explained a choice my father made when I was four years old that I had quietly resented my entire life, and had no right to.
The coin was worn smooth because it had been carried in a mans pocket for thirty years before it ever reached my father, and by another mans pocket for thirty more after. It was not rare. A collector would give you a dollar for it. But in 1971, in a grain elevator outside our town, it was the last thing a man named Walt Rennick ever held.
My father was twenty-two that year, new on the job, when the leg of the elevator gave way. Walt, who was fifty and had done it a thousand times, shoved my green young father clear of the fall and did not get clear himself. Before the crew reached them, Walt pressed his lucky coin into my fathers hand and said, near as my father ever repeated it, that he had spent too many years chasing overtime far from his own kids, and if this boy was getting the life Walt was losing, he had better not waste it the same way.
My father was found holding that coin. He never spoke of it. Not to me. My brother knew because my brother was older and had pried it out of him once, drunk, years ago, and had always assumed I knew too.
I did not know. All I knew was the choice, the one I resented. When I was four, my father was offered a foremans job in the city, real money, a house with a second bathroom, the whole climb. And he turned it down flat and stayed a plain hourly man in a plain town, and we grew up with less than we might have, and I spent my whole life thinking my father simply had no ambition, no fire, that he had settled and dragged us down into the settling with him.
He had all the fire in the world. He just aimed it somewhere I was too young and too sour to see. He turned down the city because the city was more hours and more miles from his kids, and a man had died telling him not to spend his second life the way the first man spent his only one.
Walt gave me the years. I was not going to hand them to a foremans desk. I gave them to you and your brother. Every ballgame, every supper, every ordinary night I was home. That is what the coin bought. That is why it is the most valuable thing I own.
He wrote that on a card tucked in his desk, meant for the day I finally asked. I never asked. I dropped his most valuable thing in a bowl by the door where coins go to be forgotten, and thanked him like he had handed me a nickel.
He forgave me that, I know, the way he forgave everything. I carry the coin now, worn smooth by three lifetimes of pockets. It is proof a man died so my father could be there, and my father made sure the gift was not wasted. I was the gift. I just could not see it until he was gone.