The Claim Tag in My Husband’s Coat

Main Street was half brick and half empty. The shop sat on the corner under a faded green awning, the old gold letters on the window mostly flaked away, so that it said HARMON only in the places where the glass remembered it.

In the door hung a pasteboard sign, the old kind with a hole punched at the top. Closed, it said, in red gone pink. Taped under it, on notebook paper, in ballpoint: Band repairs Saturdays. Knock hard.

I sat in the car ten minutes. Then I said to the empty seat, “Well, Merrill,” and got out and knocked hard.

A bell rang over the door, a real bell on a curved spring. And I stepped into the smell. Valve oil, rosin, old varnish, coffee scorched on a hot plate. It was the smell of every school band room I had ever sat in as a mother.

Behind the counter at the back stood a man.

He was very old. Eighty-eight, I learned later. Tall once, now folded in the middle the way old farmers fold, in suspenders and a gray cardigan, with thick glasses that sat low. His hands on the counter were large and spotted and steady.

“Help you?” he said, not unkindly. “If it is a band horn, it will have to wait till Monday. The Wendell school gets first dibs.”

“It is not a horn,” I said.

I crossed the worn boards, set the handkerchief on the glass, folded back the cloth, and laid the pink tag down.

“I found this in my husband’s coat. Number 1146.”

He did not pick it up. He took off his glasses first, slowly, with both hands, the way a man takes off his hat in church. He looked at the tag. He looked at me. He looked at the tag again, and something moved in his face that I would not call surprise. It was older than surprise. It was the look of a man who has set a place at the table every night for a long time, and has just heard the car in the drive.

“Gaines,” he said. “You are Velma Gaines. You are Merrill’s wife.”

“How do you know my name?”

“Plum jam,” he said. “Every March for 40 years. Velma’s plum jam, he always said. He would set a jar on that counter like it was the rent.” His voice shook.

“Sir. I need to know what this is.”

“Is he with you?” He looked past me at the door with his whole heart in his face. “Is Merrill with you?”

“He passed. Last October.”

He closed his eyes. His lips moved. I have watched that movement at a great many graveside services, and I knew he was praying properly, to the end, and not for show.

“I was afraid of that,” he said. “When March came and the second Saturday went by and no jar. I told myself the roads.” He laid two fingers on the pink cardboard, very lightly. “The last time he sat in that chair, he said, ‘Ellis, I moved the stub out of my workbench and into the coat. If I am still around I will tell her myself. If I am not, she checks my pockets before every wash. Forty-eight years and she has never missed one.'”

I had to look at the floor for a moment.

“I am Ellis Harmon,” he said. “I have been waiting a long time, Mrs. Gaines. I would like to sit down for this, and I would like you to sit too.”