his dad's a stubborn old man down to his very bones, though, so dj spends hours sorting books in the library, and moving boxes in the garage, labeling totes and rifling through file folders, and all the other myriad things his dad wants. they load up dj's honda and take several trips to the good will, a few to the scrapyard, two to the antique dealer and furniture restoration specialist dj sorta thinks his dad might've had a thing with back in the day, and one to the household hazardous waste collection center. dj's touched goddamn near every single thing in his father's house. everything but the big old footlocker tucked away at the back of the closet.

"it's nothing you'd want," his dad says with that wry smile, the one he always wears when he's got a secret tucked in his cheek like a piece of hard candy. "and it's personal, deej. no passports or birth certs or deeds hiding in there. just... mementos. a couple lifetimes' worth of junk that somehow manged to make the trip every time I moved."

and... it is mostly junk, when dj cracks the padlock off, still wearing his sober black funeral suit (thank god his dear departed dad kept four pairs of bolt cutters in the garage and one in the trunk of his car).

an old flannel shirt, soft and worn thin in the elbows, the red faded pinkish from a million trips though the washer. a ring of keys that don't open any doors in the house. a pair of kansas license plates that expired back in '06, an unimaginably ancient year. a bunch of old school ID cards for dad and his brother, dozens of them shuffled together in an old tin box the used to hold electrical splicing tape. (dj has the laugh at the mullet his dad was rocking in the early '90s, the long over-gelled daytime tv heart-throb bangs his older brother — dean senior, dean the first— sported back then.)

receipt papers with unfamiliar designs scribbled on the backs and old brochures and brittle, yellowed newspaper clippings leaving acid stains on the folder they're tucked inside. a library copy of the collected works of vonnegut, absconded from a high school in battle creek, michigan. old leather bracelets, the knotted kind you're supposed to leave on until they rot off, wrapped around a black jelly bracelet. beer bottle caps, flattened into misshapen coins. an old winchester repeating arms belt buckle, cowboy logo dark with tarnish and age, attached to a belt whose cheap pleather strap flakes off on dj's fingers. a dark green hoodie with "HURON HIGH SCHOOL MATHLETES" on the front and "S. WINCHESTER" across the shoulders in cracked white vinyl letters. a navy blue bandana with a crusted brown stain gluing the folds together. (it smells like iron when dj tries to peel it apart.)

a box of four- and five-leaf clovers, each one carefully pressed and dried, easily a hundred of them, piled neatly in an old peanut brittle can. a pocket knife with DEAN carved into the casing in crooked, spikey letters. a red plastic whistle on a lanyard, like a lifeguard might use. a keyring with a silver bullet dangling from it. an index card labeled "LAWRENCE HOUSE" in sharpie, folded in half and taped at the edges into a makeshift envelope, filled with grass clippings that scatter all over dj's lap and the closet floor when he finally rips it open.

polaroid pictures, faded blues and oversaturated pinks distorting the faces of people dj only knows by sight. his grandparents. uncle bobby, who "wasn't really our uncle, but if you'd've told him that, he'd've kicked your ass." dean. there are others — better pictures, from cameras and phones; the dark-haired man whose commitment to being photographed repeatedly in a trench coat stems either from a strong personal sartorial philosophy or a complete lack of sense, fashionable or otherwise; the redheaded women, one tall and one tiny; the boy with the sunshine grin — but there are so many photos of dean. dean, and his dad, and dean-and-his-dad frozen in time throughout the years, moving and sitting and standing as a unit, without a sliver of space separating them.

dj had asked his dad over and over as a kid, how come he didn't have a brother or a sister, and his dad always got that little half-grin that it took dj almost two decades to realize wasn't a smile for him, but for the man he reminded his father of whenever he used that tone.