The Tab Book at the Corner Grocery

“That’s $38.60,” Jace said, and he said it to the register screen instead of to the old man standing across the counter from him with his hat in one hand.

I was two people back in line that Thursday morning, holding a box of coffee filters for the church kitchen and a sack of sugar for the funeral lunch on Saturday.

I could see the back of Dad’s head and the little white curl over his collar.

Dad had set his groceries out the way he has set them out for as long as I can remember. Coffee first.

Then a ring of bologna, a loaf of bread, a half gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, and two cans of soup lined up like soldiers.

He put his hat back on, reached into his overcoat and took out the black fountain pen he carries in the inside pocket.

Then he said the same five words he has said at that counter since 1971.

“Put it on my book, please.”

There is a little tab book that lives on a shelf under the register at the corner grocery.

It is the size of a church offering envelope box, with a spiral binding and colored index tabs, the cover gone soft from years of thumbs.

Jace did not reach for it. He kept his eyes on the screen and his hands flat on the counter, and the girl bagging at the end stopped with a can of soup in her hand.

“We don’t run house accounts anymore, Mr. Ostrom,” he said. “It’s card or cash now. I put a sign up on the door Monday. I’m sorry, but that’s the policy.”

Mr. Ostrom. I heard it and something cold went down the back of my neck.

At Christmas, at my table, with a paper crown from the crackers on his head, that young man calls my father Grandpa Wendell.

Jace Hollenbeck is my stepson. My husband, Leif, married his mother when Jace was a baby, and when she died of an aneurysm two years later, Leif raised that boy alone in a rented house by the elevator.

I came along when Jace was fourteen. I had not had children of my own, and I did not pretend to be his mother.

I packed his lunches and drove him to wrestling and loved him the way you love a boy who never asked you to.

So I knew that boy. I knew he was not cruel by nature. And I stood in that line with my coffee filters and could not understand what I was watching.

Dad looked at the tab book shelf, then at Jace. He did not argue. He has never argued with a clerk in his life.

He took his billfold out of his back pocket and opened it right there on the counter.

He counted slowly, the way men his age count, licking his thumb on each bill. A five and six ones.

He counted them twice to be sure, and the woman ahead of me looked at the floor.

“Eleven dollars,” Dad said, mostly to himself.