He glanced toward the trailer.
“Sold it.”
I stared.
“Why?”
He sighed.
“Kaylee needs money for dance.”
For a moment, I couldn’t speak.
Then I asked whether we could keep it and find another way.
Dad placed a hand on my shoulder.
“Hollis, your sister has a real opportunity here.”
I looked toward the machine.
Its chrome front reflected the afternoon sunlight.
The wooden panels were worn, but I recognized every scratch.
Dad continued.
“That thing just sits in the garage.”
I swallowed.
“But it was Grandpa’s.”
He nodded.
“And now it’ll belong to somebody who actually uses it.”
I watched the trailer disappear down our street.
For a long time afterward, I could still picture the jukebox moving away beneath the straps.
Kaylee continued dancing for several years.
Then she stopped because she wanted to concentrate on other interests.
I never blamed her for that.
Children change their minds.
It’s normal.
What I couldn’t understand was why the things that mattered to me were always considered expendable when Kaylee wanted something else.
My parents weren’t terrible people.
Dad, Dale Mercer, worked at the transmission plant for more than thirty years.
He rarely missed a shift.
Mom, Connie, ran a small hair salon from the front room of our house.
They worked hard.
Paid their bills.
And did their best to give us a comfortable childhood.
But there was an imbalance nobody wanted to acknowledge.
When Kaylee needed something, everyone adjusted.
When I wanted something, I was expected to understand why it wasn’t practical.
Kaylee received a used Jeep for her sixteenth birthday.
I learned to drive in Grandpa’s old Buick, whose driver’s door could only be opened from the inside.
When I turned eighteen, my birthday dinner was moved because Kaylee needed to shop for a dress for a school event.
We ate at a chain restaurant on a Tuesday.
Kaylee spent most of the meal looking at photographs of dresses on her phone.
Dad didn’t seem to notice.
When I completed my appliance repair program at Ivy Tech, Mom baked a sheet cake.
Dad congratulated me between checking racing results on television.
I was proud of finishing the program.
I had worked hard.
Learned electrical diagnostics.
Refrigeration systems.
Mechanical repair.
Customer service.
And everything necessary to build a career doing work people genuinely needed.
But my family treated it as ordinary.
Then Kaylee passed her real estate licensing exam.
Mom and Dad rented a private room at the local lodge.
They invited relatives.
Ordered catering.
And Dad gave a speech.
He called Kaylee the first true professional in the family.
I remember standing near the back of the room wearing my work polo.
I’d come directly from a service call.
I was holding a paper plate and trying to smile.
Dad wasn’t deliberately trying to embarrass me.
At least, I don’t think he was.
He simply seemed unable to recognize that fixing a family’s refrigerator was also professional work.
That people depended on my knowledge.
That I had certifications.
Insurance.
Customers.
And responsibilities.
I didn’t argue.
I rarely did.
Instead, I worked.
Over time, I developed a reputation for being dependable.
I showed up when I said I would.
Explained repairs clearly.
Charged fairly.
And tried to leave every customer’s house cleaner than I’d found it.
People remembered.
They recommended me.
And eventually, I had enough regular work to purchase my own service van with a liftgate.
It wasn’t fancy.
But it could carry a washing machine without requiring three people and a prayer.
I loved that van.
I also kept a spiral notebook inside it.
The notebook had nothing to do with ordinary appliance repairs.
It was for music.
Whenever I repaired an old record player, radio, or stereo system, I wrote down the first song the owner played after it was working again.
The date.
The customer’s name.
The song.
It began when I was twenty.
An older woman hired me to repair a turntable that had belonged to her husband.
When I finished, she placed a record on it.
The first notes began playing.
She closed her eyes and started crying.
I stood quietly beside the cabinet.
Afterward, she told me it had been her husband’s favorite song.
I wrote it down that evening.
I didn’t want to forget.
Over the years, the notebook filled with names and songs.
Elvis Presley.
Bob Seger.
Patsy Cline.
Frank Sinatra.
One man played the Chicken Dance.
I wrote that down too.
The point wasn’t musical taste.
It was remembering that a machine could hold something much more important than its market value.
And that’s why, when Dad’s sixtieth birthday approached, I decided to find Grandpa’s jukebox.
I wanted to give him something meaningful.
Something connected to his father.
To Mom.
To their wedding.
To a time when Augie’s had been the center of so many family memories.
Finding the machine took months.
I had almost nothing to go on.
A flatbed trailer.
An eleven-hundred-dollar sale.
A man wearing a seed-company cap.
And the vague memory that he’d come from somewhere north of Kokomo.
I asked Dad once who had bought it.
He shrugged.
“Some guy from the classifieds.”
Then he changed the subject.
So I began asking around.
I contacted antique jukebox collectors.
Repair shops.
Secondhand equipment dealers.
I joined online groups where people discussed old Seeburg machines with the seriousness other men reserved for restoring vintage automobiles.
I found an old photograph of Augie’s in a newspaper archive.
There was the jukebox.
Standing beside the green door.
I posted the picture in several collector groups.
“Looking for this exact machine, sold from Kokomo around 2006.”
For months, nothing happened.
I received offers for similar models.
Machines in better condition.
Machines in worse condition.
Some people insisted the original was probably gone forever.
I almost believed them.
Then a woman from Tipton contacted me.
Her neighbor had passed away.
His son was clearing out a pole barn.
There was an old jukebox beneath a tarp, and she thought it looked like the one in my photograph.
She sent me a picture.
I opened it while sitting in my service van outside a customer’s house.
The photograph was blurry.
The chrome looked cloudy.
The cabinet was covered in dust.
But on one side was a faded sticker.
A white oval with black letters.
AUGIE’S.
I stared at it.
Grandpa had placed those stickers on everything.
Toolboxes.
Storage bins.
Even his old lunchbox.
I recognized it immediately.
I called the woman.
Then drove to Tipton that weekend.
The jukebox stood in the back corner of a pole barn.
A riding mower was parked beside it.
Someone had stacked paint cans on top.
The cabinet smelled musty.
The selector mechanism was stuck.
Several lights were missing.
But the original identification plate matched the model I remembered.
And Grandpa’s sticker was still there.
The owner’s son asked five hundred dollars.
I explained the repairs it needed.
He agreed to four hundred.
We loaded the machine into my van.
On the drive home, I kept glancing toward the rearview mirror.
I was thirty years old.
Driving through Indiana with a machine that hadn’t worked in years.
And I felt like the eleven-year-old boy standing in our driveway watching it disappear.
Only this time, I was bringing it home.
I rented a small storage unit with access to electricity and enough room to work.