The Locker I Filled for My Son

Somebody’s cousin cooks in a kitchen up the interstate. I did not ask who, and I do not intend to find out.

I wiped my hands on my apron and took the envelope. It was light. There was no letter in it, no card, not a single word in anyone’s handwriting.

There was a small brass padlock.

It was a cheap one, the kind you buy at a hardware store for a bicycle, scratched along the body and dulled where a thumb had held it for years.

It was the padlock I had put in the hand of a ten-year-old boy and said, “A man ought to have his own drawer.”

I turned it over. The key was taped to the shackle with a scrap of white freezer paper, and on the paper, in grease pencil, was a date.

It was the Friday before the Saturday I stood on the bucket.

I do not know what that means. I have turned it over a hundred times. I know it might mean a man has made up his mind to leave a door shut.

I know it might mean something else, and I have decided not to be a man who guesses that out loud.

I walked down the hall of the cold room to locker thirty-one, in the cold with the compressor going, and I did not say anything to Selby, who followed me and stopped at the door.

I opened the little brass drawer and looked at the forty packages in white paper, each dated in my hand.

Then I put the padlock through the hasp on the outside of the door, which has never needed one, and snapped it shut. I put the key in the pocket of my shirt.

It is not a lock to keep anyone out. It is the opposite of that. It is a thing a man puts on his own drawer to say that it is spoken for.

I still fill it on Fridays. I will keep filling it as long as I am standing.

A good cut kept cold will wait for you a long time, I will tell you that as a butcher. It does not spoil. It only waits.

The apron is on its hook. The white canvas one, the third from the end, with the name in blue thread, gone gray at the creases from five years of washing.

I wash it twice a year in the shop sink, the same as always.

If there is someone you drove off with a sentence you meant to be true, a son or a daughter, a brother, a sister, a friend, I would ask you one thing.

Do not wait for them to call first. Say it where you said the other thing, out loud, with the people who heard it.

Then do not ask for anything. That part is theirs.

This Friday I put the ribeye in the drawer at a quarter to one. I stood there in the cold, and I did not feel quite as alone as I used to.

I said, “Well, son.” And I shut the door, and the lock clicked behind it.