Last Updated on May 24, 2026 by admin
Memorial Day weekend, three living rooms, three folded flags on three side tables, and three old cats who never asked for any of this.
Marian Decker is seventy-nine. She lives outside Albany. Her husband Henry was Air Force, two tours in Vietnam, retired E-7, died of cancer in 2018. The folded flag is in a triangle case on the credenza by the front window. Underneath the case, on the lower shelf, asleep on a folded plaid blanket, is a cat named Pepperminty. Pepperminty is sixteen. She was Henry’s cat — the one Henry brought home in a cardboard box from a base auction in 2009, the one Henry called “the lieutenant,” the one Henry was holding the morning he stopped being able to get out of bed. Marian inherits a cat and a flag.
Theresa Boudreaux is seventy-one. She lives in Slidell. Her husband Antoine was Marine Corps, Beirut barracks bombing 1983, made it home, never quite did, died of a heart attack in 2014 at sixty-one. The folded flag is in a case above the television. The cat, Cobalt, is a fifteen-year-old gray longhair Antoine adopted four years before he died, after Theresa quietly said one evening that she thought the man needed something soft to look at. Cobalt slept on Antoine’s chest, every night, for four years, and on Theresa’s chest, every night, for the eleven years since.
Frank Maglione is eighty-three. He lives in Yonkers. Frank himself was Army, Korea, Pork Chop Hill, came home with a Purple Heart and a slight limp and a quiet — the kind of quiet that does not lift. The folded flag is for his older brother Vincent, killed at Heartbreak Ridge in 1953 at twenty-one. The case is in the back bedroom Frank uses as a den. The cat, Quincy, is a fourteen-year-old black tuxedo Frank’s late wife Lucia brought home from the shelter in 2012, the year of Frank’s quadruple bypass. Lucia died in 2021. Quincy stayed.
Three folded flags. Three old cats. Three living rooms on a Sunday afternoon in late May.
The cats do not know about the wars. The cats do not know about Vincent at twenty-one, or Beirut, or Pork Chop Hill, or what Henry meant when he said “the lieutenant.” The cats know about the laps. The cats know which person is now the only person in the house, and the cats sit, every afternoon, with their full weight on that lap, in the room with the folded flag, and they do not move.
That is also a kind of service.
🐾