The Woman Who Only Did the Books

“Seven o’clock,” I said. “Front door. It’s harvest, and eight men asked me today where you were, and I am not going to keep telling them you’ll be along.”

He folded the page in half, and in half again, and put it in his shirt pocket behind his glasses. Then he took the envelope out of his coat, the same one, gone soft at the corners from being carried, and he tore it across and dropped it in the wastebasket under the register.

“Seven,” he said.

The lights were on when I got there Monday.

It was a quarter to seven and still raining. Through the glass I could see Ozzie at the coffeepot, and beside him a big man in a canvas apron, unlocking the register.

The front door was already open. I used my key anyway, the one I cut, just to feel it turn.

“Morning, Gary.”

“Morning.”

With Gary, I would have taken that and called it settled. But at seven the regulars came in, the way they do on a rain day when nobody can get in the field. Walt and his son, the two Lund brothers, Kyle, a half dozen more, all standing around the coffeepot by the wood stove display with their caps pushed back.

Gary came out from behind the counter and stood in front of them. He had his hands in his apron pockets. I thought he was going to talk about the rain.

“I want to say something, and I want you to hear it from me and not at the elevator,” he said. “Three weeks ago I told Jan there wasn’t a place for her in this store. I offered her five thousand dollars for Steve’s half and told her to clear out her desk.”

Nobody moved. A hardware store full of farmers can be the quietest place on earth.

“She showed me the books Saturday. It’s worth better than forty times that. I didn’t know, and I should have, and that’s on me. She’s been opening this door at seven every morning while I came in the back at eight like a hired man.” He cleared his throat. “She’s my partner. Has been since Dad signed the papers. If you need something, ask her. She knows where it is better than I do.”

It was Walt who finally spoke.

“Well, Gary,” he said, “that was a dumb thing to do.”

“It was.”

“Your dad would have skinned you.”

“He would.”

Walt nodded, satisfied, and held out his cup. “Is there any more of this coffee, Jan, or do I have to ask your partner?”

I poured it. My hand was not quite steady. Gary went back behind the counter and stood at the far end from me. After a while a man came in wanting a fitting for his pressure tank, and Gary started to answer him and stopped.

“Third aisle,” he said to me. “Is that right? Third?”

“Second,” I said. “We moved them in March.”

“Second,” he told the man.

It was not easy after that. I would be lying if I said so, and I have tried not to lie to you.

Gary and I are not alike. He thinks I order too much. I think he gives away too much glass cutting. Neither of us is Steve, and some days the whole store leaned toward the place where he used to stand, the way a table leans on a short leg.

But he opened on time. Every day. He started coming in the front.