The Saturday Book My Grandfather Kept

My hands were not steady when I opened it. Inside were thirty one years of entries in my grandfather’s blocky handwriting, one line for every Saturday the store was open. Who came. What time. What they did. For years and years, the same two initials appeared at seven in the morning, every single week, rain or heat or the year I had the flu and came anyway because I didn’t want him working the counter alone. M.I. Seven o’clock. Stocked nails, cleaned the paint mixer, stayed past close to help count the drawer.

Nolia’s initials appeared four times across three decades. Once for a school project. Twice for photographs at Christmas. Once, the year she got engaged, to ask Grandpa for the ring that had belonged to our great grandmother, which he gave her without a word of complaint, because that was the kind of man he was even to the grandchild who barely knew him.

Whitfield broke the wax seal on the second envelope and read Grandpa’s actual final will, the one he had quietly signed two years before he died, with two independent doctors present and the whole reading recorded on video specifically so it could never be called into question later. Isbell Hardware, the building and the business both, appraised at just over three hundred and ten thousand dollars. The workshop behind it, where he’d taught me to rebuild a lawnmower engine at age eleven. A small rental duplex two doors down on Main Street that brought in fourteen hundred dollars a month, money he had quietly saved rather than spent for over a decade. And an investment account, built dollar by dollar from Saturday receipts he never touched, worth just under one hundred and eighty thousand dollars.