Because wrapped in that scrap of cloth, down under all those buttons, was the pocketknife.
Not a new one. My grandfather’s — the Case with the bone handle and the broken back spring, the one that had been in a coffee can in my mother’s basement since 1996 because nobody could fix it and nobody could throw it out.
Marie got it from my mother in February. Took it to a man in Winston-Salem who does nothing but old knives, and he replaced the spring and re-pinned the bolster and left the handle alone, and it cost her two hundred and ten dollars, which I know because the receipt was folded in with it.
I asked for a pocketknife. I got a pocketknife. It was under nine inches of buttons and I did not look.
And here’s the other thing, which I did not understand until I sat down on the floor of that sewing room and started going through them.
Those buttons are mine.
Thirty-two years of shirts. She never once let a shirt go out of this house without cutting the buttons off it first, and I have watched her do it a thousand times and never asked why, and I assumed it was thrift, and I was wrong.
There’s a Sunday-school teacher’s button in there off a shirt I wore in 1994. There are eight identical gray ones off the uniform shirts from the years I drove a route. There are the pearly ones off the shirt I got married in, which I did not know she still had any part of.
She’d been keeping the marriage in a jar and I called it a jar of buttons.
On the cloth around the knife, in ballpoint:
“Your granddaddy’s, fixed. And every shirt I ever mended for you underneath it. Dig, Russell. You never do dig.”
Dig, Russell. You never do dig.
A month later she was gone in the night and the bed was cold on her side.
The recliner is in the front room with a quilt over the back of it. Our daughter sits in it when she comes and I have never told her not to.
I carry that knife every day. It’s in my pocket right now.
And I sewed a button on my own good shirt in October. Badly. It’s crooked and the thread’s the wrong color and I am not taking it off.