The Cans My Daughter Collected

“Honey, they were cans.”

My uncle Barry said it standing against the tailgate of his Ram with a thermos cup in his hand, and he said it to my ten-year-old daughter, not to me.

I want you to hold onto that, because I have turned it over a hundred times since. He did not say it to the grown woman who might argue. He said it to the child who had counted every one.

Lacey was standing in the doorway of his pole barn with her hand still on the latch. The sliding door was open about three feet, and the morning sun came in across a concrete floor so bare you could see the broom marks.

Eleven big wire bins had stood against that back wall on Labor Day. I had helped her carry the last two in myself, each one stuffed with crushed aluminum and tied shut with baling twine.

Now there was a coil of orange extension cord, a push mower with a flat tire, and a lot of nothing.

“Where did they go, Uncle Barry?” Lacey asked. Her voice was small and very even, the voice she uses when she is working hard not to be a baby about something.

“I got rid of them, hon. They were getting to be a fire hazard back there.”

“A fire hazard.” “Cans, mice, all that. Your mom would’ve done the same.”

Let me back up and say who all of us are, because it matters for what I did.

My name is Whitney Brooks. I am thirty-seven. My husband Corey works second shift at the plant, two in the afternoon until a little after eleven at night, and has for nine years. We live in a small town in northwest Ohio, the kind with one stoplight, one grain elevator, and one scrap yard inside thirty miles.

Barry Carver is my mother’s younger brother. He is fifty-eight and does siding and gutters, and he has a pole barn on four acres out on County Road 12 that my grandfather put up in 1988. He tells good stories and always has a boat engine in pieces somewhere. He has never met a bill he could not float for one more month.

The class trip was the whole reason for the cans.

Every year the fifth grade rides a school bus to Columbus, a couple of hours south, to tour the Statehouse and eat sack lunches on the lawn. It is the big event of the year. Kids who have never been farther than the county fair come home talking about the rotunda for a month.

Lacey stood up in class and said she would get it. She told me about it at supper, very serious, like she was reporting a job she had taken on.

“I’m going to do cans,” she said. “Mrs. Barnett says aluminum is worth about fifty cents a pound at Hostetler’s. That’s real money, Mom.”

I laughed. I will be honest about that. I thought it was cute. I thought she would collect a couple of garbage bags and lose interest by Christmas.

That was last Thanksgiving. She did not lose interest. She did not lose interest for eleven months.