The Tab on the Coffee Bench

The first week he could barely do it. He stood at the end of the bench with the register tape in his hand, and his voice came out thin as paper. “Mineral, fifty pound, twenty-two forty. Salt blocks, two.” He read each price as if it cost him blood.

The men looked at their cups. Nobody said a word, and nobody left. By the eighth month he was reading it in his old rhythm.

I was there the thirteenth Saturday, because Lyle was on a hunting trip and I wanted to see. At the very bottom of that week’s ticket, in the old habit, there was one line that read: Cold case, one case.

My brother stopped.

“It’s mine,” he said. “It’s for Christmas Eve at my place. I paid for it myself, Pa. It’s not on your account.”

“Then why’s it on the ticket?”

“Marcy puts everything on it so you can hear the whole thing.”

“Then read it.”

“Pa.”

“Read it, son.”

“Cold case,” Dwight said. “One case. Twenty-six ninety-nine.”

He stopped again. I saw something go out of his shoulders and something else come in.

“That’s what it was,” he said, so quietly the stove nearly swallowed it. “Twenty-six ninety-nine. More than a hundred times. I never once said the number out loud.”

“No,” my father said. “You didn’t.”

“I’m sorry, Pa. I’m sorry I made you sit there.”

My father turned his face to him. For a long time he said nothing, and I thought, here it is, he’s going to forgive him on a church pew in front of God and six old men.

“Write that one down, Imogene,” my father said instead. “That one’s paid.”

That was what he gave him that day. Not forgiveness yet. A line crossed off.

Forgiveness took longer. It came at Christmas, in a way I will keep to myself, and it came again in fits.

Every payment Dwight made, my father signed for, and every dollar came to me, and every dollar I put in a separate envelope.

I did not keep it. The money was not mine. It was my father’s, and what he was owed was eyes.

Every dollar my brother handed my father went into a savings account I opened in Pa’s name. That first spring I took him to Wichita to see a retina specialist, at a clinic I had put off for three years because Dwight kept saying he would drive him and never did. The doctor said the fog could not be undone, but it could be slowed, and some of the edges could be given back.

There were eight visits that year, and an injection each time.

In the fall, when the account had grown to the price of one, I walked into Brandt’s with Pa on my arm and a catalog under the other. Cecil’s nephew Carter, who had taken over the store that spring, set a desk video magnifier on the counter beside the register, the kind that blows whatever you slide under it up to the size of a dinner plate.

Marcy put the first ticket under it. My father leaned in with his nose nearly on the glass.

“Mineral. Fifty pound,” he read. “Twenty-two forty.”

He sat back.

“Twenty-two forty. That’s gone up a dollar since March.”

Marcy laughed so hard she had to sit down.

The last envelope went into my father’s hand on a Saturday in the second week of April, nineteen months after the Wednesday I laid a cashier’s check on Cecil’s counter.

Cecil came in anyway, as men do, and stood at the back with a cup of his own coffee, pretending to check the stock.