The Key My Husband Forgot I Had

“Is it done?” Kim asked. She is a nurse in Lexington and she was whispering from a supply closet.

“It’s done.”

“What did you get, Mama?”

“The Buick. Grandma’s hutch. Six thousand dollars.”

There was a long silence. I could hear a monitor beeping somewhere behind her.

“And the store?”

“The store’s his, baby. It always was, apparently.”

“I’m going to drive down there and I am going to say some things to him.”

“No you are not. You’re going to finish your shift.” I looked around at the bare shelves and the calendar in the window, still turned to a January two years gone. “I gave the key back tonight.”

“You what? Mama, Papaw told you never to.”

“I know what he told me. I thought about it the whole way over.” I lay back on the cot. The ceiling was pressed tin, same as across the square. “I kept it twenty-six years, Kim. I figure that’s a fair try. And the key wasn’t ever the part that mattered.”

“Then what was?”

“I’ll tell you when I know for sure.”

I did not sleep much. A little after five I gave up, washed my face in the tea-colored sink, and put on a clean shirt and my good jeans. I did not have an apron. I kept reaching for the pocket of it anyway.

At 6:30 I turned on the lights and unlocked the door.

I did not have a sign. I had torn a piece of butcher paper off a roll I found in the back and written Open on it with a carpenter’s pencil, and I taped that in the window under the old calendar.

Then I stood behind the plank counter with a cup of coffee, in an empty store, and waited to find out what I was worth.

Nobody came.

Seven o’clock. I watched Hank’s Ford pull into the alley across the square. I watched the lights come on over there, one bank at a time, front to back, the way he has always done it.

Eight o’clock. A feed truck slowed down, saw the dark shelves, and drove on.

Nine. A woman I did not know tried the door of the drugstore, found it locked, and stood reading my butcher paper for a while like it was in another language. Then she left too.

I will tell you what goes through your head in a morning like that. You think, he was right. You think, maybe all I ever did was stand at a register in a building that belonged to somebody else. You think about six thousand dollars minus four hundred, and you do the arithmetic on how many months that is, and it is not many.

At ten the door opened.

Hank stood there in his red flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled twice. He is seventy-one. He started at Crandall’s at twenty-seven, sweeping up for Earl, and he has been there forty-four years. He is lean and brown and he does not waste words. I have seen him go a whole morning on six of them.

He had his own toolbox in one hand. Not the store’s. His own, the dented gray one with his initials scratched in the lid, the one that rides behind the seat of his truck.

In the other hand he had my apron, still folded in thirds.

He stood in the doorway and looked at my bare shelves for a long time. He looked at the stove and the card table and the cot I had not thought to hide.