Thirty Days
Episode 1 of 3 of Property of Nobody by June Whitaker
“Black umbrella,” he said. “Wooden handle. Chip near the top.”
I had fourteen black umbrellas on the shelf behind me and I knew exactly which one he meant, because I had tagged it myself at six that morning.
“Train and date,” I said.
“Five forty-one. Tuesday. Car three.”
Nobody knew the car. People barely knew the day.
I wrote it in the box anyway, because the form had a box for it, and the form was the entire job. I ran the lost property office at Suburban Station, one level under Market Street, in a corridor that smelled like brake dust and floor wax. Gray bins came down twice a day off the Paoli line, the Trenton line, the Airport line. I tagged what was inside them. I logged it. I held it thirty days.
After thirty days it went to the auction house out in Upper Darby and stopped belonging to anyone. Property of nobody. There was a rubber stamp for it and everything.
“ID,” I said.
He slid his license under the glass. Owen Ferris, forty-four, an address on Winona Street I had already copied into the ledger twice that month.
He signed slowly, like the pen weighed more than it did. Then he said thank you, Tess, because my name was on a badge and he was the only rider in eleven years who ever read it, and he took the umbrella up the stairs to the 5:41.
That was the first week of April.
By the end of May I knew his handwriting better than my sister’s. A paperback with a cracked spine, Elmore Leonard, pages swollen from a radiator. A spiral road atlas, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, 1997. Reading glasses in a soft case. A steel thermos, dented at the base. A Phillies cap so old the logo had gone the color of weak tea.
He came Thursdays, mostly. He never argued about the paperwork. He never asked me to bend the rule, and everyone asked me to bend the rule, because everyone believed their thing was different from the six hundred other things on my shelves.
I want to say I caught it early. I didn’t.
Here is what the job did to a person. In eleven years I had returned maybe one item in five, and the ones who came down for their property were usually furious about something, the hours, the stairs, the delay, me. Owen Ferris was never furious. He said please. He waited behind the woman with the stroller. He asked about my knee the week I had it wrapped, and remembered to ask again the week after.
So I started looking forward to Thursdays. I was thirty-nine years old and I ate lunch in a room full of other people’s coats. Take that however you want.
In the middle of June the thermos came back.
Same thermos. Same dent in the base, same blue dish towel wrapped around it, sitting in the two o’clock bin like it had never left. I had logged it on May 8. I had watched him sign for it on May 9.
I stood there with it in my hands for a while. Then I got the ledger down off the shelf, the real one, the green one the auditors never asked about, and I went back to April.
Eleven entries. Nine of them Thursdays. Every single one the 5:41 to Malvern, car three, and every single one claimed inside forty-eight hours by a man who had never once in four months asked me what happened to items nobody came for.
People lost things in patterns. I had seen a man lose the same set of house keys five times in a year. But a pattern was sloppy at the edges, and this had no edges. It was a schedule.
The following Thursday I left the window at 5:25, put the closed sign in the slot, and went up the stairs to the platform level instead of out to Sixteenth Street.
The 5:41 was already in, doors open, the air on the platform thick and warm the way it got down there in June. I stayed by the stairwell with a stack of claim forms in my hand so I would look like a woman doing her job.
He came down from the concourse at 5:33. Canvas tote on his shoulder, the same one every week. He walked past the first two cars without looking at them and got into car three, and he took the window seat on the platform side, which put him about nine feet from me behind two panes of scratched glass.
He set the tote on his knees. He opened it.
He took out the cap, the old Phillies cap with the tea-colored logo, and he held it for a second in both hands the way you would hold something at a funeral. Then he leaned over and put it on the empty seat beside him and squared it up, brim forward, dead center, and pushed the tote back down between his feet.
He did not look out the window once.
Nobody sets a hat down that carefully by accident.