Mr. Begay laid the dog tags on the glass patio table, between the burrito platter and the Bloody Mary pitcher, and the little chain made a small clear sound against the glass. The tags were dull with age, the edges worn smooth. Overhead a red balloon with white stripes floated across the morning sky, so low that we could hear the burner roar, and no one looked up. “These belonged to Sergeant First Class Hosteen Begay,” he said. “United States Army. Quang Tri Province, 1969. He is my father.” His voice was very steady. “For three months last winter I did not know where he was.”
“He is eighty one,” Mr. Begay said. “His mind is clear, but his pride is hard as turquoise. After my mother died he did not want to live with any of us. He said he would not be a burden. One night in November he took his pickup truck and drove off the reservation and did not call. We searched Gallup, Farmington, Window Rock. My wife and I put his picture on every post office wall.” His wife, a small woman in a denim jacket, touched his arm. “He was in Albuquerque the whole time. He was living in that truck, at the back of a parking lot.”
“A young woman who stocked shelves at night noticed him,” said Mr. Begay, and he turned his head, at last, toward my daughter. “She brought him coffee on her break. A burrito. She did not ask questions. She sat with him on the tailgate, in the cold, and she let him be silent, which is a thing he had not been given for a long time.” He picked up the dog tags. “When she asked about his service, he took these from around his neck and put them in her hand. He had never shown them to anyone. A week later she sat beside him in the waiting room at the VA for nine hours, on her days off, until a social worker found him an apartment.”
Old dog tags laid on a patio table at a Balloon Fiesta breakfast showed a dentist what his niece had done for a veteran sleeping in a pickup.
Sofia had not moved. She was standing by the patio rail with a paper plate in her hand, in her good blue blouse, looking at the tags. She is thirty years old, a slight, serious girl with dark, steady eyes, and she had never told us. My wife, Carmen, who had squeezed my arm to keep me seated, was suddenly squeezing it for a different reason. Mark stood on his patio chair.
“Mr. Begay,” Mark said at last, “I had no idea. That is a wonderful story. I would never have said it if…” “If you had known,” said Mr. Begay mildly. “Yes. That is the thing I came to see. I own the building on Montgomery that you wish to lease. My wife and I have been deciding whether to sign with a chain of dental offices. We hoped it would be a good fit.” He took the sunglasses from his pocket, unfolded them, and put them away again. “I wanted to learn what kind of man would be my tenant. How he speaks of the people who stock the shelves.”
He did not raise his voice. “We will not be signing,” he said. “The building will go to another tenant.” A small sound came from the wife of Mark, Dana. Mark got down off the chair, slowly, with great care, and put the Bloody Mary on the table. I watched him. I had known Mark twenty six years, and I had never once seen him without a smile, and in that moment the smile was gone completely. He looked, for the first time, like someone who could be hurt. “Sofia,” he said. “Please. May I speak to you?”
She nodded. They stood together near the rail, with the Sandia Mountains behind them, blue and enormous in the morning light. “I called you a stocker,” Mark said. His voice was thick. “I said it as if it were a sentence. You were the only person in this city who noticed that man. I own eleven offices and a boat, and I have never noticed anyone in the dark.” He looked at his shoes. “I am so sorry. I would like to try to be someone you could be proud of.” Sofia studied him. “Uncle Mark,” she said, “I was never ashamed of the job. I was ashamed of how quiet everyone got when you said it.” Then she put her arms around him.
Mr. Begay watched from the table, and some of the stiffness went out of his face. “Miss Delgado,” he said, “I would like you to meet someone.” He glanced toward the gate, and I turned. An old man in a pressed western shirt was standing there with a cane and a straw hat, his gray braid down his back, and he had been standing there, I realized, for some time. Behind him a younger woman was holding a thermos. “This is my father,” said Mr. Begay. “He asked to come and say what he could not say in the parking lot.” The old man took off his hat. “Thank you for the burrito,” said Sergeant Begay, gravely. “It was a good one.”
Sofia laughed and cried at the same moment, and the old man held out his arms. They stood a long time at the edge of the patio as the balloons rose past them, forty, fifty, a hundred of them, red and gold and blue, a whole sky full of color. “My son tells me you want to be a social worker,” the old man said. “You told me at the VA. I have been thinking about it since.” Mr. Begay said that his family foundation kept a scholarship at the University of New Mexico, four years, all costs, and a job after it as a veterans outreach coordinator, at a salary of fifty eight thousand dollars. “You will start with my father,” he said, smiling. “He needs somebody to argue with.”
Sofia started classes in August, on the scholarship, and worked mornings at the foundation. Every Tuesday she drives out to the apartment complex on Central where Sergeant Begay lives, and they play checkers and eat green chile stew. Mark leased a different building, on Menaul, and he sends over a case of toothbrushes every month for the veterans. This October, at the Balloon Fiesta breakfast, he cooked breakfast burritos himself, in an apron, for sixty people, and carried the first plate to a lawn chair at the edge of the patio. Sergeant Begay took it with a nod. “Needs more chile,” he said. And Mark laughed, and went to get it.
