The Shoebox My Teacher Kept

Donny Pruett

I could not keep it. That is the only way I know how to say it. I had this box on my table full of people, and I could not just know the thing and keep it.

So I started with the names I could read best. Donny Pruett was first, because he had drawn that baseball and because Pruett is not a common name around here.

I found a Pruett Tire and Alignment outside Muncie. I called on a Tuesday, which felt right, and a man answered with a voice full of gravel and said, “Pruett’s.”

I asked if he was Donny Pruett who went to fourth grade in our town in the seventies, and there was a long quiet, and then he said, “Who is this.”

I drove out to see him the next morning. Forty minutes, which also felt right.

He was a big man in his late fifties with grease worked into the lines of his hands, and he stood in the door of his shop and did not know what to make of a strange woman holding a child’s card with his name on it.

I handed it to him. The blue card with the ballpoint baseball.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he turned it over, and on the back, in a child’s hand, it said FROM DONNY, and he made a sound I will not try to describe.

“I made this,” he said. “I made this for some kid. I don’t even remember which kid.”

“You made it for me,” I said. “I was the kid. And she kept yours too.”

Donny had missed most of a year when he was ten, he told me, because his dad got hurt in a grain auger and the family came apart for a while. He figured everybody had forgotten him. He figured he had been the dumb kid who got held back, except, he said, he never did get held back, and he had never once stopped to wonder why.

“I thought I just squeaked by,” he said. “I always thought I just barely squeaked by.”

I showed him the page. “Present with me,” in pencil, next to his name, week after week of the winter his family fell apart.

Donny Pruett sat down on a stack of tires in his own shop and put his face in his hands, a grown man, a grandfather, and he cried the same way I had in the child’s chair.

Then he wiped his face on his sleeve and said, “What do you need from me. Whatever you’re doing, I’m in.”