Life With Objects

The List was tacked to the wall next to the employee schedule. Some day that summer before I left for college, Reveley had written “Things for Meghan to take” on a long section of paper from the cash register and would add to it when business was slow at the café.

In elementary teacher handwriting, she compiled a list of essentials:
“extra long twin sheets,” “hot pot,” “husband pillow and/or lap desk,” “iddy biddy book light,” “folder for important papers 1st day of class,” “message board for door,” “surge protector”…

Number 16, “sense of adventure!” was in suspiciously different handwriting, as were numbers 43 (“Large Caliber Handgun”) through 78 (“gimp”), non-so-secretly added by some of the guys we worked with.

I was eighteen, sometimes confident and sometimes broken. Reveley, who had recently graduated college with a major in English, as I would four years later, had taken me under her wing that summer and at the same time treated me as a peer.

My last day of work, I un-tacked The List from the wall and took it to school with me that August, more as a keepsake than a guide.

It was spring six years later when Reveley died. I kept the program from her funeral on the refrigerator for months. When we moved from the house, I took it down and tucked it into a box of mementos, layers above my only other written memory of her.

For Chrissake’s, Sandy, slow down, Gail said.

I’d taken the Mackey Lake cutoff, and station wagon was clattering over the wash-board, whiting out the road behind us a good quarter mile. All three of us were bor-derline grumpy, hot, impatient to be home. Air conditioning was extra in those days—thrifty me, I’d saved us eight hundred dollars because how often did you need air in Montana? Gail rarely skipped a chance to remind me how road-ragged, wind-whipped, etc., she invariably was after a long drive.

I eased back on the gas.

Moments later, she went, Oh, Buck, where’d you get those? I felt a burst of hard taps on my shoulder. Pull over, she said. Quick, quick.

I ground the brakes, sneaked a glance behind me, saw a strew of shiny thumbtacks on the back seat.

The instant we were stopped, Gail jumped out, roiling gumbo dust engulfing her, then scrambled in back. Sit still, she told the Backseat Buckaroo, our two-year-old, given name Frederick. She pried open one sweaty fist, then the other, inspected his lap; satisfied, she began whisking the tacks into her hand. Where’s the box? she asked me.

I swiveled around, scanned. No box. Here, I said, extending my own cupped hands. Gail dropped the tacks in, a couple dozen, a few sticking to her palm. The ashtray was already spilling over with butts; all I could think to do was jiggle the tacks down into my jeans pocket.

God, they’re all over— Gail said, her head disappearing from view.

You had me taking around those fliers, I said. For the—?

Fuck, Sandy, you never put anything away.

I said nothing.

For once, Buck was doing as instructed, sitting still; he seemed to find all this to-do pretty amusing. I made goofy eyes at him; he waggled his head and giggled. But then his face froze, huge-eyed—it was a look straight from an old movie, someone just grasping the fact he’s been run through with a rapier.

Then he was crying.

Gail pincered his chin, explored the inside of his mouth and produced two more thumbtacks, held them up in evidence, all spit-bubbled. He inhaled one, she said. I know it.

He’d be coughing or something.

Then he swallowed it, Sandy. What do we do?

Thirty miles from a phone, I thought. Hundred miles from an ER.

For a second, we just stared back and forth, picturing what a sharp steel point might do inside a two-year-old’s gut.

That’s what I remembered this afternoon, prying a thumbtack from the corkboard down in the lobby: Gail with a skinny-strapped sun top, her hair still chestnut, in a dense hawser braid she’d switch from shoulder to shoulder. And Freddy, our first-born, when he was still an only child with a silly nickname, in the care of two 23-year-olds with only their native smarts to go on, to tell them whether a thumbtack was just a little thing, or not.