The Woman Who Only Did the Books

“There is no place in this store for a woman who only did the books, Jan.”

My brother-in-law said it to the filing cabinet. He could not seem to say it to me.

It was a Tuesday, ten minutes past closing, three weeks and two days after we buried my husband. I was at the desk in the back office of Meyer Hardware with the day’s charge tickets in front of me, the same desk I had sat at for twenty-one years. Steve’s coffee cup was still on the shelf above the adding machine. I had not been able to move it.

Gary stood in the doorway with his cap in one hand and an envelope in the other.

“I’m not saying it to be ugly,” he said.

“How are you saying it?”

“I’m saying it because it’s so.” He looked at the floor, then at the calendar from the grain elevator, then at the floor again. “Steve ran the counter. Steve knew the customers. You paid the bills and I’m grateful, but a store is not a set of books. I can get a girl at the bank to do what you do, two afternoons a week.”

I was forty-seven years old. I had not been a girl at anybody’s bank in a long time.

“What’s in the envelope, Gary?”

He set it on the desk blotter, careful, the way you set down something that might spill.

“It’s a check. Five thousand dollars. For Steve’s half.”

“Our half,” I said. “Steve’s and mine.”

“For your half, then.”

I did not open it. I could see the corner of the check through the window of the envelope, his square handwriting, the store’s own account. He had written me a check out of a checkbook I balanced.

“Five thousand,” I said.

“It’s what the place can stand. You know better than anybody what’s in that account.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “There’s ten thousand and some in checking. Half of that is five. I think that’s fair, and I think Steve would say it was fair.”

I want to tell this honestly, so I will say what went through me. It was not anger first. It was a kind of dizziness, like stepping off a curb you did not know was there. This was the man who had stood up beside Steve at our wedding. He had carried one corner of the casket twenty-three days earlier. He had eaten ham buns in the basement of Our Savior’s Lutheran with his arm around my daughter.

And he thought the store was worth what was in the checkbook.

“Connie and I talked about it,” Gary said. “You’ve got Hannah’s school to think of. You’ve got the house. You don’t need to be down here every day looking at…” He stopped. “At all this.”

“At all what?”

He did not answer that.

“I’d want your things out of the office by Friday,” he said. “No hurry beyond that.”

There were a great many things I could have said. I had twenty-one years of them, filed by month.

What I said was, “Thank you, Gary.”

He let out a breath. I think he had been braced for a scene, and when he did not get one his shoulders came down two inches.

“You’ll take it, then.”

“I said thank you.” I pushed the envelope back across the blotter with one finger until it sat on his side of the desk. “I’ll keep the half.”

“Jan.”

“Good night, Gary. Tell Connie hello.”