It was a four-by-six print, soft and rounded at the corners, creased into quarters and flattened again so many times the creases had gone white and fuzzy and nearly split. Claire and Owen at the beach at Sandbridge, three summers ago, Owen four and holding a red plastic shovel, Claire laughing at whoever held the camera. Him. He had held the camera. He turned it over, though he didn't need to, and his own handwriting was there in faded blue ballpoint, blocky capitals across the top: THIS IS WHAT YOU GO HOME TO.
He had given this photograph away in March. He had pressed it into a man's hand at an aid station, the man's good hand, the right one, because the left was wrapped in gauze gone black and a medic was working on it, and the man was shaking and gray and kept saying he was sorry, and Daniel had told him there was nothing to be sorry for. Daniel had told him to hold onto it. He had told him to look at it on the bird and on the plane and in the hospital in Germany. He had told him: that is what you go home to, that is what we all go home to, so you go first and you hold the door. And if you get there before I do, go tell my wife I'm fine. Tell her I'm eating. Tell her I'm coming.
He asked his son, quietly, where he had gotten the picture.
Owen explained it in the matter-of-fact way of a child reporting a well-known fact. Mom's friend had brought it. Mom's friend was in the army with Dad, in the same group. He had gotten hurt, really bad, his hand, he only had three fingers on that hand now, but he could still do almost everything, he could even throw a football, kind of. Dad had given him the picture to carry so he would remember to come home. When he got home he came to their house and gave the picture back, so they would know Dad was okay. Then he gave Owen the coin, because Owen was the man of the house and Dad's soldier, and soldiers got coins. Then he fixed the step. Then he fixed a lot of things.