The Woman Who Only Did the Books

“He said there’s no place for me,” I told Hannah. “I don’t think a lawyer can fix that. I think I have to go and find the place.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’m going to work in the morning.”

“You go to work every morning.”

“Not through the front door,” I said.

After we hung up I went to the hook by the kitchen door where the keys hang. Mine was on a ring with a brass tag stamped with a 3. Harold had given it to me my first week. Gary had number 1, Steve had 2, Ozzie had 4. In twenty-one years I had only ever used mine on the alley door, the one that opens straight into the office.

It fit the front, too. I had just never had a reason.

I set the alarm for half past five and laid out a plaid shirt.

I was on the sidewalk at twenty minutes to seven with my hair tied back. It was dark yet, and thirty-four degrees by the bank sign, and the wind was coming straight down Main Street out of the northwest, the way it does from October to April.

I had my key out before I saw that the lights were already on.

Ozzie was behind the counter with the coffee made.

Ozzie is seventy. He started sweeping floors for Harold the summer he was fifteen and never found a reason to leave. He is a narrow man with a voice like a gate hinge, and he has worn the same canvas shop apron every working day of his life. He looked at me through the glass, and then he looked at the lock, and he did not come around to open it.

He was going to let me do it.

The key turned hard. That lock has needed graphite for years. Then the bolt went over, and the bell rang above my head, and I was standing on the wood floor at the front end of my own store, for the first time as anything but a woman passing through to the office.

“Morning, Jan,” Ozzie said.

“Morning, Ozzie.”

“Walls in this building are bead board,” he said. “A man hears things.”

“I suppose he does.”

“I suppose.” He reached under the counter and came up with something folded square, and he set it beside the old register. “I took it home Saturday and washed it. Ironed it, which he never did. I didn’t know what for. Now I guess I do.”

It was Steve’s apron.

Tan canvas gone soft as flannel, with the store name stitched across the bib in red thread and a scorch on the hem from the time he leaned against the wood stove display. I had not seen it since the Friday before he died. I had thought about asking for it and had not known who to ask.

I could not pick it up right away. Ozzie found something to do with the coffee filters.

When I did put it on, I had to wrap the strings twice around and tie them in front. Steve was a big man. The bib came up nearly to my collarbone.

And there was something in the pocket.

His tape measure, the twelve-footer. A carpenter’s pencil sharpened with a jackknife. And the little spiral pad he called the want list, where he wrote down anything a customer asked for that we did not have, so he could carry it back to me to order.