because for one second it felt like somebody was watching me, and it was a family, staring up out of a photograph at the bottom of the bag.
A framed picture, small, face up under all the tools and clothes, and in the dim garage those eyes looking up caught me wrong and I turned around fast to check the door. Then I got the light on it and my heart went soft. A woman and three children on the steps of a little house, squinting into the sun. On the back, in careful pencil: Elena and the children. We are all here, and we are all waiting for you. Come home to us.
Under the frame was a folded letter, an offer of work from a plant up north, and a childs drawing, a crayon man with a lunchbox, and over him in a kids letters: COME HOME SOON PAPA.
I go to that Alabama baggage place for tools, and I had been pleased with myself, a heavy locked duffel for ten bucks, sure to have good tools in it. It did. Wrapped-up wrenches, a level, a good square. A working mans tools. And I understood all at once whose they were. A father had packed his tools to go work far from home, and his good clothes for church, and at the very bottom, where he could reach it on a hard night, the picture of the family he was working for. And the airline had lost the whole bag, tools and all, and a man had shown up to a new job in a new town with nothing.
The tag on the duffel had a name and part of an address, over in Tuscaloosa. I could have kept the tools. Good tools are good money. But a man does not get to keep another mans reason for leaving home.
It took some doing, some calls in my bad Spanish and his family patient with me, but I found him. Hector. He is still up north at that plant, sends money home every month, has for years. When his bag was lost he could not afford to replace the tools, so he borrowed and doubled his shifts and paid it back slow, and never told Elena how close it came to breaking him. He thought that picture of his family and his boys drawing were gone forever.
I mailed the whole bag back to him, tools and all, my own dime, and I would not hear otherwise. What I could not mail was the thing I most wanted him to have, which is to know that his family had been at the bottom of that bag the whole time, waiting for you, come home soon Papa, riding along with him even when he thought he had lost everything.
He called me when it came, a big man brought low, saying over and over he could not believe a stranger would do it. I told him a man who packs his childs drawing at the bottom of his tool bag is a man I would be proud to know.
He is going home this Christmas, first time in three years. Same tools in the same bag. Come home soon Papa. He is coming.