The Morning Every Tab Was Paid

I set it on his oilcloth and found the page. A plain page, in my father’s slanting hand, with a line for every week from December through March. Flour and lard. Canned milk. Eggs, one dozen. Coal oil, one gallon. Each line had its number, written in the dark blue ink my father favored.

At the bottom of the page was the total. $212.60.

And below the total, in the same blue ink, in a hand that was not quite steady, my father had written four words.

Vester settled up. R.B.

Toler Quave looked at it for a long time. He put one finger on the line, the way you touch a thing you are not sure is real.

“That’s his handwriting,” he said. “Telling that lie.”

“It’s the only lie in the whole book,” I said. “I’ve been through some of the old ones since. Sixty-four years of his handwriting, and that’s the one.”

“It’s the best thing in it,” Toler said, and he took off his glasses and wiped his eyes with the back of a hand that had run a grader for thirty-one years and had never, I would guess, been used for that.

We drank the coffee, which had gone cold, and neither of us said anything for a good while. The ice ticked on the roof like somebody counting.

Then Toler cleared his throat and gave me my instructions, which were that I was not to tell a soul. Not the town. Not even Burdette Sumpter, who had asked me to. He wanted the families to go on thinking it was the Lord, or a lottery, or a stranger passing through.

“They’ve had enough to carry,” he said. “Let them have a mystery. A mystery’s lighter than a name.”

I told him I could not keep it from Marcelle. He thought about that a long minute, and then he said, “Well, I reckon she does the books.”

I told her that night, on the edge of the bed with the lamp off. She did not say a word for a very long time. Then she said, “The dime and the nickel,” and began to cry the way she had cried at the kitchen table in October, only this time it was a different kind.

In the morning I took the sign out of my shirt pocket and looked at it a while. Then I fed it to the stove in the back of the store, and I watched it go.

There was one thing left, and it took me until the following Tuesday to work out how to do it.

He came in at ten minutes to seven, in the canvas coat. I had the register drawer open and the milk case humming, and on the counter beside it, the book, set down square, the way he had left it.

He counted his quarters out one at a time on the glass, the way he had every Tuesday for twenty-one years. A can of Vienna sausages. A sleeve of saltines. A dozen eggs. A quarter pound of bologna.

“Six eighty-four,” I said.

“Same as always.”

“Toler, I’ve got an empty page in the book.”

His hand stopped on the quarters.

“I’ve been carrying thirty-eight families on this tab,” I said, “and as of a week ago I’ve got none. A man who has run a book his whole life gets lonesome with an empty one. I’d take it as a kindness if you’d let me put you down on it.”

“I’ve never run a tab in my life,” Toler Quave said.

“I know. That’s why I’m asking.”