The Room Over Haskins Hardware
So I took it, in both hands. I put it in the drawer of my grandfather’s desk, the one that sticks unless you lift it just so, and I lifted it just so.
At the door, Travis turned and looked at the calendar on the nail. He read the pencil in the squares. Walt dentist. Pay Kramer.
“Nineteen ninety-eight,” he said.
“It was June Haskins’s office,” I told him. “She kept the books for the store. Walt never took it down.”
He went down the stairs, and I heard him stop at the counter. “Mr. Haskins,” he said. “Thank you for helping my wife.”
And I heard Walt say, “She did most of it, son.”
When I came home at five, the legal pad was gone from the kitchen drawer. I found it later in the burn barrel behind the garage, with the rest of the week’s paper.
Denise came for Sunday dinner with a pie and a shoebox. After the dishes, she opened the box on the coffee table and showed Travis thirty-one years of receipts in Ron’s handwriting.
Travis read every one. It took almost an hour, and nobody hurried him. Then he put the lid back on, very gently, and handed it to his mother, and said, “I’m sorry, Mom.”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” she said. “You came around. Your father never did.” Then she cut the pie.
I think it was the first time Travis ever heard his mother say a hard thing about his father. I think it was the first time she had said it out loud to anyone.
I paid Walt $175 on November first, “November rent” on the memo line. He took it this time. Then he went in the back and came out with a brass screw.
“For the drawer,” he said. “Your grandpa used the wrong size. That’s why it sticks.”
I put it in that afternoon. The drawer has not stuck since. I almost miss it.
People on Main Street still talk about the morning the desk went by.
The man from church told me he thought I was moving out, and he said a prayer for Travis right there in front of the café.
I told him that was kind, and that it worked.
I still work in the room over Haskins Hardware. It has been a year. The radiator still knocks.
The trucks still go by in harvest, and the school buses, and the Lions Club lights in December.
June’s calendar is still on the nail, October 1998. I dust it on Fridays.
Walt came up once and saw me doing it, and stood in the door a minute, and went back down. That was enough.
The house on Third Street is in both our names now. Travis did that himself in the spring, without my asking. He said a house you pay for together ought to say so.
And every Friday at noon, I hear the street door open at the bottom of the stairs. The first step, and the second, and no pause anymore. He comes all the way up and knocks.
Then my husband sits on June Haskins’s windowsill with two loose-meat sandwiches from the café, and we eat lunch above Main Street, and we talk about anything at all, including the money.