Glint of Gold

During a painfully in-character Houston July, my mother and I drove through thick heat and endless traffic to the car wash on Kirby Drive. We had called ahead, so they were ready. Whether or not we were ready was a different question. A kind man with a sympathetic face led us to a tucked away area in the back. We walked around the corner, hiding ourselves from the stream of cars waiting their turn. Cars sat in a line calmly, stoically, just as my mother’s had done that morning before we realized what was at stake. The kind man handed us two pairs of rubber gloves and a flattened piece of cardboard––our excavation tools. Then, for the moment of truth: he went over and heaved the industrial-sized vacuum tank out of its holster and emptied all of its contents onto the cardboard in front of us. 

Word of our plight had made its way across the Mr. Bubbles lot, and soon another man had joined our team and put on rubber gloves of his own. The three of us crouched down around the cardboard, hands at the ready. He asked us what it was we were looking for, and we told him. “It’s small and gold. Really small.” My eyes met my mother’s as she finished this description and we both laughed a hoppless laugh. And then we started digging. The dirt and dust and stubs of paper were our haystack; now we just had to find our needle.

When men would walk past and observe the scene––the three of us cocooned in soft dust, drops of sweat hitting the cardboard in steady intervals––the would look at us expectantly. “Sentimental value,” we kept saying. And they would nod and continue on their way. 

I had gotten it on my twenty-first birthday, a delicate charm on a silver chain. New moon, new beginnings. Something like that. Something that I desperately needed. When we realized it was gone, vacuumed up that morning, I had cried, and cried hard. “I can’t believe I did this. I always do this.” I was so unforgivably angry that I had lost my new beginning to old habits, a well-exercised muscle of carelessness. At first, this idea had bordered on being a joke: I guess we could call them, see if we could look.

And so here we sat, like grasshoppers or some other idling animal. Our accomplice was running out of steam. My mom was circling back, searching and re-searching through the same currents of muck, other people’s needles and haystacks, no way of telling which was which. My glove had ripped. I went to grab another one, and was met with exhausted eyes.

“Just five more minutes. Please.” 

A beat, and then our new friend: “Sentimental value?” 

I nodded. “Sentimental value.” And so we kept going.