What the Scrap Pile Was Really For

The tin box

My wife, Marlene, worked in the front office at Vandalia Community High School for twenty-eight years. She did the attendance and the transcripts and the lunch counts and the phone, and she knew every kid who came through that building better than their own mothers did, because the front office is where kids end up when something is wrong.

She died in February, nineteen years ago. Cancer, the slow kind. She was fifty. I was fifty-one, and our Joanne was twenty-seven and newly married and living over in Effingham.

A week after the funeral the school sent a copier-paper box with her things from the desk. A stapler she liked. A coffee mug a kid had given her that said World’s Okayest Secretary, which she had treasured. A cardigan off the back of her chair. Her reading glasses. A small green tin box, the kind you keep recipes in.

I did not open the tin for a month. I figured it was recipes. When I finally lifted the lid there were none. There were index cards, a couple hundred of them, in her round careful handwriting. Each card had a first name and a last initial at the top, and under it a line or two in pencil, with dates.

I read them standing at the kitchen counter in my sock feet.

Tessa M. Mother cleans at the nursing home nights. Smartest kid I have ever typed a transcript for. Will not apply anywhere because she has done the math.

Dustin P. Dad out of work since the plant closed. Wants to be a lineman. Hands like his grandpa’s.

Marisol V. Reads in the office at lunch because it’s warm. Never asks for anything.

Some of the cards had little check marks. Some had a dollar figure beside the check mark, fifteen or thirty or forty-five, and I did not understand those until I turned over a card near the back and found a note in different ink.

Paid application fee out of my purse. Do not tell Marvin, he’ll say I’m soft.

I stood in my kitchen and laughed until I had to hold on to the counter. I was not going to say she was soft. I would have asked her how many there were.

She had been doing it for years. A kid would come in with the grades and the want and no way to pay for the first semester, and Marlene would quietly cover the small things, the application fee, the transcript fee. She kept a card on each so she wouldn’t forget them, and so that someday, I think, she could do more.

I did not know what to do with the box, so I did nothing with it for about three more months.