The Counter Man the Town Kept

The Table

By Thursday, people had begun to call me with their problems. I had spent twenty-nine years being the man who knew the answer, and now, with no counter, they kept ringing the house phone. Harold, my storm door won’t latch. Harold, what size belt goes on a John Deere 2040. Harold, I lost the key to the padlock on the stock tank.

On Saturday I took the key machine out of my garage. It was my own, an old Ilco I had bought secondhand from Harlan in 2003 for a hundred dollars. I clamped it on a card table, loaded my truck with blanks, and drove to the one place in town where everyone passes on a Saturday morning, the gravel lot beside the elevator.

Dutch Sorensen, who manages the elevator, came out and looked at me. “Do I need to ask what this is?” he said. I told him I would like to cut a few keys, and he said, “It’s all right. You want a better table? I’ve got a good one in the back.”

I cut eleven keys that first Saturday and charged nothing. The next Saturday it was thirty-four. The one after that, I ran out of blanks at ten-thirty.

I was only trying to stay useful. But every person who held out a key said the same thing. “Where am I supposed to take this now?” and when I said I did not know, “Well, I know where I am not.”

By the third Saturday, the line stretched to the road.

The Register

I did not hear about the register until later, and I heard most of it from Dylan, the clerk.

Corbin and Hale ran every store off one number, sales per week, posted in the back office. The week after I left, sales were down thirty-one percent. The week after that, down forty-eight.

By the first of November, the contractor accounts alone, the ranchers and builders who had run an open tab with Harlan, were down sixty-one percent. They went to Tilden and Watertown and Milbank in trucks, and they did not look back. The key kiosk sat by the door the whole time, and in three weeks it got four customers, and two of them wanted refunds.

I would like to say I took no pleasure in that. I will tell you honestly that for about a week I did, and then it stopped being any fun at all. Because the man at the end of that spreadsheet was Trent Mabry.

I saw him on the third Saturday, across the lot, leaning on the fender of a gray company truck, watching the line. He stayed forty minutes and never came over. The Saturday after that, he came over.

He had a plain brass house key in his hand, and he held it out like he was returning something stolen. “Can you cut this? I lost the spare. My wife’s going to kill me.”

I cut it. It took me about forty seconds. “What do I owe you?” he said, and I said, “Nothing.”

He stood there. The wind was pulling at his collar, where I noticed he had stopped wearing the lanyard. “Mr. Vance,” he said. “Can I tell you something and you don’t say anything?”

“I’m a hardware man. I’m good at that.”

“Eleven percent,” he said. “That’s the number. Alan Frisk, my regional guy, gave every store leader a payroll number in July. Cut eleven percent by the end of the quarter or the store gets, quote, right-sized. That means closed, or sold. My store has seven people. I did the math in a hotel room in Mitchell and looked at the spreadsheet for four hours. There was a column called tenure exposure, and you were at the top of it. The company has a list of people close to their vesting date. You were the first name because you were the closest.”

I put the cut key in his hand and closed his fingers around it. “Is your wife expecting?” I asked, because I had seen it in how he said her name.

“January third.”

“Then you had better learn how to cut a key.”

He laughed, and then he put his hand over his face for a second. “I didn’t pick you,” he said. “I picked a column.”

“I know.”

“That doesn’t make it better.”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

He nodded at the line behind him, a dozen people who were all pretending not to listen, and went back to his truck. I was wrong that I would not hear from him again, and I will get to it.