I still think about him

My sister's garage door started going up about a foot and then stopping, and she'd been living with it that way a month before she said anything to me. I had it apart on a Saturday in June. One of the torsion springs had a wrap broken out of it. The Home Depot on Bell had the wrong length and a place off Cave Creek had the right one, so between the driving and the winding bars it ate most of the day. By the time I had the door balanced I was kneeling on a flattened box, because you can't put a knee down on that driveway in June.

The email came in that afternoon while I was putting the tools up.

There's a guy named Rinker who runs the reunion for the ship. He's been doing it fifteen years or so. He keeps everybody in a spreadsheet, and instead of writing an actual email he just sends the spreadsheet, so you open it on your phone and you're looking at columns. Last known city, and one he labeled STATUS. Most of the rows say ACTIVE. Some say NO CONTACT, which only means a guy moved and didn't tell anybody.

Row forty-one said Vanek, Paul, Erie PA, and the status cell said DECEASED 2019.

He died in 2019.

I sat at my sister's table a while and she asked did I want a sandwich. I said sure. She put tomato on it, which I don't eat, and I ate the whole thing anyway.

We were on the Hayler together, ninety-five to ninety-eight. He was an electrician. I was on the mechanical side. In that plant it doesn't matter much, so the two of us stood watch in Central for three years, six hours at a stretch in a compartment about the size of a laundry room with the module screaming on the other side of the bulkhead. He'd tap the glass on number two and look over and I'd know he wanted coffee.

He talked about Lake Erie the way guys from there do. He had an '89 Ranger. The tailgate wouldn't latch so he ran a bungee across it, and he never fixed it the whole time I knew him. In the yard period we'd drive down to Nags Head on a Saturday because in February there's nobody on it. Room was thirty-one dollars off season.

Nothing written down. No pictures. If anybody from the division was going ashore in a port, we didn't. He'd say he went up to see his cousin in Newport News, and he did have a cousin in Newport News, so that part was easy.

It started in the yard period and it went on the rest of the time we were on there. Afterward he'd sit on the end of the bed putting his socks on, talking about the truck.

Back then it went fast. There was a yeoman on the Hayler in ninety-six who was off the ship by that Friday, and what I remember is nobody said anything at quarters. They read the plan of the day and we went to work. I had four years in and a plan for twenty.

He gave me a pair of Klein side cutters in ninety-seven because I kept losing mine. He scratched VANEK into the handle with a scribe, the way everybody did so their stuff wouldn't walk.

His enlistment was up in ninety-eight and he didn't ship over. Somebody his dad knew had a spot for him at a plant outside Erie, making bearings, and the money was better than mine was ever going to be. I had orders to San Diego anyway.

Last I saw him was the lot by Gate 3. He put his bag in the bed and hooked the bungee over the tailgate. We shook hands. He said I was going to hate the traffic out there. I said probably. Neither one of us brought up anything after that.

He called me one time, 2001, late. He'd had a few. We talked about the LM2500 for about twenty minutes. He said Karen was good. I said good. Then there was a long piece where neither of us said anything and I could hear a TV going somewhere behind him, and then he said all right, and I said all right.

The obituary's still up on the funeral home's site. There's a picture of him at maybe forty. He'd gotten heavier. Same haircut. It doesn't say what happened. It says he passed at home, and it asks for donations to the hospital foundation instead of flowers.

Survived by his wife Karen and the two kids. The daughter's a nurse in Pittsburgh. He'd been at the plant since ninety-nine.

Rinker's reunion is San Diego in October. The email says family welcome, and they mean widows, they've had two or three come the last few years and they sit them up front at the dinner. Rinker said Karen's coming. I haven't answered him. He's sent it twice, and the second time he put my name in the subject line.

My sister's lived eight minutes from me for eleven years, off 19th. I go over Sundays. In July she asked was something going on with me and I told her it was the heat, and she took that, because it was a hundred and fifteen for nine days straight and that's what everybody was saying to everybody. She doesn't know his name.

The obituary page has a guest book on it. People from the plant wrote in it. One woman put a whole story in there about him fixing her car in the lot in the rain and not letting her pay him for it. There's a box at the bottom where you put your name and your city and then your message, and I had it open on the laptop with my sister's AC cycling on and off in the other room.

I typed we served together. It wants your city under the name.