The Claim Tag in My Husband’s Coat

The coat hung in the hall closet for a full year, and for a full year I walked around it.

Brown canvas, a corduroy collar gone shiny, the left cuff frayed to threads. Merrill wore it from the first frost to the first week of May for 43 winters. It still held the shape of his shoulders. When the furnace kicked on, the sleeves moved a little, and for one second every time my heart did what it used to do when I heard his boots on the porch.

On the Saturday after the first anniversary, I told myself I was done being a coward about it.

Elaine had driven down from Des Moines. She stood in the closet doorway with a roll of black trash bags in one hand and her father’s old seed cap in the other.

“Mom, you do not have to do this today.”

“I do,” I said. “It has been a year. The clothing closet at church can use a good coat.”

“That one is not good, Mom. It is held together by habit.”

“So was he,” I said, and we both laughed, and then we both stopped.

I laid the coat across the bed. Forty-eight years I had been married to that man, and in all that time I had never let a coat go into the washer without turning out the pockets. I had done it so many thousands of times my hands knew the way without me.

So my hands went in on their own.

Left pocket. A flat carpenter’s pencil from the co-op. A cherry cough drop, the kind he hated and bought anyway because I told him to. Two hex bolts and a washer.

Right pocket. A handkerchief, folded small, a blue plaid one gone soft as skin.

I almost dropped it in the bag. But something inside had a little stiffness to it, and I unfolded the cloth on the quilt.

It was a piece of pink cardboard, about half the size of a playing card. The corners were round from being carried. One edge was torn straight across, the way a ticket is torn at a county fair. In the middle, stamped in blue ink, was a number: 1146.

Under it, smaller: Harmon Music and Repair. Tipton Falls, Iowa.

I turned it over. On the back, in pencil, in Merrill’s square careful printing, the kind he used to fill out a seed order:

March 9, 1985. Paid $38.

“What is it?” Elaine said.

“A claim tag. Like a coat check. You leave a thing to be fixed, they tear the tag in half, you keep one piece and the shop keeps the other. You bring your half back and they hand you the thing.”

“Your father never left anything to be fixed in his life. He fixed it himself or he lived with it.” I looked at the cardboard. “Thirty-eight dollars. That was a week of groceries for us that spring. You were in diapers and the note at the bank was at 14 percent.”

“It is a music store, Mom. Dad did not play anything.”

“Your father could not carry a tune in a bucket with a lid on it.” I held the tag up to the window. “And he kept this for 40 years, and in 48 years of turning out his pockets I never once saw it.”

The coat smelled of lava soap and cold air. I had to sit down on the edge of the bed.