The Pencil Marks on My Pantry Door
“No, ma’am,” Josh said. He was down on one knee already, looking at the label.
“Twenty-four hundred dollars. Don was laid off that winter. Nine weeks.” I waited until I had the rest. “I cooked at the grade school. I paid on that furnace seventy-five dollars a month. Out of my check. Thirty-two payments.”
“Look on the side.”
Josh leaned around. There is a piece of paper taped to the sheet metal there, gone brown as a paper sack, the tape gone brown with it. It is a receipt from the heating company. Across it, in blue ballpoint, somebody in their office wrote Paid In Full and the date, September 14, 1998.
“Now I’ll tell you the truth about it,” I said. “It is thirty years old. It is on borrowed time. Whoever lives here will buy a furnace inside of five years, and they are not twenty-four hundred dollars anymore.”
I could not take them down to the basement. I have not been down those stairs since the third of August. So I stood at the top with both hands on the rail and called down to them where to look.
“Northwest corner. Behind the shelves.”
“There’s a stain on the floor,” Josh called up.
“It takes water. Not every year. A wet spring, when the Blue comes up. An inch. Maybe two.”
“Is there a sump?”
“Don put one in. In 2001. It works. You have to check it in March. A person ought to know what she’s buying.”
Harriet came to the back door about then.
Harriet Novak has lived across the alley from me since 1989. She is seventy-six and built like a fence post, and she is the reason I am alive. I will come to that.
She had a pan of apple bars with a dish towel over it, which was her excuse. Her real reason was the car at my curb with the realty name on the door.
She came in without knocking, the way she always has. She looked at the young people. She looked at Ms. Dunning’s blazer. Then she looked at the kitchen table, where that flyer was lying face up beside the sugar bowl.
She set the pan on the counter very gently.
“Maxine,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m showing the house.”
“Maxine. Did you know about that sign out front?”
“I do now.”
Harriet had seen that sign every day for nine days. She told me later she had cried over it at her sink. She thought Kim and I had settled it between us up in Lincoln, and she had not had the heart to bring it up on my first night home.
She looked at me a long second, patted the dish towel, and went back out across the alley.
I did not know until an hour later that she walked straight into her own kitchen and telephoned my daughter at work. She said, “Kim, you had better get in your car and come see who is standing in your mother’s kitchen.” Then she hung up.
It is forty miles from Lincoln to Beatrice, straight down Highway 77.
Then we came back around to the kitchen, and I showed them the last thing, which I had been saving without knowing I was saving it.
The pantry is to the left of the icebox. It has a plain flat door, painted white. I have painted that door four times in forty-four years.
I have never once painted the inside edge.
“Open that,” I said.