The Seventh Most Important Thing Read Free

pink knit hat, all of the pegs were empty.
    Feeling more and more uneasy, Arthur pounded up the stairs to his parents’ room, making the walls of the small house shake. He and his sister shared one room at the top of the stairs. His parents shared the other. Both rooms were shabby. Arthur’s family had never had a lot of money.
    The door to his parents’ room stood open. Arthur saw that the old radio his dad used to listen to ball games on was missing. The wedding picture that had always been on his parents’ wall was gone. Even the ashtray on the windowsill—the one he’d made for his dad in art class in third grade, a hideous green-and-blue swirl of clay—wasn’t there.
    —
    Arthur had been afraid this was coming. It had been three months since his dad died, although it still felt like yesterday.
    Arthur hadn’t forgotten how upset his mom had been after the funeral, how she’d gone through the kitchen like a bulldozer when they got home.
    “I don’t want anything that reminds me of Tom left in this house! Nothing! Not one damn thing!” she’d shouted, half crying, half yelling, as she threw out everything she could find in the refrigerator and cupboards: His father’s booze. Bags of corn chips. Packs of cigarettes. Cans of pork and beans. Anything that had belonged to him. Anything he’d liked.
    Only Arthur’s begging and his sister’s tears had finally stopped her from clearing out even more that night.
    And now the rest of his father’s things were gone.
    For the past couple of weeks, his mom had been hinting that it was time for them to move on. “We need to make a new start,” she’d been saying.
    But he never thought she would do something like this without giving him some warning. Had she just packed up his dad’s stuff and thrown everything out while he was at school?
    Feeling sick, he pounded back down the stairs, yanked on his shoes, and ran outside to look.
    Up and down the street, the curbs were lined with empty metal garbage cans. Some of the lids were already rolling away in the gusty November wind. Leftover bits of trash stuck to the city street.
    Arthur began to sprint, careening madly down his block and around the corner, as if he could somehow catch the garbage truck and save his father.
    That was when he noticed the old man who often came through the neighborhood on trash day with his grocery cart, looking for junk. “Got any shiny stuff for me today?” he’d holler if people were outside. “Anything valuable you don’t want?”
    Everybody called him the Junk Man. They knew he picked through their garbage whether they let him or not. He’d been collecting junk for years—as far back as Arthur could remember. Always pushing the same rusty cart down the street, and always wearing the same filthy tan coat, summer or winter.
    Arthur had seen the guy take wine bottles out of the trash and put them straight into his coat pockets. Or sometimes he’d haul away people’s discarded furniture—broken chairs, headboards, small tables—in a teetering pile in his cart. One person even spotted him sitting on a piano bench in their yard once, playing an invisible piano.
    He was a crazy old drunk, people said.
    —
    Which was why, when Arthur saw his father’s motorcycle cap perched crookedly on the Junk Man’s head, he completely lost it. He knew the Junk Man had stolen it from them. He knew the worthless trash picker had gone through their garbage, piece by piece, and picked out the best things of his father’s to take with him.
    And in that moment, all of the fury that had been building inside Arthur since his father’s death came exploding out.
    It was bad enough that his mother had thrown away his father’s things without even asking him. Bad enough that most people thought his father had thrown away his life and didn’t deserve to be remembered. Bad enough that other kids had their fathers and his dad was dead.
    But when Arthur saw the crazy Junk Man wearing the most important