA appointments for veterans and widows in Potter, Randall and Armstrong counties. In the first year we replaced forty one broken cases and gave rides to three hundred appointments. Patty Reyes runs the Goodwill drop, and any flag that arrives in a donation bag comes to us. We have found nine. Every one of them, every single one, went home.
Ricky and Brandy still live in my house, but they pay rent, and on the first Saturday of every month we drink glass bottle Cokes on the back porch, the way Ramón used to bring home on Fridays. Ricky tells me he reads the letter once a year, on the birthday of his father. Brandy has learned to make my tamales. The flag hangs in its triangle case on the mantel, next to the picture of the Marine I married, and I raise the other one on the pole in the yard every morning at seven.
