The Cans My Daughter Collected

It has a slot cut in the top with a hinged lid and a hasp for a padlock. The paint was so fresh that Corey came away with a smear on his sleeve and did not seem to mind.

“I’ll weigh it at the end of every month,” Ralph told me, “and I’ll bring the check in myself. Mrs. Barnett says next year’s class can take over the account.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said. “I know I didn’t.”

By the time we got out to the parking lot, it was nearly eight o’clock, and the sky had gone a hard dark blue with the first stars out over the grain elevator. It had turned cold, the kind of cold that means the beans are all off and the corn is next. My breath smoked.

At the truck, she stopped. “Mom,” she said. “Can I go back in for a second?”

“What for?” “I left something in the crate.”

She meant the milk crate in the back seat. She opened the door and dug through it and came up with a single crushed can, a Pepsi, one she had pulled out of a barrel on the last Sunday at the ball field and forgotten to put in the bins.

She held it up and looked at it in the glow of the parking lot light.

“It doesn’t weigh anything,” she said. “Mr. Hostetler said a can’s about half an ounce. I looked it up.”

“That’s right.” “So it’s not worth anything by itself.” “No,” I said. “By itself it isn’t.”

She thought about that for a minute. Then she said, “But if you count every one, it is.”

I could only nod.

Lacey lifted the lid with both gloved hands. She held the Pepsi can over the slot for a moment, and I saw her lips move.

I think she was counting.

Then she let it go. It hit the bottom with the thin hollow ring that aluminum makes, a small sound in a big empty hall.

“One,” she said.

She opened the green notebook against the wall and found a clean page. She wrote the date at the top in pencil, and under it, in her careful hand, a number.

Corey stood behind her with one hand on her shoulder. He did not say anything. I could see him looking at the number over her head.

I stood in that school lobby on the first Thursday in November, with the receipt folded in my purse and a bus paid for and a furnace that would have to wait another year. I did not feel like anyone had won. Barry was still my mother’s brother, and there would still be a place in the family where a person ought to be and was not.

But the bus was paid. The ticket was stapled in Bonita’s ledger, in pink, where anyone could read the name. The old men at the Legion had their own reason to keep saving, and the man who ran the scale had put his name to a yellow bin in a school hall.

And my daughter, who is ten, had a clean page and the number one.

I locked the truck and took her hand. “Forty-nine,” I said. “Sunday.”

She grinned up at me. “I’ll bring the gloves.”