The Account She Opened in Her Boots

The Co-op Counter

Here is what I pieced together later. Partly from Dale, partly from the Hensley boy who works the parts counter and hears everything.

The co-op in our town is a feed store, a hardware, and a gossip exchange, all under one metal roof.

The old men gather at the coffee counter in the back most mornings. They solve the world. They have solved it the same way every morning for decades.

Mrs. Alcorn went home Thursday night and told Harlan about the little girl in the show boots who signed her own name. She told it because it was the kind of thing that made a long day at a teller window worth something.

She did not say it to wound anybody. She said it the way a person tells a sweet thing at supper.

And Harlan, who is a kind old man and a terrible keeper of secrets, told it Friday morning at the coffee counter.

Not meanly. He told it the way men out here tell a thing they liked.

“Dockery’s granddaughter was in the bank yesterday. Opened her own account. Twelve years old, stood up on her toes in her show boots to sign the card. Prettiest thing you ever saw.”

Somebody said, “Dockery? That’d be Boyd’s granddaughter.”

And Harlan, God love him, said, “Must be. Renee brought her in. Her mother. Spent her own tax money on it, Edith said, because the girl’s steer check went somewhere.”

He let it sit a half second. “Hell of a thing, a mother teaching her girl to bank her own money. More of that and the world’d be straightened out.”

Boyd was sitting right there. Four feet away, with his coffee, on his stool, where he has sat three mornings a week for thirty years.