I set it down, lifted the lid, and the second I saw what was in there, I couldn’t move, because it wasn’t junk and it wasn’t a reel. It was a court envelope. Stiff, legal size, the district clerk’s return address in the corner, and my name typed across the front.
Inside was a certified copy of a decree, file-stamped by the clerk of Hidalgo County, and it took me most of a minute standing in my own driveway to make sense of the caption.
IN RE: CHANGE OF NAME OF DANIEL RAY OCHOA, ADULT.
Danny is my nephew. Carmen’s sister’s boy. He came to us at six years old with a grocery sack of clothes and a bad ear infection, and he never left, and he has called me Tio for thirty-one years because that is what he called me the first week and neither of us ever knew how to change it.
The decree said the petitioner’s name was changed to Daniel Ray Salinas. My name. Signed by the judge, entered the ninth of the month. Twelve days before Carmen died in the kitchen.
Behind it was the clerk’s receipt, two hundred and sixty-five dollars, paid in cash. Behind that, a photograph somebody took on the courthouse steps in San Juan: Danny in a shirt with a collar, thirty-seven years old and grinning like a fool, and Carmen beside him in her good blue dress with both hands around his arm.
She never said a word. Not one. She sat across from me at supper that night and asked me about the truck’s brakes.
The note was in the bottom of the box under a folded dish towel, in her handwriting, the letters leaning hard the way they did when her hands were bad.
Viejo — you always said the one thing you never got to give anybody was your name, because we never had kids of our own. You gave it. He asked for it himself, and he asked before I ever said a thing. I only drove him to the courthouse. Now go on and cry in the driveway, and then call your son. — C.
I called him from the driveway with the truck still running and the church van waiting at the curb with its flashers on.
He answered on the second ring like he’d been keeping the phone close for eleven months. He said she made him swear to wait. She told him the box would sit on that workbench a good long while, that I was stubborn and I’d get to it when I got to it, and that whenever I did, he should be ready.
Eleven months he waited. He said he drove past the house twice a week the whole time.
I told the church fellow I was sorry and to go on without the box.
Danny got here in forty minutes. We sat on the tailgate and looked at that photograph for a long while, the two of them on those steps in the sun, and I thought about a dollar cigar box with the hinges loose and what I said about it, dry as the border in July, while my wife stood there with our son’s name folded up inside it.
The reel never mattered. I bought one myself that fall. It’s a fine reel. The box is on the mantel.