The Room Over Haskins Hardware
I did not look at them. I did not want anybody to think this was about them, or about Travis. I was a woman moving a desk. That was all it was supposed to be.
Then I looked up and saw Walt.
He was coming up the sidewalk from the store, three blocks down, in his red apron and his plaid shirt, his white hair bright in the sun. Walt does not walk fast. But he was not stopping either.
He did not call out or wave. When he got to me, he went to the far end of the desk, bent down, and took hold of it under the top.
“Ready?” he said.
I said he shouldn’t. I said he was seventy-four. He looked at me with his hands already on the oak.
“I carried bigger than this for June when she wanted the piano moved upstairs,” he said. “Twice, because she changed her mind. Lift on three.”
So we lifted on three, and we carried my grandfather’s school desk down Main Street together, one of us at each end, side by side, past the insurance office and the old theater.
People stopped. Two women on the corner by the drugstore. A man at the pumps across the street. The mail carrier, who stood holding a bundle of letters until we passed.
Nobody said anything to us. Walt said “Morning” to each of them, in the same voice he uses at the counter. They said “Morning, Walt” back, and watched us all the way to the store.
The stairs were the hardest part. We tipped the desk on end and walked it up one step at a time, Walt above and me below. Halfway up, Walt stopped to rest.
“Your grandpa built this?” he asked.
“Refinished it,” I said. “It came out of the Pleasant Ridge school. He bought it at the auction in 1961.”
“Eight dollars,” Walt said.
I nearly dropped my end. He laughed, low, the first time I had ever heard him laugh.
“I was at that auction,” he said. “I was nine. My dad bought the flagpole. Your grandpa outbid Hank Miller on this desk, and Hank was sore about it for a month.”
“That drawer still stick?” he asked. I said it did, unless you lift it just so. “Same as it did in ’61,” he said. “Come on. We’re almost there.”
We set it under the left window, facing the street. Walt stood back and looked at it. Then he looked at June’s calendar, and out the window at Main Street.
I got out the check I had already written, $175, “October rent” on the memo line, because I wanted to do everything properly. He would not take it.
“You’ll pay starting November,” he said. “This month’s half gone, and you carried your own desk. That’s worth something.”
I argued. He listened all the way through, the way he listens to farmers explain what they need when they don’t know the name of the part.
“June wouldn’t have charged you this month,” he said finally. “She’d have brought you a cup of coffee and asked about your people. So I’m not charging you either.”
Then he went down to open the store. I sat at my grandfather’s desk in June Haskins’s office, logged in at eight fifty-two, and cried for about four minutes before my first call.