The Key My Husband Forgot I Had

“I don’t have any kegs. I don’t have any nails to come in them.”

“Gene’s got buckets in the truck.”

So five old men sat on upturned feed buckets around a cold potbellied stove, and I made the coffee with a pinch of salt, and by eleven Gene and Walt had the stovepipe down and were arguing about whether it could be made to draw again.

It could. Walt had it lit by noon.

I stood behind my counter in my apron and watched them, and I thought about Earl closing my fingers over that key. I had spent twenty-six years thinking he was telling me to hold on to the building.

Friday morning the truck came from Louisville at seven. Hank and I had the fittings on the shelves by nine, every bin labeled in his square capitals, plumbing by the window where the light was good. Bev opened a ledger. Three of her twenty-two phone calls had already walked in the door and asked to set up accounts, and the fourth was Dale Pruitt’s office saying Dale would be by after lunch.

Wayne came at two.

I saw him start across the square from the far side, and so did everybody else. The Tuesday men had come back, Friday or not. Hank was at the card table truing a mower blade. Bev was at her adding machine. Mrs. Albright was at the counter with a second storm door.

He was in a golf shirt again, peach this time, and he walked like a man who has been rehearsing. He pulled my door open hard enough to rattle the butcher paper sign.

“You’ve got my people,” he said.

Nobody answered him. The stove ticked.

“I don’t have anybody, Wayne,” I said. “Ask them.”

“You came in my store Monday night. That’s trespassing. I could call the sheriff.”

“I came in to leave you the last key and my apron. They were on the counter Tuesday morning and the door was locked behind me. Did you find one thing missing?”

His mouth worked.

“Did you find one thing missing, Wayne? A washer? A dollar? You count it. I’ll wait.”

“You took Hank.”

Hank did not look up from the blade. “I give you my notice Tuesday at seven. You was at the golf course. I left it with the girl.”

“You took Bev.”

“You told the judge that store loses money,” Bev said, and punched a key on her machine. “I believed you. I got out of your way.”

“And you all.” He turned on the Tuesday men. “Forty years you sat around my stove.”

“Your daddy’s stove,” Lloyd said mildly. “Then hers. We go where the pot is, son. No offense meant.”

Wayne turned back to me. His neck had gone red to the collar. I had seen that color every time a customer asked him a question he could not answer, and he would holler “Paula” toward the back of the store.

“I own that store,” he said. “The building, the name and every stick of inventory in it. A judge said so.”

“He did,” I said. “And I said thank you. I meant it then and I mean it now. It’s all yours, Wayne. Every shelf. I wouldn’t take a nail off you.”

“Then what in the world do you think you’ve got over here? You’ve got a feed store and a card table.”

I did not raise my voice. I have never had to, in a hardware store. People lean in.