The Custodian Laid His Late Wife's Yellowed Instrument Sheet on the Music Stand After the Coach Kicked His Bucket

"Get this junk out of my building," Coach Denny Krol said, and kicked Orval Renn's mop bucket down the gym hallway in front of a hundred waiting parents.

Orval is sixty-three. He has mopped that school for eighteen years, since the plant closed, and every parent in that hallway knows his face and almost none of them know his name. He said nothing. He walked past the trophy case, into the band office, and laid a yellowed instrument sign-out sheet flat on the music stand.

His wife Louise had been the choir accompanist in that building for twenty-four years, and she kept a copy of every instrument sign-out form in the bottom drawer of the band office. Nobody ever asked her why. Nobody ever read them.

After she died, Orval kept opening the drawer.

He started noticing that nine horns were signed out to students who had graduated years ago. Same nine serials. Every year. The horns were not in the band room, and they were not in the instrument closet, and they were not on the district's inventory list that Principal Coyne signed every spring without looking up from his desk.

Orval copied the missing-inventory numbers down by hand on a folded page from a pocket notebook and kept it next to the sheet in the drawer. Then he waited.

Here is what everybody in that hallway thought, including me. The old man had finally cracked. Eighteen invisible years and one kicked bucket, and he was about to march down to the office and complain about the broken floor buffer or the way the coach talked to him. That is what an old yellowed piece of paper looks like at first. A keepsake. A thing a widower carries because his wife's handwriting is on it.

He laid it on the stand anyway.