Getting Ready
We made a list on the back of a minnow order pad. Jake took the tanks, the pump and the heater. Tori took the coffee and the doughnuts. I took the stock, the money and Otis.
Otis had been driving the tackle and sporting goods route for the distributor out of Wausau for twenty-some years. When I called him Wednesday morning and told him who I was, he was quiet for a second.
“Gus’s granddaughter,” he said. “I heard about the hip. I heard about the other thing too.”
“We’re opening Saturday,” I said. “Four o’clock, like always. I need what he always gets.”
“Honey, I know what he always gets. I’ve been writing that order since you were in diapers.” I heard paper rustling. “Blaze orange stocking caps, three dozen. Orange vests, two dozen. Hand warmers, the big case and a half. Toe warmers. Drag ropes. The deer scent the old guys swear by. Gloves. A case of the cheap knives with the orange handles.”
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“That’s it.”
“I’ll be out Thursday after lunch,” he said. “Gus is on thirty days with me. Always has been.”
“I’d rather pay it,” I said. “I don’t want anything on his account right now.”
He understood that without my explaining. The total was two thousand one hundred and forty dollars. I put it on my own credit card, the one Pete and I keep for emergencies, and I did not tell myself it was crazy until I’d already read him the numbers.
Pete didn’t say it was crazy either. He said, “Your grandpa sold me the first orange hat I ever wore in this county.” Then he went out to the garage and found two space heaters and a fifty-foot extension cord.
Thursday afternoon Otis’s van pulled up in the bright cold and he carried the boxes in himself, two at a time, even though he had a bad back and a younger guy along to do it. He stood a minute at the counter when he was done and looked at the stool.
“He always had a cup of coffee waiting for me,” Otis said. “Every delivery for twenty-two years.”
Tori poured him one from the old pot. He drank it standing up, set the cup in the sink, and left without letting us thank him.
Friday I took a personal day from the clinic. We stocked the shelves until our hands were black. Jake drove to the bait dealer on the other side of the lake and came back with fatheads and shiners for the walleye men still fishing open water. Tori ordered twelve dozen doughnuts from the bakery in town, glazed and cake and the long johns with the maple frosting Grandpa liked.
I did the cash drawer the way he’d taught me when I was twelve. Two hundred in small bills, rolled quarters, a stack of paper bags under the counter, and the old receipt book for anybody who wanted to run a tab.
When we turned the lights off Friday at four in the afternoon, the shelves were full and the sun was going down orange over the trees across the highway. The Commercial Lot sign was still standing in the grass.
None of us said a thing about it.