The Empty Seat That Cost Everything

What I Actually Do For This Family

To understand why I did not make a scene, you have to understand what I had already decided about scenes a long time before that wedding.

Five years ago, my father had a heart attack behind the counter at Voss Hardware and Feed, the store his own father built out of a Quonset hut on the edge of Cross Creek in 1968. I was twenty six, three years out of Purdue with an accounting degree and a job at a firm in Fort Wayne I actually liked. I came home for what I told my boss would be two weeks to help my mother get the store’s books in order while my father recovered.

I never really left.

The store had been run on index cards and my father’s memory for thirty years, which worked fine until the year he was in a hospital bed and the memory was full of morphine instead of vendor terms. I opened up QuickBooks on a laptop at the kitchen table and started untangling it, and somewhere in that untangling I became, without anyone ever saying it out loud, the person who ran Voss Hardware and Feed.

I do the books. I run payroll for our four employees, the three part timers and the one full time yard man, on the fifteenth and the last day of every month. I place the seasonal orders with the feed distributor before harvest and before the first hard frost, because if you order fertilizer and rock salt late in this part of Indiana, you simply do not get it in time. I renew the store’s general liability and workers’ compensation policy every October first, because a hardware store with a forklift and a loading dock cannot legally operate without one, and my father has never once logged into the insurance portal himself.

When the bank required a personal guarantor on the store’s line of credit after his heart attack, because his credit had taken a hit from missed payments during his recovery, I was the one who signed. I was twenty six and it seemed like the only thing I could do that would actually help instead of just feeling bad.