The Woman Who Only Did the Books

I should not have opened it there. I opened it there.

The last page was from that Friday. His handwriting leaned downhill, the way it always did.

Walt Jensen, 2 tank heaters, hold when they come.

5/8 fine thread nuts, we are out again.

Tell Jan she was right about ordering the heaters early. Do not tell her I said so twice.

I read it and I laughed, out loud, one time. Then I was crying in the middle of the store at ten minutes to seven with a tape measure in my hand.

Ozzie did not say a word. He came around the counter and set a cup of coffee by my elbow. Then he went back to sorting a coffee can of mixed bolts into the bins at the end of the counter, as if a woman crying by the nail bins needed about as much comment as the weather.

I have loved that old man ever since.

At seven o’clock by the clock over the paint counter, I turned the sign in the window around.

My first customer came in at four minutes past.

He was a young farmer from north of town, in a seed cap and a sweatshirt with chaff down the front, and he stopped two steps inside the door.

“Mrs. Meyer,” he said. “I was awful sorry about Steve.”

“Thank you, Kyle. What do you need?”

He looked past me for Gary, and then he held up a piece of roller chain, black with grease, about a foot of it. “Connecting link for this. Number 60. I ought to take a half link too, I guess.”

I did not know how to cut a key. I did not know one pipe fitting from another. But I had ordered every box of chain parts that had come into that building since I was twenty-six, and I knew they lived in the gray drawers under the belt rack, because I typed the labels.

I walked straight to it. Number 60 connecting links, four in the box, and the offset links beside them. I put one of each on the counter.

“You bought two connecting links last October,” I said. “Do you want a spare this time?”

He looked at me.

“It’s on your ticket,” I said. “The ninth of October, last year.”

“That’s when I broke down,” Kyle said slowly. “In the bottom forty. Give me the spare.”

I wrote it up in the carbon book, and my hand knew his account number without my looking. He went out with the bell ringing behind him.

“Well,” Ozzie said, not looking up from his bolts. “That’s one.”

There were twelve more before Gary came.

I could not help all of them. A man wanted a hydraulic hose made, and I had to call Ozzie over. But I knew where the thing was, every time. I would walk to it and put my hand on it, and if I did not understand what it was for, Ozzie would say two words down the counter and I would understand a little more.

Gary came in the back at ten minutes to eight.

I heard the alley door, and his boots, and then nothing. He would have been standing in the office, looking at my desk. Then the boots came up the aisle between the plumbing and the electrical.

He stopped at the end of the counter.

“Morning, Gary.”