The Last Entry
Episode 3 of 3 of Property of Nobody by June Whitaker
“Four days,” Russ said. “Then it goes on the manifest with everything else.”
My district supervisor was a decent man who had never made an exception for anyone, which was why I asked him, standing in the doorway of an office already half in crates.
“It’s one ring.”
“It’s one ring on a manifest the state audits,” he said. “Thirty days is thirty days. The auction house takes the lot on the thirty-first, and you are not spending your last week here explaining a gap to Harrisburg.”
So I had until Thursday.
I went through the claim slips that night, all twenty-three, in the crate marked 2019 to present. Owen Ferris, 1109 Winona, a house that belonged to a family from Drexel Hill now. Phone number line blank every time. I never asked him for one, because the form did not require it and I had always been very good about the form.
On Thursday I closed the window at 5:20, eleven minutes early, and signed the ring out of the safe to myself.
Then I went up to the platform and got on car three.
He was in the window seat with nothing on the seat beside him.
I sat down in it. He did not look surprised. The doors chimed and we went out under Fifteenth Street into the dark and came up at Thirtieth with the river going gray.
“You stopped riding down to the office,” I said.
“I stopped losing things.”
“That’s not the same as stopping.”
“No.”
I put the envelope on his knee. He did not take it, so it sat there through Overbrook and most of Narberth while the car filled and the conductor came through and punched tickets around us like we were furniture.
“It was my father’s,” he said finally.
“I figured.”
“Ray Ferris. He died the ninth of January. I’m the one who cleaned out the house, because my sister’s in Tucson and somebody had to, and what I found out is that a man who lives eighty-one years in one house leaves about nine boxes that matter and forty that don’t.”
Longest thing he had ever said to me. His voice did not do anything special while he said it.
“I couldn’t throw the nine out,” he said. “I couldn’t keep them either. I’d get them as far as the trash and then I’d stand there.”
“So you put them on a train.”
“One a week. I’d tell myself, leave it, somebody finds it, somebody logs it, it goes to auction and some kid buys the atlas for a dollar and that’s a good end for an atlas.” He turned the envelope over on his knee. “Then I’d get off at Ardmore and cross to the eastbound and ride back in and come down your stairs.”
“Twenty-three times.”
“Twenty-three times.” He almost smiled. “Thirty days, you said. I couldn’t do one night.”
The train slowed for Haverford.
“Then you said it out loud,” he said. “At the window. You said, you leave them on purpose, and after that it wasn’t something happening to me, it was something I was doing. You can’t keep doing a thing once it has a name. So I did the ring and I stayed on the train.”
“You could have come down anyway.”
“For what.”
“For the paperwork.”
“Tess.”
“I kept everything you lost in a safe for four months,” I said. “That’s a fireproof safe, for wallets and firearms, and I put a paperback in it. Nobody made me. I broke the only rule I have and then I filled out a form saying I hadn’t, every Thursday, for a season, and you want to sit there and tell me there was nothing to come down the stairs for.”
He picked up the envelope then. He got the ring out into his palm and we both looked at it, thin on one side, forty years of somebody’s hand.
“It’s not his anymore,” he said. “He’s dead. And it was never mine.”
“It goes to auction Monday. Unclaimed. There’s a stamp.”
“Property of nobody,” he said.
“Property of nobody.”
He took my hand off my knee and put the ring in it and closed my fingers over it, and his hands were cold from the window, and he held on about four seconds longer than a man needs to give someone a ring.
“Then it’s yours,” he said.
I missed my station. I missed the next one too.
The office closed on the last Friday in October. I packed eleven years into forty-one crates and Russ carried the rubber stamp back to the district office, and the only thing nobody wanted was the green ledger, so I took it home to Fishtown.
The last entry was dated October 30. Item, one gold band, worn thin. Found, car three, the 5:41. Claimed by, and then my own name in my own handwriting.
He was waiting at the top of the stairs with two coffees and a bad opinion about the new schedule. It was cold on Sixteenth Street. We walked up toward the Parkway and he carried nothing and I carried nothing, and neither one of us set anything down the whole way home.