The Key My Husband Forgot I Had

I am not saying it to be bitter. I am saying it because it matters to what happened next. Wayne Crandall owned that store for twenty-six years and I do not believe he could have found a box of wood screws in it without a map.

The square was nearly empty when I pulled in. The store closes at 5:30 and it was a quarter till six. Hank’s old Ford was gone from its spot by the alley. The lights were off, all but the one tube over the paint counter that we always left burning so the deputies could see in.

I parked out front, in the same space I had parked in ten thousand times.

Wayne had never changed the locks. I knew he had not, because changing a lock costs sixty dollars and a phone call, and Wayne did not spend money or make phone calls when he believed a thing was already handled. He had an envelope with a number written on the flap. In his mind that was the end of it.

The key turned the way it always had, with a little hitch and then a give.

The bell over the door rang once.

I stood there on the mat and breathed. If you have never been alone in an old hardware store after closing, I do not know how to tell you what it smells like. Fertilizer and cut pine. Machine oil. Rope. The sweet dusty smell of bird seed. A little bit of the popcorn we ran on Saturdays. It smells like every problem anybody ever had, along with the thing that fixes it.

I want to be very plain about what I did in there, because there has been talk since.

I did not go near the register. I did not go in the office. I did not open the safe, though the combination was my own mother’s birthday and it still is. I did not take one washer, one receipt book, one sheet of paper. Everything in that building belonged to Wayne. A judge had said so forty minutes earlier, and I had said thank you.

I walked the aisles. That is all.

I walked aisle one, the paint, where I had mixed the yellow for half the kitchens in the county. I walked aisle four, the fasteners, where Hank and I had spent the whole winter of 2009 relabeling every drawer by hand. I walked aisle nine in the near dark, the plumbing, and I did not need a light. I knew it by the floorboards. There is one that gives a little right in front of the copper fittings, and one that squeaks at the couplings, and I knew them the way you know the stairs in the house you grew up in.

I put my hand on the bins as I went by. I suppose I was saying goodbye. I had raised a daughter in that store. Kim did her homework on an overturned bucket behind the counter from first grade through twelfth. She learned her fractions off a tape measure.

Then I went behind the counter.

My apron was on its nail by the key machine, where it had hung since March because nobody had thought to take it down. Green canvas, gone soft as flannel. My name stitched over the pocket in white thread. Earl’s wife had done the stitching herself.