What We Worked Out
We stood out there in the sun a long time. Jake and Tori came out after a while with the last two cups of coffee anybody was going to get from that shop that day, and the four of us stood at the bottom of Grandpa’s steps and worked it out like a family, which we should have done in the first place.
Nobody would be alone at the shop. That was the rule. Not ever again.
Jake could drop by mornings on his propane route. Tori could do Saturdays. I’d take two weekday afternoons after the clinic, and my two kids could do their homework at the counter like I used to. Pete said later he’d put a handrail up both sides of those steps and salt them every morning before he left for work. And Rudy Petersen, it turned out, was serious.
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Mark said he’d pay for one of those alarm buttons Grandpa could wear around his neck. “He’ll hate it,” he said.
“He’ll wear it,” Tori said. “If you ask him. Not if you tell him.”
Then Mark went inside, and he called the developer out of the Cities from Grandpa’s kitchen phone, and he told them the listing was withdrawn.
It cost him something. He’s a realtor in a small county, and he’d already told people it was sold. There were men in the café that week who told the story of Mark Ostrom walking up the highway in his loafers. He heard about it. He let them tell it.
The Sign
About ten o’clock, with the lot finally emptying out and the sun warm enough to melt the frost off the front window, Mark walked out to the pump island in his good coat.
I watched him from behind the counter.
He grabbed that Commercial Lot sign by both posts and rocked it back and forth in the frozen ground until it came loose. It took him a while. The ground was hard and the posts were long.
He carried it out to his truck on the far shoulder by the curve, a hundred yards down the highway, and laid it in the bed.
A couple of the men still sitting in their trucks watched him do it. Nobody honked. Nobody clapped. One of them lifted two fingers off the steering wheel, the way you do on a county road.