The Tab Book at the Corner Grocery

I bought the sugar and the coffee filters for the funeral lunch, because they were still sitting on the end of the counter where I had left them the day before. Nobody had put them back.

Jace rang them up when he came back in. He did not look at me at first. Then, as he handed me my change, he said, “Marlys, I’m sorry. I should have called you. Does Dad know?”

He meant Leif. He has always called Leif Dad.

“Dad knows,” I said. “He wanted to come down here last night. I asked him not to.”

Jace closed his eyes for a second. “Thank you,” he said. “I’d have deserved it.”

“You would have,” I said. “Come to supper Sunday. I’m making the pot roast.”

Leif heard all of it at supper Friday night, and he did not say much.

He just reached over and put his hand on the back of my neck for a while, which is how Leif says the things he does not have words for.

Jace came to Sunday dinner after church. He brought a can of coffee, the kind Dad drinks, and set it on the counter by the stove where Dad would see it. He did not make a speech about it.

He sat next to Dad at the table and asked him about the creamery, about the old butter churn and the cream routes out past the lakes in the winter of 1965, when the snow was up to the mailboxes.

Dad talked for an hour. I have not heard him talk for an hour since Mom died.

Leif sat at the end of the table and listened to the two of them, and his eyes were wet, and nobody said a word about it.

After dinner Jace took a little folded paper out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me.

It was the sign from the store door, the one about house accounts. He had taken it down Saturday morning.

“Ardith said I could keep the binder,” he said. “But I’m writing a page in the back of it. It’s going to say, ask first.”

The 3rd of December came around on a Thursday. Dad walked the four blocks to the corner grocery in his gray fedora and his tan overcoat, the way he has every pension day since the creamery closed.

He settled his November tab in full, cash, counted twice on the wooden counter with his thumb.

Jace wrote Paid beside it in the little tab book and initialed it, the way Ardith’s father did.

Then Dad took out his black fountain pen and signed for the week’s groceries. Coffee first. Then the bologna, the bread, the milk, the eggs and two cans of soup.

Ardith tells me she has a new ledger now, a fresh one, and Jace is keeping it.

The first page says Ostrom, Wendell, in Jace’s handwriting, which is a little crooked but very neat.

My $400 is still in the drawer, in the white envelope, with his name on the front in Ardith’s hand. Dad won’t let anyone touch it.