The Room Over Haskins Hardware
The stairs were inside a narrow door next to the store window. They were steep and wooden, painted gray long ago, worn pale in the middle of each step.
At the top was one room, maybe twelve feet by fourteen. Two tall windows looked down on Main Street, with a radiator under each one and a small sink in the corner.
The floor was oak, like my desk. It had been swept. Somebody had been coming up here to sweep. There was no dust on the windowsills either.
On the wall by the window, on a single nail, hung a calendar from a seed company. The pages had gone soft and brown. It was turned to October, and the year was 1998.
In the square for the fourteenth, somebody had written in small, slanted pencil, “Walt dentist 2:30.” On the twenty-second, “Pay Kramer.” The thirtieth was empty.
Walt was standing in the doorway with his hands in his apron pockets. He saw me looking.
“That was June’s office,” he said. “My wife. She kept the books for the store up here for twenty-two years. She said she couldn’t add with me talking.”
I said I was sorry, because I could see it in his face before he said the rest.
“She went in November of ’98,” he said. “Cancer. It was fast. I came up after the funeral to get the ledger, and I saw that, and I couldn’t take it down.”
He said it plainly, the way men his age say things. Then he cleared his throat and kicked the radiator once, gently, with the toe of his boot.
“This one knocks,” he said. “You’ll get used to it. There’s still an internet line from when the insurance man rented it in 2010.”
I asked how much. “A hundred seventy-five,” he said. “Heat’s included. You pay your own internet.”
I would have paid twice that. I told him I would take it. Then I asked him, carefully, whether he would mind if I left the calendar up.
He looked at me a long moment. “I’d mind if you took it down,” he said.
I called the telephone co-op that afternoon. The old line was still live, and they could have me hooked up by Friday. Then I called the clinic’s compliance officer.
She wanted pictures again. The door, the lock, the window, the screen angle. She said the room was fine as long as I locked it every time I left, even to run downstairs.
Then I had to get the desk there.
My car is a Corolla. The only truck in the family was Travis’s, and I was not going to ask him for the loan of it to move my desk out of his house.
Our house is a block off Main. Haskins Hardware is six blocks south, down Main Street, past the café and the bank and the old theater that shows second-run pictures on weekends.
I decided I would roll it. Travis had an old hand truck in the garage. I had watched him move the deep freeze with it, so I figured it could move a school desk.