The Morning Every Tab Was Paid

The morning I unlocked Brasfield’s Grocery and opened my father’s ledger to thirty-eight pages ruled through in pencil, every family’s tab marked Paid, I stood in the dark with my coat on and the compressor humming.

I did not turn on the big lights. I stood in the glow from the milk case, the way I have stood every morning at twenty to six since 1988, and I read the first page twice because I was sure I had made a mistake.

The first page was Burdette Sumpter’s. He had been on the book longest, three winters, ever since his oxygen machine started eating his light bill, and the last number in the balance column was $1,206.40. Someone had drawn one straight line through the page with a wide, flat pencil and written one word at the bottom in careful block letters.

Paid.

I turned to the next page. Orlena Crews, $612.40, ruled through. The Treece family, $944.11. Yesenia Corral, $388.19. Every single page had the same flat line and the same single word.

I counted thirty-eight pages. I counted them again.

The ledger was not where I leave it. I keep it on the shelf under the register with the spine turned in, a little crooked, because Marcelle straightens things and I like to know when she has been into it.

That morning it was lying square on the counter with its cover closed and a deposit bag sitting on top, the old canvas kind from the Farmers Bank, tied shut with cotton string.

Inside the bag was money. Bundles of it, folded and rubber-banded by denomination, mostly twenties and fifties and some hundreds. Taped to an index card on top were a dime and a nickel.

The card was written in the same flat pencil as the ledger. It said, Tabs. Please do not look for me.

That was all. No name, no initials, no Bible verse. A dime and a nickel taped to a card, because somebody had gone to the trouble of making it come out to the penny.

I sat down on the stool behind the register, which I almost never do, and I did not touch the bag again for a while.

If you did not grow up in a town like mine, I should tell you what the book is.

Brasfield’s Grocery sits on the corner of Main and Depot in Pine Flat, Arkansas, population nine hundred and some, depending on whether you count the folks out on Route 9 who vote here and shop in Harlow. My father, Rhodell Brasfield, opened it in 1958 with a loan from the Farmers Bank and a used meat case.

I started sweeping the floor when I was nine. I have owned the place since 1997, when Daddy’s heart gave out the first time and he decided I could be trusted with the key.

The book is what we call the tab. Daddy bought the first green cloth ledger in 1958, and the rule that went with it was four sentences long. You write it down. They pay when they can. You never say a word about it in front of anybody. And you keep the page face down.

That last part matters most. In a town this size, a family’s page in the book is as private as a doctor’s chart. I have never once turned a page face up where another customer could see it, not in fifty-two years at that counter.