The Cash Box in Dad’s Closet

The back of the church

The next morning I lay awake thinking about the funeral, because I had gotten something wrong there too.

Three hundred and some people came. I remember the number because the church seats two hundred and forty, and they stood along the walls and out the doors and down the steps into the parking lot in thirteen degrees of cold. I had told Annette it was my mother’s old friends, and the cafe, and the post office.

I had not looked closely at the back rows. A woman in a green parka. A man in a seed cap, turning it in his hands. A boy of seventeen in a suit that did not fit him, with his mother’s hand on his back.

At the reception a woman I did not know pressed a jar into my hands and said, “It’s huckleberry. He liked it.” She went out into the parking lot before I could ask her name.

I thought it was a casserole sort of thing. I put it on the counter next to the potato salad.

I got up and looked at that jar. There was a handwritten label in blue ink, a little crooked. It said, For the route. And a year in tiny numbers on the lid.

It was not the only jar. There were nine more in my father’s pantry, lined up behind the canned peaches, every one with a different year on the lid.

I went back to Lorraine, got a list of box numbers, and started going to doors.

Eugene Alcorn and the coffee pot

Eugene Alcorn lives in a single-wide at the end of Lower Mill Road, with a woodstove he has mostly given up on and electric baseboard heaters that ran on a bill he could not pay for the better part of thirty years.

He was ninety-one, in a recliner with a quilt over his knees. “You’re the Renner boy,” he said. “I seen you at the funeral. I could not get to the front.”

I told him what I had found, as plainly as I could. I watched his face while I said it.

He listened without moving.

“I figured it was a program,” he said finally.

“A program?”

“The co-op. A fund, or the government, or somebody.” He lifted one hand off the quilt and let it fall. “My wife passed in the winter of ‘eighty-five, and I got a pink one that same week. Then I got a paper that said it was handled. And the next winter, same thing. I thought, well, that is what the co-op does.”

“Mr. Alcorn, I am sorry. I should have known.”

“You were a boy.” He looked at me. “Your dad stopped here every Tuesday, you know. Truck would pull up at the end of the lane and sit. Never came in. I put the pot on anyway.”

I could not say anything.

“Twenty-two years,” he said. “I would hear the truck and put the pot on. He never came in. I figured he was shy. You tell me whether it was him.”

“It was him,” I said.

Eugene Alcorn nodded, a long slow nod.

“Then I would like you to have a cup,” he said, “and I would like you to know it was a good pot, every time.”

I drank a cup of coffee at his kitchen table at nine in the morning, and it was the worst coffee I have ever had in my life, and I would not trade it for anything.