James

Yeah, old Bob Miller. Well, we weren’t best friends or nothing. I suppose I knew him better than most folks around here, although that’s not saying much. ### He moved next door around, oh, 1996 or ’97. He was from Pennsylvania somewhere. He said he worked in a steel mill up there for 40 years. Looked the part, too. When I first met him, he was pushing 70 but, man, the guy was built like a wall safe. ### I never could figure why he came down here. Didn’t have no family here -- no friends either, so far as I could tell. Guess that’s how he liked it. Look, there’s a lot I wish I’d have asked him, but you gotta understand, Bob didn’t go around sharing his life with everybody. Heck, for the longest time, it was all I could do to get a hello out of him. ### He started slowing down the last few years, so a couple times I went over and helped him fix some things around the house. I wouldn’t take his money, but when I got done, he’d offer me a can of Bud and we’d sit at his kitchen table and b.s. for 15 or 20 minutes. Nah, mostly we just talked about football and cars --typical guy stuff, nothing real personal. ### I hadn’t seen him around for a while, and then I saw in the paper last spring that he passed away. Next thing I know, the wife gets a call from this attorney across town, talking about how I gotta go pick up something Bob left me in his will. Now that was a shock. Since when does helping a guy re-grout his bathroom floor get you mentioned in his will? ### Anyway, I go over the next morning and the lady hands me this little oak box. I sat down in the lobby and popped it open right there. On top is this ratty, old, half-falling-apart doll. Looked like something a third-grader would have made. ### Second thing blew my mind. It was a black-and-white photo of Bob, looking younger and happier than I ever seen him, holding a little boy on his lap. Sure enough, the kid’s got that dang doll under his arm. There was a woman’s handwriting on the back; it said “Bob and Bobby. December 1956.” ### Third thing was a letter, dated 1971. It was addressed to Mom and Dad from Bobby -- must have been the same Bobby from the picture. He sent it from Vietnam. I’m not going to say much about what he wrote, but I’ll tell you, he sounded like a bright young man who really had his head on straight. ### That was it. Nothing else. No explanations. ### I’m curious to know more about the kid, but there must have been a thousand Robert Millers who fought in ‘Nam. I wouldn’t know where to begin. ### I’m keeping the letter and the picture. They feel kind of sacred, you know? But I gave the doll to my brother-in-law up in New York. That thing spooked me out, brother. It kept staring at me with that mangled eye and that weird little smile, like some half-crazed ghost who wanted to tell me a secret.