The Hardware Store They Forged Away

The Wednesday they came for the store

Last Wednesday I locked up Halvorsen Hardware at five thirty, the way I had almost every weekday for eleven years, and I found my sister Pam and my mother waiting for me on the sidewalk out front. They were standing under the green awning with the paint that Grandpa Walt had touched up every other spring, and they were both wearing the same small smile. I have learned to be afraid of that smile. It is the one people in my family put on when they think they have finally cornered you and there is nowhere left for you to run.

“Hey, Nora,” Pam said, in a voice so sweet it made the back of my neck cold. “We need to talk.”

I want you to understand the store first, before I tell you what they did, because you cannot understand what it cost me otherwise. Halvorsen Hardware sits on the corner of Main and Second in Lindale, a town of maybe two thousand people if you count the farms out past the grain elevator. My grandfather opened it in 1961 with money he saved cutting hay and pumping gas. He sold nails by the pound out of wooden bins and he could tell you which size wood screw you needed just by looking at the hole. When I was six he used to set me on the counter next to the register and let me hand people their change. When I was nine my grandmother Elsie taught me to mix paint in the back, how to shake the can until your arm burned and the color came out even. That store is not a building to me. It is the smell of sawdust and machine oil and the little bell over the door, and it is the two people who raised me more than my own parents ever bothered to.

So when Pam said we need to talk, standing in front of that green awning, I already knew. I have known my family my whole life. I unlocked the door and let them back in.

What the family always was

I should back up and tell you what kind of family I come from, because the rest of this will not make sense if you think we were ever close.

My mother, Diane, has spent her whole life certain that the world owed her something it kept forgetting to deliver. My father, Gary, agreed with her about everything as long as it meant he did not have to think. My sister Pam is four years older than me and she inherited my mother’s certainty whole, the way some people inherit a nose. From the time we were small, the rule in our house was simple. Pam was the one who deserved things. I was the one who was lucky to be around.

Pam got the new clothes and I got hers when she was done. Pam got the driving lessons and I got told I could figure it out. When there was one good thing, one nice thing, it went to Pam, and if I ever said a word about it, my mother would look at me like I had spit on the floor and say, “Some people just don’t know how to be grateful, Nora.”