Then came a collection of Mad magazines. (Okay, fair enough, that was pretty good, even if the final fold-over page was already done, on every single one.)
And lastly, strangely—what was this?
What the hell was this?
Were these people having a laugh?
Because there, at the very bottom of the box, keeping the foundations together, was a calendar, and it was titled Men Who Changed the World. Was Michael Dunbar to choose a new father figure here?
Sure, he could go straight to January and John F. Kennedy.
Or April: Emil Zátopek.
May: William Shakespeare.
July: Ferdinand Magellan.
September: Albert Einstein.
Or December—where the page turned to a brief history and the work of a small, broken-nosed man, who would become, through time, everything the murderer-to-be admired.
Of course it was Michelangelo.
The fourth Buonarroti.
* * *
—
The od
dest part about the calendar wasn’t so much the contents but the fact that it was outdated; it was last year’s. It most likely was just there to give added support to the box, and clearly it was well used: when each page opened to a photo or sketch of the man of the month, the dates were often scrawled with events, or things to do.
February 4: Car registration due.
March 19: Maria M.—Birthday.
May 27: Dinner with Walt.
Whoever owned the calendar had dinner with Walt on the last Friday of every month.
* * *
—
Now a small note about Adelle Dunbar, the red-rimmed receptionist:
She was a practical woman.
When Michael showed her the box of Lego and the calendar, she frowned and tilted her glasses. “Is that calendar…used?”
“Yep.” Suddenly there was a kind of pleasure in it. “Can I keep it?”
“But it’s last year’s—here, give us a look.” She flipped through the pages. She didn’t overreact. It may have crossed her mind to march down to the woman responsible for sending this charity shitbox, but she didn’t. She swallowed the glint of anger. She packed it into her prim-and-proper voice and, like her son, moved on. “You think there’s a calendar of women who changed the world?”
The boy was at a loss. “I don’t know.”
“Well, do you think there should be?”