Because inside, where a sandwich should’ve been, Ruth had tucked away a brass tag on a boot lace and my father’s name stamped into it.
Badge 411. Dubuque Malleable, gate two.
My old man carried a black dome-top lunch pail into that foundry for thirty-four years and I ate the crusts off his sandwiches at that kitchen table until I was old enough to be embarrassed about it. When they closed the plant in 1988 the company auctioned the contents of the locker room off in lots, and his pail went with it, and he was dead by then and I did not have two hundred dollars to go bid on a lot of forty lunch boxes.
I have mentioned that maybe three times in thirty-six years.
The pail she handed me was not a pail like his. It was his.
She’d been watching estate sales and online listings since 2015. She found it in Manchester, Iowa, in a barn sale, in a stack of six, and the man wanted eighteen dollars for the lot and did not know or care what the badge in the bottom of one of them was.
She had a fellow at a body shop in Peosta take the dents out of it and reline the inside, and she left the paint alone, and she left the dent in the lid alone too, because my father put that one there himself in about 1979 slamming a car trunk.
I thought I got a lunch box. I wanted a watch. I put it up in the rafters of my own garage and I did not lift the lid.
A month later she went down in the garden and was gone by nightfall.
The note was folded around that badge under a rubber band that had gone brittle:
“Nine years I’ve been hunting this, Del. Your daddy’s name is on the bottom. Don’t you dare put a sandwich in it.”
I’ve got it on the kitchen counter. I have not put a sandwich in it.
I’m not selling the house anymore either. I got about nine days into that idea before I understood what I was actually doing, and I called the realtor on a Sunday and apologized and paid her what I owed her for her trouble.
The sewing machine is set up in the back bedroom under a dust cover. I turn it on sometimes. It hums and I shut it off.
Thirty-six years I lived with a woman who spent nine years finding a lunch box in a barn in Manchester, Iowa. And I forced a smile at her.
Badge 411’s on my key ring now. It’s too big and it’s ridiculous and every time I put my truck key in the door I have to hold my father in my hand first.