The Tab Book at the Corner Grocery

I stepped around the woman ahead of me with my purse already open.

I had my billfold half out before I even thought about it. My hands were shaking a little, I remember that.

Dad put his hand on my wrist. His hand is big and spotted and still strong from thirty-eight years of lifting cream cans.

He did not squeeze. He just set it there, the way you would lay a hand on a dog that wanted to jump.

“I pay my own, Marlys,” he said quietly. “You know that.”

I did know that. Everybody in that town knew that. Wendell Ostrom has not borrowed a dollar from his own children in his whole life, and he was not going to start in front of half the morning regulars.

So I stood there with my purse open while my father picked up the coffee and walked it back to the shelf in the second aisle.

Then he came back for the bologna and walked it to the cooler in the back.

Then the eggs. He did it slowly and carefully, the way he slides a hymnal back into the rack at the end of a service, square and neat, so the next person finds it right.

Nobody in that store said a thing. Agnes, who has had coffee by the front window every weekday morning since her husband passed, set her cup down. The furnace kicked on. The cooler hummed.

Dad paid for the bread, the milk and the two cans of soup. It came to $10.12.

He counted the change into his palm, put it in his pocket, and thanked Jace. He actually thanked him.

Then he put his fountain pen back in his inside pocket, picked up his paper sack, nodded to Agnes, and walked out the door into the morning, four blocks home on the cold sidewalk.

He is 90 years old. He has walked those four blocks every week since he gave up driving at 86. He says the walk is the only reason his knees still work.

I put the sugar and the coffee filters down on the end of the counter. I did not buy them.

I did not say one word to Jace. I just followed my father out the door.

I want to be honest about why I stayed quiet, because I have thought about it a hundred times since. It was not that I had nothing to say. I had plenty.

But Jace was my husband’s son. If I had lit into him at that register, in front of the regulars, it would have gone home with both of us that night and landed right on Leif.

He would have been stuck between the boy he raised and the father-in-law he loves.

I would not do that to Leif. I would not make that good man pick.

So I kept my mouth shut and caught up with Dad at the corner of Main and Second.

“Dad, let me drive you the rest of the way,” I said. My car was parked in front of the post office, a half block back.