The Morning I Counted Dad’s Pay Out Loud

The store

The hardware store sits on the square, two doors down from the old bank building that is a florist now. It has been there since 1946.

The front is all windows, and the floor is the original maple, worn into a shallow trough between the door and the counter from seventy-some years of boots.

Lavern’s father opened it after the war. Lavern ran it for forty years after that. Two years ago, when his knees went, he made Brody the manager and kept the ownership.

He still comes in every Saturday morning.

He sits by the coffee pot near the front door with the other men his age and some of the women too, and they drink coffee out of the store’s chipped mugs and talk about the weather and the price of beans and who died.

I want to be fair to Brody here. When Lavern made him manager, a lot of people said he was too young.

He was thirty, and he had only been at the store four years. But he worked hard. He put in the computer inventory.

He got the paint counter going again. Lavern liked him, and my daughter loved him, and I had no quarrel with him at all until Friday afternoon.

I opened the door and the bell rang over it.

The store smelled the way it always has: birdseed and oiled steel and that sharp metal smell from the key machine.

The nail bins ran down the middle aisle, the old wooden ones with the brass scoops hanging off them, sixteen-penny and eight-penny and roofing nails and drywall screws sold by the pound.

Dad was behind the counter. Red vest, plaid flannel shirt, white hair combed back.

He was standing by the key machine with a blank in his hand, and he looked up when the bell rang the way he looks up for every customer.

When he saw it was me his face changed. He knew. He did not know what, but he knew.

At the coffee pot by the window sat four of them. Lavern Haupt, in his feed cap and his canvas coat. Rudy, who farmed three hundred acres north of town until his son took over.

Edna, who comes in every Saturday for sunflower seed and stays an hour. And one of the Hoffman brothers, I could never tell which.

“Morning, Garner,” Rudy said, and I said good morning to him and Lavern and Edna. I walked to the counter. The cash register sat at one end, the old brass-and-iron one with the new card reader bolted to its side.

Kade was not at it. The stockroom door at the back was half open, and I could hear boxes moving.

The office door was shut. Brody’s truck had been in the lot.

I stood on the customer side of that counter, where I had stood ten thousand times since I was a boy, and I took the folded bills out of my jacket.

“Garner,” Dad said, low. “What are you doing.” I laid the first twenty on the counter. “Twenty,” I said.