The Woman Who Only Did the Books

He stood there a while longer. Then he picked up his envelope, put on his cap, and went out the back way, and I heard his pickup start in the alley.

I sat with the charge tickets until my hands quit shaking. Then I finished posting them, because it was Tuesday, and on Tuesday the tickets get posted.

I should explain about the half.

Meyer Hardware has been on the main street of our town since 1958. If you have never been to southwest Minnesota, picture a street four blocks long with a grain elevator at one end and a water tower at the other, and wind the whole way between. Corn and soybeans run to the edge of town in every direction. Steve’s grandfather opened the store. Steve’s father, Harold, ran it for forty years and knew every farmer in the county by the sound of his truck.

When Harold retired, he split it down the middle between his two boys, and he did it on paper at his own kitchen table with all four of us sitting there. One half to Gary and Connie. One half to Steven and Janice Meyer, the both of us, with the survivor to hold it. Harold was particular about paper.

So I was not asking Gary for anything that night. My name had been on that half since Hannah was in diapers.

Gary knew that. What Gary did not know was anything else.

In twenty-one years he had never once sat down and looked at the books. It was how the three of us worked. Gary had the back room and the deliveries, the glass cutting, the screen repair, the small engines. Steve ran the counter and the customers. I did the ordering, the payables, the charge accounts, the payroll, the taxes, and the inventory count every January. Each of us trusted the other two to do what he could not stand to do himself.

Steve used to say the store had three legs and he was the one that talked.

It was the second week of October, and the trucks were lined up six deep at the elevator with beans. At home I made toast for supper and did not eat it.

Hannah called at eight from her dorm in Marshall. She was nineteen, a sophomore, and she had called every night since the funeral.

I told her. I have never been any good at keeping things from that girl. When I got to the five thousand dollars she was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped.

“That’s about what my books and fees cost,” she said. “For one year. Mom, that’s nothing. Call a lawyer. Call that man who did Grandpa Harold’s papers.”

“I could.”

“Then do it. Tonight. Leave a message.”

I had thought about it the whole drive home, and here is where I came out. A lawyer could tell Gary I owned half of that store. Gary already knew I owned half of that store. A lawyer could not make me belong in it. Letters would go back and forth all winter, and Gary and I would stop speaking, and Hannah would lose the only uncle she had left on her father’s side, and every morning of it somebody else would be opening Steve’s door.

It was also harvest. For six weeks every fall that store is the difference between a man finishing his field ahead of the rain and a man sitting in a dead combine. Since the funeral Gary had been unlocking at eight, sometimes half past. I knew because the farmers had started calling the office line at a quarter past seven, and I was the one who answered.