The toolbox was on the floor under a table of drill bits, priced with a strip of masking tape that read $12 in ballpoint. Wooden, the old kind. A long open tray with a dowel handle running the length of it. The handle was the part worth holding. Someone had worn it smooth on the underside, where four fingers close, and left it rough along the top.
Burned into the end of the handle, into the grain itself, were three letters. A brand, not ink. E, then a gap, then K, then a smaller mark that might have been a period or a slip of the iron. It had gone in deep and scorched a little past the lines, the way a hot tool does when the hand holding it is sure of the claim.
You burn your initials into a thing when you share a shop with other men. It is a fence, not a decoration. It says this one is mine, don’t reach for it in the dark. It says there was a wall of pegboard once, and a row of benches, and enough hands passing through that a claim had to be made in the wood where it couldn’t be argued with.
The tools were gone. Sold off, one at a time, to other tables and other boxes. What sat in it now was somebody’s leftovers — a bent tack hammer, a jar of drywall screws, a spool of picture wire gone stiff. None of it his.
I paid the twelve dollars. The masking tape came off clean at first, then it wouldn’t. Half of it stayed stuck to the wood.
The letters will answer to my hand now, and my hand is not an E or a K. The scorch is still darker than the grain around it. It has not faded at all.