My uncle Mark said it between the mashed potatoes and the ham, the way you would mention that the furnace filter needed changing. “I signed the listing Friday. Ninety thousand for the lot. Dad’s never running that place again.”
It was a Sunday in November, a little after one in the afternoon. We had all come from church to my aunt’s kitchen in town, the way we did most Sundays since Grandpa fell. The window over her sink was full of thin gray light.
Nobody said anything for a second. My cousin Tori set her fork down. Her brother Jake kept chewing, but slower, and looked at his father the way you look at a dog you are not sure about.
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“The lot,” I said. “Not the shop.”
“The building comes down,” Mark said. “There’s a developer out of the Cities. They put those little chain stores on county corners. They want the frontage and the pump island. It’s a fair price for that piece of highway.”
“Does Grandpa know?”
“He knows.” Mark reached for the rolls. “I’ve got his power of attorney, Lacey. I’ve had it since Mom died. This is exactly what it’s for.”
The Sign on the Highway
My name is Lacey Ostrom. I was thirty-six that fall, a dental hygienist in town with two kids, a husband named Pete who strings power line for the co-op, and a mortgage on a little ranch house eight miles from the lake.
I am the oldest grandchild. That means I was the first one Grandpa ever let behind the counter at Gus’s Bait and Tackle, when I was about six and could barely see over it.
Gus Ostrom ran that shop on the county highway for fifty-two years. One room of knotty pine, a gas pump out front, minnow tanks humming along the back wall, and his house up the little rise behind it.
The first week of November we had freezing rain, the kind that coats every branch and every step in glass. Grandpa went out early to check the pump and his feet went out from under him in his own yard.
He broke his hip. He was eighty-three. They pinned it at the hospital in the county seat and sent him on to the rehab wing at the care center, where he was learning to walk again behind a silver walker with tennis balls on the feet.
After Sunday dinner I did not go home. I drove out the county highway instead, in the flat light of the afternoon, and there it was, staked in the frozen grass beside the pump island.
A big white sign. Commercial Lot. The name of Mark’s real estate office across the bottom in blue letters, and Mark’s own cell number under it.
I sat in my car on the shoulder for a long time with the engine running. The front window of the shop was dark. Somebody had already flipped the little cardboard clock on the door to Closed and left it there.