The Key My Husband Forgot I Had

“He asked me where we keep the checkbook.” She put her glasses back on. “It is in the same drawer it has been in since 1994. I let him look for it.”

Now, I had nothing for Bev to keep books on. I told her so. I had made forty-one dollars in two days.

She pulled one of the folding chairs up to the card table and took a legal pad out of her purse.

“Then we’ll start with forty-one,” she said. “I’ve started with less.”

And then she did the thing I could not have done myself. She picked up my phone, and she started dialing numbers out of her own head.

Thirty-one years of statements go through a woman’s hands, she does not need a file. She knew the office line of every contractor in three counties the way I knew aisle nine. She did not ask them for one thing. She said the same sentence every time.

“This is Bev from Crandall’s. I’m calling to let you know that Paula and Hank and I are across the square in the old feed store now. That’s all. You have a good day.”

She made twenty-two calls before lunch.

The first one through the door was Jeff, and he was not a customer. Jeff is the route man for the wholesale house up in Louisville. He has been writing my orders on Wednesdays since 2003. He came in at two with his order tablet under his arm, looked at the shelves, and took off his cap.

“Paula, I’ll be straight with you. The office won’t open an account for a business with no history. They want two years of statements.”

“I figured they would.”

“So I called my boss from the truck.” He scratched the back of his neck. “I told him I can’t vouch for a store. But I can vouch for a woman who has paid every invoice I ever wrote by the tenth of the month for twenty-two years, including the year of the ice storm. I told him if he wanted to see history, I’d send him a picture of you.”

I did not trust my voice.

“He said five thousand to start, thirty days. It isn’t much. It’ll get you plumbing fittings, fasteners, some electrical, the things people can’t wait on. I can have a truck here Friday morning.”

“Jeff, what did Wayne order this week?”

Jeff put his cap back on. “Wayne wasn’t in. The young lady asked me what a case pack was. She was real nice about it. She offered me a cinnamon roll.”

That was the other thing I started hearing about by Wednesday. Tiffany.

Wayne had put her on the register Tuesday when Hank walked out, and I want to be fair to that girl, because nobody else in this story was going to be. She had never asked for a hardware store. She had asked for a man with a nice truck and a tee time, and she had ended up alone at a counter at 6:30 in the morning with a line of plumbers.

The reports came across the square all week, and every one of them was told with a kind of wonder.

She answered the phone, “Crandall’s, this is Tiffany, hold please,” and then could not find the hold button, and hung up on the county road department twice.

A man asked her for three-eighths and she asked, “Three-eighths of what?” Which, when you think on it, is a fair question.

She sold chain by weighing it on the nail scale.