“We showed Mr. Hatcher your picture, told him you were doing well,” Jim said. “Your mother didn’t want to say where you were. I think she was embarrassed. She thought it might hurt poor Mr. Hatcher to learn that his dead friend’s boy had run away from home. She didn’t think she could make him understand. So we told him you were away at school, but we’d tell you about him, and you’d write if you wanted to speak to him yourself.”

“Is he still alive?”

“Norman Hatcher? I don’t know,” Jim said. “I imagine so. It wasn’t that long ago.”

I picked up one of the pictures: a color shot of two men sitting on a wall of sandbags around a foxhole. I didn’t have to ask which one was John LaRue. I could tell by the eyes, and the mouth, and the crooked smile, which were mine as well.

“Your mother was waiting for you to come home so she could give you all of these things and tell you what she’d learned, and how she’d felt,” he said. “But by the time you came back, she was too sick to remember. And I couldn’t think about anything else but her. We just let it slip our minds. I had all but forgotten about these things until just a few weeks ago when I was taking boxes out to put into storage. I would have called you then, but you were busy with the campaign. Anyway, there it is. Your history.”

I flipped through the pictures, studying my father’s face, observing our resemblance and the differences between us, imagining how my mother would have been smitten to the point of recklessness with him.

“She never really talked to you about your father, did she?” Jim said.

“Not much,” I said.

“She never told me much either,” he said. “Not until we heard from the widows and Norman Hatcher. I have to admit, I was very jealous. I loved your mother as I have never loved anything else in this world. So much that it pains me to this day to think of her with anyone else, or worse, to think of her loving anyone else. I have to remind myself that if not for John LaRue, and you, your mother and I would never have found each other.”

I put down the picture and picked up the Zippo. The brass was smooth and burnished. My father’s initials—jtl—were engraved on its side.

“I was so jealous of you,” I said.