THE ZIPPO LIGHTER

"For years Michael carried the lighter in his pocket wherever we went."

Early in our marriage, when we lived in a ramshackle house on the wrong side of 10th Street in Lafayette, Indiana, Michael and I would unfold lawn chairs on the roof and sit to watch the sunset. Unseen people were always in the streets, their voices drunk and loud, their words punctuated with f-bombs and the shatter of thrown glass bottles.

But one late-summer night, the activity was noticeably subdued. It was quiet enough that we could hear the breeze rustling the dry oak leaves and footsteps crunching on the loose gravel and bottle caps. Then, clearly: the hollow clink of a metal lighter’s top being flipped open, the scraping wheel, the flint spark. Michael sat up straight, his eyes wide, straining to listen. “That sound,” he said. “I haven’t heard it in so long. It reminds me so much of my childhood.”

His father had grown up in a mountain holler—three-room house, 10 kids, no running water. His mother hadn’t finished high school. Before Michael was born, they left the coal mines of Appalachia for northwest Indiana, to work in the Bethlehem Steel mills and Wonder Bread factory, chase a better life. As a boy, Michael owned two pairs of pants, so he’d always have one pair clean for school while his mother washed and patched the other. He once asked his father if they were poor. “No, we’re not poor,” his father said, touching the lighter flame to a cigarette. “We don’t have money, but we got a boy. You can’t be poor if you got a boy.”

Not long after the quiet evening on the roof, I selected a brass Zippo from a case of lighters and had it engraved KAI, my nickname for him. Our nicknames were part of our secret language, begun when we were English majors and aspiring writers and refined over nearly three decades. We used our given names only when mentioning each other to someone else. Alone together, we defaulted to “Honey,” “Hon,” “Love.” But in our written relationship, where the heart of our marriage lived—in letters, on sticky notes stuck to mirrors or inside cabinet doors, on scraps of paper folded and tucked in wallets and lunch bags—we were Lee and Kai.

For years Michael carried the lighter in his pocket wherever we went. Sitting at a picnic table at the frozen-custard stand at Columbian Park, browsing Von’s record and book shop, hiking at Turkey Run State Park. Almost absently, he’d flick open the top, thumb the wheel, close the lid on the flame. Stare at it as if he didn’t see it.

One night, we rushed back into a bar when he realized he’d left the lighter behind. Our table had already been cleared, so Michael made a beeline for our waitress, tears pooling in his eyes, his hands out beseeching as he begged her to help him find it. She looked at him for long seconds, silent and straight-faced. Then, without a word, without breaking eye contact, she reached her right hand into her apron pocket, slowly removed the Zippo and placed it in his open palm. 

He stopped carrying the lighter then, afraid to lose it forever. After he died, just five months after a surprise cancer diagnosis, I found it in his dresser box among his cufflinks, silver collar stays, gold tie clip. It was safe in its original box with a sticky note from me and a creased paper fortune from a fortune cookie: “Hardly anyone knows how much is gained by ignoring the future.”

—Helene Kiser

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Helene Kiser writes about love, family and grief. A former poet, she is currently working on a memoir. Her work has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.