The Cans My Daughter Collected

“There’s no call to make a show of it.” “I haven’t made a show. Bonita read the ticket. All I did was bring it.”

Then, from the second table, a small voice. “Uncle Barry?”

Lacey had stood up. She was holding her green notebook in both hands in front of her, and her yellow gloves were tucked into her jumper pocket.

I started to say her name. I stopped. She was not asking my permission.

“I just want to say something,” she said. Her voice shook, and she steadied it. “It was forty-eight Sundays.”

Nobody breathed.

“I went to the ball field forty-eight Sundays. Rain too. I wrote every one down.” She held up the notebook. “It was about sixty-four thousand cans. I counted them in pounds, but I figured the cans too.”

She looked at him. She did not look angry. That was the worst part, for him, I think. She looked like she was trying to understand something.

“I would have given you some,” she said. “If you’d asked.” Barry opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

Mr. Merritt got up from his chair by the door. It took him some time. He is eighty-four, and he used the cane and the back of the chair both. He stood with his Legion cap in his hand and his eyes on Barry.

“Son,” he said. “Half of those cans were mine.” That was all he said. He did not need to say another word.

The door at the back of the cafeteria banged open.

A cold wind came in across the floor, and the paper turkeys all trembled on the wall. Ralph Hostetler stood in the doorway in his canvas work coat and his blue cap, with a steel hand truck and, on it, a wire bin the size of a refrigerator, painted school-bus yellow.

“Excuse the interruption,” Ralph said. “I’m not a member of this club.”

“Ralph,” Mr. Eastman started.

“I’ll be brief, Principal.” He wheeled the hand truck two steps in and set it down. His eyes went to the third row and stayed there.

“Barry. You came to my gate at seven o’clock this morning with a trailer of scrap. Copper pipe and some old gutters.”

Barry said nothing.

“I told you my scale isn’t open to you anymore. Not today, not next week, not ever.” Ralph’s voice was not loud. He is not a loud man. “I’ve weighed for you thirty years. But I’m not going to be the place a man brings a child’s work to sell. I’d rather lose the tonnage.”

He turned to the room.

“I put one at my front gate this morning for the whole town. This one’s for the lobby of this school. I built both myself and painted them yellow.” He looked at Lacey. “Every can that comes to my yard from this town’s ball fields, I’ll weigh under the name of Mrs. Barnett’s room. Every month. I’ll write the check to the class myself.”

He set his cap back on his head. “And it’ll all be on the record,” he said, nodding at the table. “In pink.”

The room was very quiet. Then Mr. Merritt started to clap, slowly, with his cap in one hand and his palm against his cane, and one by one the others took it up, until the whole cafeteria was ringing with it, parents and grandparents and Mr. Eastman and the lunch ladies at the kitchen door.