He found the gun six months after Ellen died, while he was cleaning out the cellar. It was a job he'd promised Ellen to do many times over the years, but he'd never gotten around to it. Mostly out of guilt for breaking that promise he'd set aside a weekend to brave spiders, fight cobwebs, repeatedly bump his head up against the low ceiling and finally get the job done. He sat down on Friday evening and carefully crafted a checklist for the job ahead. He spent all of Saturday and half of Sunday following his checklist and hauling all the clutter up the decaying steps of the cellar entrance, out the Bilco doors and onto a jumbled heap in his small front yard. The junkman could have it all on Monday. Finally, the only thing left was a battered, dust-covered bookshelf up against the painted stone cellar wall a few feet from the unused coal bin.

The bookshelf was there when they moved in, hauled downstairs by one of the previous owners and forgotten. He and Ellen were the third couple to own the house, and they'd forgotten it as well. All the shelves except the topmost were bare. The sole items on that shelf were half a dozen old red coffee cans. 'Hills Bros.' was the brand on each, spelled in large, white sans-serif letters. Underneath the lettering was the image of a white-bearded man, Indian…Pakistani, perhaps?… in a white turban, yellow patterned robe and sandals. He was drinking from a large white cup held between both hands.

Years earlier he'd looked in one of the cans and found heaps of mixed nails and screws. He opened each of them now as he cleaned off the shelf, looking for anything worth keeping. The first three cans were stuffed with nails, screws, nut, bolts, washers…typical basement flotsam. The fourth and fifth were filled to the brim with blue, yellow and red plastic wire connectors, twisted bits of thinly insulated copper wire, old fuses and a light switch or two. When he lifted the lid on the last can, he found something wrapped in cloth. He put the small bundle on the shelf, undid it, and discovered a snub-nosed revolver, heavily packed in grease. He stared at it for several long moments, then wrapped it up again, put it back in the coffee can, and took it up to his bedroom closet.

It was the only thing from the cellar that he kept.