The Kids Who Came to My Potluck

The Padded Envelope

The envelope came on a Tuesday. It was the gray padded kind the drugstore sells three to a pack, and my name was on it in Brian’s handwriting.

I stood at the kitchen counter in Delphos and worked my thumb under the flap. You do that slow when you still expect something good.

Inside was a candle. A gas station candle, the kind they keep by the register next to the energy shots. Vanilla scent. Six dollars.

The little orange price sticker was still on the bottom. He had not even peeled it off.

There was no card. There was a receipt folded once, and that is the only reason I know what it cost.

The receipt was from a Phillips 66 off the interstate. It listed the candle, a large coffee, and a lottery ticket, all bought at 7:14 on a Monday morning.

He had stopped for gas. He grabbed me something on his way out the door. That was the whole of it.

I set the candle on the counter. I did not cry, not yet. I turned it in my hand and read the label twice, like the label would change.

Lon came in from the garage with grease on his knuckles. He asked what Brian sent, because Brian had sent Lon something too.

I told him it was a candle. Lon got very quiet. A decent man gets quiet like that when he already knows and does not want to be the one to say it.

That was the month we both retired, Lon and me, two weeks apart. Lon had thirty-one years at the co-op.

I had twenty-eight years in the school cafeteria. That does not sound like a career to people who have never done it. It sounds like exactly a career to anyone who has.