Saturday morning, I got up, put my good towel over my shoulder like always, walked down that hill to Scalp Avenue, and did not go on that lot. I sat on the wall by the Dollar General across the street where I have eaten my lunch for twenty-three years.
The line was around the block by nine, same as they said it would be.
I want to tell you about the box first, because the box is the reason any of this happened.
People hand you things through a car window at the end of a tunnel. Christmas cards mostly, some years fifty or sixty, and you cannot read a card with a rag in each hand and a Buick coming, so it goes in your pocket, and at the end of the shift it goes in a box in my basement.
Twenty-three years. I had never once sat down and read them, because I never had a week off in my life.
Then I had a week off.
Four hundred and some cards. It took me four days and my granddaughter read the ones with small letters.
December of 2011. Plain card, one page folded inside, from a young man whose name I did not know because he never signed the front.
You dried my father’s hearse in the rain on the ninth of November. You took your hat off and you did the back window twice and you would not take the money my uncle held out. I was nineteen and in the second car and I watched you do it. I do not have any way to say what that was so I am saying thank you.
His sister saw what happened to me on the internet in February.
He came and found me on that wall about ten o’clock. Thirty-two now, and he owns three washes around Somerset and one in Windber, and he had been trying to find me since the eleventh.
He did not make a speech and neither did I. Two men on a wall.
I work Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Windber store now. Not the tunnel. Hand detail bay, sitting down between cars, and the money is better than Sudsy’s ever paid me and the hip has not gotten worse.
He put a stool in that bay before I ever asked for one.
Sudsy’s has the blowers. They work fine on the roof and the hood and they will never get the mirrors or the jambs, and every person in Johnstown who has been through that tunnel since March knows it, and about forty of them have told me so.
I am not glad about that. Those are still my customers even when they are not.
The box is in my front room now, not the basement. Four hundred and some cards and I have read every one, and there are thirty-one in there from people who are gone, and I did not know how much of that town went through my hands until I sat down and read it.
A young man in a polo told me the blowers do it free. He was right about the price and wrong about everything else, and it took me twenty-three years and a box in a basement to find out how much.