The Woman Who Only Did the Books

I went to the bearing cabinet. I knew what I would find, because I had counted it in January and I had ordered behind every sale since. There were three in the drawer. I had carried three ever since the fall Steve had to drive to Sioux Falls and back in the night for one.

I put two on the counter.

“One for the cart,” I said. “One for the shelf in your shop, so the next time it’s eleven at night you aren’t sitting in my street at half past six.”

Walt picked one up and turned it in his fingers. It spun without a sound.

“How in the world did you know that?”

“I’ve been writing down what you buy for twenty-one years, Walt. I just did it from the back.”

He laughed, a short bark, and then he quit laughing. He looked at the apron.

“That’s Steve’s.”

“Yes.”

He put his cap back on. “Where’s Gary, Jan? It’s harvest.”

“He’ll be along.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know it isn’t.”

He nodded. “And those tank heaters. I had two on hold with Steve. I don’t suppose…”

I took the want list out of the apron pocket and showed him the page. He read all three lines. He read the last one, I think, more than once.

“They came in the week of the funeral,” I said. “They’re in the back with your name on them. Go fix your cart. I’ll put it all on your ticket.”

At the door he stopped with his hand on the glass.

“He was right, you know,” Walt said. “About you being right.”

Gary came in at twenty past eight. By then eight men had been through, and every one of them had asked me where he was.

I waited until closing.

It was five o’clock and nearly dark, and the first of the rain was ticking on the front windows, a day early. Ozzie had turned the sign and was counting the drawer. Gary came up the aisle with his coat on, headed for the alley door the long way around, which he had taken to doing so as not to walk through the office.

“Gary,” I said. “Would you stay a minute?”

“I’ve got supper waiting.”

“It’s one page.”

I had it under the counter. I had run it off that afternoon between customers, and I laid it on the wood between us, beside the old register. Ozzie’s hands stopped moving in the drawer.

“What is it?”

“It’s what you never asked to see.”

He did not pick it up. He got his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and bent over it where it lay.

I had kept it plain. Four lines.

The inventory in that building, counted in January by my own hand and carried forward since, at what we paid for it and not a cent more: four hundred twenty-four thousand dollars.

What the store owed the bank: nothing. Harold had paid off the building in 1998, and Steve and I had retired the last of the operating note six years back.

What we owed the warehouse: that week’s truck, which would be paid on the tenth like every truck before it.

And at the bottom, half.

“Two hundred and twelve thousand dollars,” I said. I said it quietly, but I said it out loud, because some numbers ought to be heard in a room. “That’s Steve’s and my half of what is sitting on these shelves, Gary. That’s before the building. That’s before the charge accounts, and you know what the farmers owe us this time of year. You offered me five.”