Inside the box, folded neatly, was a city sanitation jacket, faded orange, with the name ERNIE stitched over the pocket. The woman laid her hand on it. “He put this around me on Penn Avenue in 2014,” she said. “I had no pulse. He pushed on my chest for eleven minutes in the sleet and kept saying, ‘Not on my route, ma’am. Not on my route.’ When I woke up in the hospital, this jacket was on the chair next to my bed. He’d already gone back to finish his route.”
Gordon’s coffee cup was halfway to his mouth. The woman went on. “My name is Helen Brody. I tried to give the jacket back. Ernie told me to keep it till I didn’t need it anymore. I sent him a Christmas card every year. He never signed his last name, so I never found out where he lived.” I knew then what was in the shoebox at the top of Dad’s closet. Ten Christmas cards, all signed Helen.
“After that day,” Helen said, “I became a CPR instructor. I’ve taught three thousand, two hundred people. Eleven of them have saved someone.” She looked straight at Gordon. “You said a man with no ambition was perfect for that job. Sir, that man’s ambition is walking around this city in eleven people who are still breathing.”
Gordon set the cup down, very slowly. For a moment he looked like he might say something loud, the way he always does. Instead he walked over to my mother, sat down beside her, and said, “Margie, I’m sorry. I knew him fifty years and I never knew him at all.”
At the end of the reception, Helen asked whether Dad could be buried in the jacket. My mother said yes. I helped Helen fold it over his chest, and she tucked her last Christmas card into the pocket. As we walked out to the cars, Gordon stopped by the garbage truck the city had parked outside in tribute, put his hand flat on its door, and stood there for a long time without saying a word.
