The List

Jacob turned the truck off and stared out the windshield at the hardware store nestled between other smaller shops. The cab of the pickup started getting cold quickly as the heat stopped pumping out of the vents. He didn’t remember driving to the hardware store, but that didn’t bother him as he didn’t remember a lot of things these days. Not remembering why he drove to the hardware store bothered him.

“Why am I here?” he asked the man sitting in the passenger seat. The man reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a folded piece of yellow lined paper and handed it to Jacob.

“Here’s the list of things you need to get,” he said.

Jacob took the paper and opened it. The paper had come from a small pad and the jagged tear at the top betrayed that it was torn off the pad without patience. “Why do I need to get these things?” he asked while turning to the man. The man looked familiar, but Jacob decided not to embarrass himself by asking for his name. If the man was in the truck, then he must know him.

“Don’t know,” the man said. “You wrote it. Don’t you remember?” Jacob ignored the question. He stepped out of the truck and the man followed.

He walked into the store and picked up a shopping basket while scanning the aisles. The store wasn’t one of those big chain hardware stores that Jacob knew he didn’t like, but a smaller, locally owned business. There were only six narrow aisles and every available space had products for blue-collar workers.

“Don’t know my way around a store like this,” Jacob said. “’Work with your mind, not with your hands,’ someone told me once. This is a store for someone who works with their hands.”

“Who told you that?” the man asked as they started walking down the first aisle.

Jacob shrugged. “Don’t know. Just heard it somewhere, I guess.”

“You going to ask for some help?”

“Don’t bother someone if you can figure it out for yourself,” Jacob said, his gaze moving from the list to items on the shelves then back to the list as he moved down the aisle.

“Someone tell you that, too?” the man asked.

Jacob stopped and looked at the man. He did look familiar. He was short, his once brown hair was graying along the edges and the color of his mustache didn’t match either of the colors on his head. “Something like that,” he murmured as he reached past the man and grabbed a rugged-looking lunchbox.

In all respects, the lunchbox looked ugly. It was dark grey and the top of it opened to reveal a small plastic thermos that was just the right size to snuggle into the rounded lid, held there by a clasp. Jacob couldn’t see himself using it, but there wasn’t a variety of lunch boxes to choose from, so he tossed it into the basket.

When he looked up from the basket, he saw a green thermos with a silver lid which was also a cup. He picked it up and stared at it.

“The lunchbox has a thermos,” the man said.

“Yeah, but it’s too small and cheap. This one is better.” He put the thermos in the basket and continued walking down the aisle.

The next aisle didn’t have anything that was on the list, but the third aisle had an assortment of tape. Jacob stared at the different types, then looked back down at the list in the hopes it would provide some clue as to which type of tape was needed. All-weather tape, duct tape, flex tape, plumbers tape, the store had it all.

“What’s the tape for?” the man asked.

“Don’t know,” Jacob said while clenching his teeth. The questioning was becoming relentless.

“No need to get angry at me. It would just help you to know what you plan to do with it.”

Jacob didn’t know, and not knowing bothered him. He couldn’t remember making this list or why he wrote the things he did on the list, but it was his writing. Or, at least close to his writing. It looked neater than his writing – all the words in capital letters with the first letter of each word just being slightly bigger than the rest. Maybe I didn’t write the list, he thought. But he couldn’t remember anyone else who wrote like that.

He grabbed the duct tape and added it to the growing collection of items in the basket and moved on. The hand-drill was easy to find, but the last item, a cross-cutting hand saw, was a problem. Not only did he not know what a cross-cutting hand saw was, but he also couldn’t find anything in the remaining aisles of the store that indicated it was that type of saw.

He approached the bored-looking cashier and asked him if the store had a saw of that type.

“Sorry, sold the last one this morning. Should get some in by the end of the week though.”

Jacob looks down at his list and felt his heart skip a beat. The only item left was the saw and he couldn’t find it.

“Well, guess that’s it then,” the man said.

“Can’t go back without something. If I go back without something that can be used, then the trip was a waste of time. ‘Never come back empty-handed.’”

“Is that another thing someone told you?” the man asked.

Jacob snapped his head up from the list to look at the man and tell him what he really thought of him but instead noticed a display of utility knives on the counter next to the cash register. He plucked one from the display and tossed it into the basket.

“Someone said it, just don’t remember who,” Jacob said as he put the basket on the counter for the cashier. He paid for the items and walked back to the truck as the man followed.

He opened the back gate of the truck and sat on it, putting the bag of items down beside him and pulled the lunchbox out.

“Now what?” the man asked as he leaned against the side of the truck.

Jacob opened the lunch box and removed the thermos that came with it and tossed it back into the bag. He tried to put the green thermos in the slot where the other thermos sat, but the silver lid/cup made it too long.

“Nice,” the man said with a chuckle. “Your expensive thermos is too big.”

Jacob ignored him and pulled the hand drill out of the bag and started drilling holes in the side of the lid of the lunchbox. It didn’t take him long for his hands and wrists to get tired as he drilled holes less an inch apart, making a circle of holes in the side of the lunchbox lid.

With the circle of holes complete, he took the utility knife out of the bag and started cutting the space between the holes. The thick plastic of the lunchbox lid only made the work harder and his hands started cramping.

“Not using the right tool for the job,” he said.

“Guess that’s why you needed the saw,” the man told him.

After cutting through most of the circle, his cramping hands made him stop. He pushed the circle in and put his fingers through the gap and found enough purchase that allowed him to move the flap of plastic back and forth.

“If you just pull on that, it’s going to crack the lid and look like crap,” the man said.

“Yeah, I know. ‘Your work is a reflection of you’ and all that.” Jacob pulled his fingers out of the slot he managed to carve into the lid and continued his work with the knife. After another ten minutes of working on it, and with considerable cramping of his hand, he finished the hole and threw the circle of plastic he had carved out of the lunchbox into the bag.

He fit the green thermos into the lunchbox by sliding the lid through the hole and jumped off the back of the truck to admire his work.

“Well, that looks different,” the man said.

Jacob stared at the lunchbox with the silver thermos lid sticking out the side of the lid. “It works,” he said as he rummaged through the bag and grabbed the tape. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a quarter, then taped the quarter to the bottom of the inside of the lunchbox.

“What’s that for?” the man asked.

“In case I need to call home. In case I’m late or the truck breaks down.”

“Are you late?” the man asked, his lips forming a small smile.

Jacob thought about it for a moment. “Don’t know. But we should be going though.”

He closed the back gate to the truck and carried the lunchbox with him to the cab. He got in, started the truck, and noticed that the man didn’t get into the passenger side. He looked out the window, ready to ask the man what he was waiting for, but he was no longer there. He looked out the back window and the man wasn’t there, either. Jacob shrugged and drove home.

When he walked into the kitchen of his house through the back door, he saw his mother talking to a police officer.

“Jacob, where have you been?” his mother asked in the voice he recognized as part chastising, part worry.

He took his boot off, knowing he wouldn’t hear the end of it if he made the floor dirty. “Just had to pick some things up.”

“You know you can’t just leave the house like that,” she said while waving her finger at him. She glanced at the modified lunchbox in his hand and started to say something, then gasped and put her hands to her mouth. “What do you have?” she whispered.

He put the lunchbox on the kitchen table and sat down in front of it. She walked across the kitchen and picked it up, then quickly place it back on the table in front of Jacob. She sat in the chair across from Jacob and put her hands to her face while sobbing.

The office put his hand on her shoulder as her body shook. “Ma’am? Are you alright?” he asked.

She looked it up at Jacob and pointed to the lunchbox. “It’s… it is….”, she couldn’t continue.

Jacob looked at the lunchbox and the memories flooded back to him. Everything he had forgotten rushed in to fill the void his mind had created. His father filling the green thermos from the coffee carafe early in the morning. Fitting the thermos into the lid of the lunchbox by pushing the silver lid/cup through the hole he cut into it. His father leaving for work with the lunchbox in the dark. His father returning home with the lunchbox in the dark after a long day. He remembered the lunchbox sitting on the counter on weekends, always seeming out of place.

He remembered his father’s voice. The insistent sayings and phrases, talking to him in a voice that was always teaching some sort of lesson. The phrases that were repeated so many times Jacob could never forget them.

He looked up as his sobbing mother and remembered the days she cried like that after his father died thirteen years ago. He felt the hot tears streaming down his face, happy that he could finally remember and grieving because he did.

And he remembered his father telling him never to forget who you were, because if you do, then you’ll never remember who you are.