Chapter 2

“Morning, Junk.”

“Hi, Mrs. Dannifer.” I answered to Junk at least fifty times a day, five days a week. If anyone called me Julian, I had to stop a moment to realize they were talking to me.

“Hot, huh?” Mrs. Dannifer always waited until my father and I rounded the corner to wheel her trash and recycling receptacles to the street. An early riser, like me and Pops, she figured something might get into them if she brought them out the night before.

“Too hot for almost November, Mrs. D.”

We picked up early in our town, every Wednesday, often before six A.M. I’d been on the books as a Junk Waste and Refuse Management and Haul-Away Service employee over ten years, now, but I’d been riding on the back of the truck since I was five. My father was Dale Junk. The waste and refuse management and hauling business was his. I was the heir apparent. Someday, the garbage removal empire and all the glamour that came along with it would be mine, all mine.

“You got that right.”

I’d known Mrs. Dannifer since the day I was born. She’d visited the hospital to see me in my mother’s arms hours after I came into the world. She’d babysat me when my mom was in the hospital, and I vividly remembered the smell of her perfume mixing with the aroma of all the flowers as she hugged me at the funeral home, when I was only nine.

“Warm nights and trash really bring out the critters,” she said.

That they did. Things had come a long way since we’d given our customers large collection bins with wheels and hinged lids. The days of black plastic bags tossed to the curb were far messier, far more pungent. Now, sometimes, I didn’t even have to hop down from the big truck’s rear or side step. As long as I could reach the cans that needed to be pulled closer to the claw, mechanics did the rest. Sure, sometimes trash spilled over. Sometimes people had more than would fit in their bins, too, especially the first pickup day after Christmas. It was easy to know when someone was on a cleaning spree as well, or worse, if someone had passed away. Those times, we would find any manner of items piled up next to the trashcans, everything from old magazines, to oil paintings, to appliances that might still be good. Unpleasant moments still occurred, and some days were messier than others. Any day the temperature went above eighty ended up rather smelly, but I never minded hard work, and slept well most nights because of it.

“Tomorrow could be freezing and snowy,” Mrs. Dannifer said.

“Ya never know. Almost time for Christmas lights.”

“Where do the days go?” she asked.

“I wish I knew.”

I’d grown up in Denton, Virginia, where it usually did snow at least four or five times per winter. I could recall one snowy December day in particular, a white Christmas, from twenty years earlier. Trying to ride my new bike through gray slush with Mackensie Keller—always Mickey to me—on the handlebars, we’d crashed into an air-blown inflatable Santa in Mrs. Dannifer’s yard on December 25, 1997. The puffy, nylon Santa looked soft enough to break the inevitable fall, so I’d more or less aimed for it. Unfortunately, what appeared in one instant as a cushy white bearded airbag was actually more like a soft sided tent, one that collapsed upon impact. My brand spanking new bike ended up with a bent front wheel, and Mackensie and I both ended up in casts, mine on my arm, his on his leg. Good times. We laughed through the pain—until our parents gave us something to cry about.

Mackensie was back in town, right up the street from Mrs. Dannifer’s, in fact. We hadn’t hung out together since junior year of high school. He went off to private school, then college. I stayed behind to keep working with my old man.

“You done there?” That came out the driver’s side window from him, after the claw dumped Mrs. D’s trash and set her can back down on the pavement, all by his doing.

“Morning, Dale.”

“Hi, Joanne.”

“I better get a move on.” My cap ended up all crooked, when I swiped at my forehead with my already wet red bandanna. “Have a good one, Mrs. Dannifer.”

“You, too, Junk. Bye, Dale. Try to stay cool.”

Already seventy-eight at the butt crack of dawn, as Pops like to say, that seemed impossible, especially when thinking about the past.

Speaking of butt cracks and days gone by, a few stops ahead that morning, I saw Mackensie Keller bouncing up and down on a shiny black muscular beast named Onyx. I caught Mickey in passing at least a few times a week, nowadays. Sadly, it was usually at thirty-five miles an hour. Keller’s Horse Farm didn’t have to be on our daily route, but it was, since I’d recently convinced Pops taking Pine Avenue to get onto the main road actually saved us time in the long run. Using the backstreet, we didn’t have to worry about commuter traffic on those days our business took us all over the county to pick up the trash belonging to people who weren’t local, strangers, some of whom I only spoke to on garbage day. Many of them I’d never met at all. Mickey felt like a stranger, now.