The Back Table
Part One: The Note
My grandson, Caleb, is nine years old.
He has his father’s ears, which stick out a little. He has his father’s habit of chewing the inside of his cheek when he’s thinking. He has his father’s way of going very quiet when something hurts, instead of crying.
He carries one photograph of his father everywhere he goes.
It’s a small, square picture. Four inches by four inches. A little bent at one corner.
In it, my son Danny is sitting on the back steps of our house in Norfolk, Virginia. He’s wearing a gray Navy T-shirt and jeans. He’s holding Caleb on his knee. Caleb is about eighteen months old, with a sippy cup in one hand and a fistful of his father’s shirt in the other.
They’re both laughing at something off-camera. I know what it was. It was me, pretending to be a dog.
Caleb keeps that photo in a plastic sandwich bag, zipped shut, in the inside pocket of his backpack. The one with the zipper that nobody else uses.
He’s carried it there since kindergarten. Every single day.
He doesn’t show it to people. He doesn’t talk about it. But sometimes, when he thinks nobody’s looking, I see him unzip the pocket and slide the bag out just far enough to see his father’s face.
Then he zips it back up.
His father died in 2019.
Danny was a Navy corpsman. A medic attached to a Marine unit in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. On a hot afternoon in August, his patrol was hit by a roadside bomb. Danny ran into the smoke to reach two wounded Marines.
He saved both of them.
He didn’t make it back himself.
He was thirty-one. Caleb was two.
My name is Frank Halloran. I’m eighty-one years old.
I served in the United States Navy from 1963 to 1991. Twenty-eight years. I retired as a Chief Petty Officer. Aviation Boatswain’s Mate. I spent most of my career on the flight decks and hangar decks of aircraft carriers, moving planes, fighting fires, and yelling at nineteen-year-olds to keep their heads down.
After the Navy, I worked fifteen years as a fire safety inspector for the City of Norfolk. My wife, Peg, and I raised three kids in a little brick house a mile from the naval station.
Danny was our youngest.
Peg died in 2015. Cancer.
Danny died four years later.
I won’t pretend I handled either one well.
After Danny’s funeral, his wife, Jess, moved back to Norfolk from Camp Lejeune with Caleb. She didn’t have family of her own. Her parents died when she was in college.
She moved into the little apartment over my garage. Then, when that got too small, she and Caleb moved into the house. Into the back bedroom where Danny grew up.
We’ve been a family of three ever since. A widow, a widower, and a little boy with his father’s ears.
Caleb goes to Hampton Roads Preparatory Academy.
It’s a private school in Virginia Beach. Brick buildings and white columns and green lawns that somebody mows every Tuesday. Navy blue blazers with a gold crest. Classes of fifteen kids.
We could never have afforded it.
But the academy has a scholarship. The Gold Star Fund. For the children of service members killed in the line of duty. Full tuition, kindergarten through twelfth grade.
Caleb got it when he was five. Jess cried for a week.
Every spring, the academy hosts a Father-Son Breakfast.
It’s a big event. Fathers in tailored suits. Sons in their navy blazers. Round tables with white tablecloths in the gymnasium. A guest speaker. Photographs on the front lawn afterward, under the big magnolia tree.
Caleb has never gone.
In kindergarten, Jess went with him. She wore a blazer and a tie and drew a mustache on her upper lip with eyeliner. Caleb thought it was hilarious. A few of the other mothers thought it was sweet.
The headmaster at the time, an older woman named Mrs. Abernathy, thought it was wonderful. She hugged Jess at the door and seated them at a front table.
Mrs. Abernathy retired the next year.
The new headmaster was Dr. Graham Prentiss.
This year, in April, Caleb brought home a note.
It was on heavy cream-colored paper. The academy crest embossed at the top. Printed in a formal typeface.
I found it on the kitchen island when I came in from the garden. Caleb had dropped it there and walked straight to his room.
I picked it up.
Dear Hampton Roads Preparatory Families,
We are pleased to announce our annual Father-Son Breakfast, to be held Friday, May 9, at 7:30 a.m. in the Main Gymnasium. This year’s distinguished guest speaker will be Admiral James R. Carrick, United States Navy (Retired).
This cherished tradition is designed specifically to honor the unique bond between fathers and sons.
Students lacking a father in attendance may wait in the library during the event. Light refreshments will be provided. Thank you for understanding our policy.
Sincerely,
Dr. Graham Prentiss, Headmaster
I read it three times.
Students lacking a father in attendance may wait in the library.
Light refreshments will be provided.
I went down the hall to Caleb’s room.
The door was closed. I knocked.
“Come in,” he said.
He was sitting on his bed with his back against the wall. He wasn’t crying. He had his backpack in his lap. The inside pocket was unzipped.
He was holding the sandwich bag with the photo in it.
He looked up at me.
“It’s okay, Grandpa,” he said. “I don’t even like pancakes that much.”
He zipped the bag shut. He put it back in the pocket.
He zipped the pocket shut.
Then he picked up a book from his nightstand and opened it and pretended to read. 