I lifted it out of the pieces, and I couldn’t breathe, because it was a pawn ticket with my name on the back of it in Earl’s printing, and it was dated the ninth of October, 2019.
Three tickets, actually, folded together tight enough to fit inside a bird.
Dunlavy’s Loan, on Third. October of 2019. A Snap-on roll cab and the contents. A Milwaukee band saw. A tap and die set that belonged to his father.
My husband sold his tools.
October of 2019 is the month my mother went into the home in Bellefontaine and the deposit was six thousand dollars and Medicaid hadn’t come through and wouldn’t for eleven weeks. I remember sitting at the kitchen table doing sums and Earl telling me he’d figured it out, that he’d been paid on a job, and I remember being so relieved that I did not ask one single question. Not one.
He worked out of a plastic tote for six years. I watched him do it. I watched that man borrow a socket set off our neighbor Rusty a dozen times and I thought nothing of it, and when I asked once what happened to the big red box he said he’d gotten tired of the clutter in the garage.
Tired of the clutter. And I bought him a tool chest for our twenty-eighth anniversary and made a whole production of the bow on it, and he stood in that garage and looked at it for a good while before he said anything at all, and I thought he was overwhelmed.
He was doing arithmetic on what it must have cost me.
His note was rolled up inside the bird with the tickets.
Ellen — I never wanted you to know because you’d have said no and then your mother wouldn’t have had a bed. They’re just tools. I can borrow tools. There was never one day I wanted them back more than I wanted that taken care of. I’m sorry about the bird. It’s the only thing I’ve got to give that didn’t cost anything but the time, and the time is the part I’d want you to have anyway. — E.
The time is the part I’d want you to have anyway.
I set that bird on a shelf and let him see exactly how little I thought of it. Two weeks later he was on the floor of that garage by the workbench and I could not get to him fast enough, and the tool chest I bought him was still in the corner with my bow on it.
He never opened it. Not once. My son says he was waiting for a Saturday when he could do it right.
I went down to Dunlavy’s in March. The tickets were long dead, of course, six years dead. But Mike Dunlavy is sixty and he remembered a man selling a full set out from under himself in one trip and not haggling about any of it, and he still had the tap and die set in a case in the back because his father had bought it for himself and never used it.
He would not take my money. I made him take it. We compromised, is what I’d call it, though he’d call it something else.
That set is in the tool chest now, in the top drawer, in a garage with nobody in it. And the bird is glued back together and sitting on the windowsill over the sink, crooked wing and all, and it is the single most valuable thing I own.