The Tab Book at the Corner Grocery

“I’m fine,” he said. “Walking’s good for me.”

So I walked with him. It was a bright, still morning with the sun low and the elevator throwing a long shadow across the tracks.

He carried his sack in his right hand and kept his left in his coat pocket.

We did not talk about it for two blocks. Then, by the parsonage, he said, “That boy’s got a lot on his plate, Marlys. New job. Ardith counting on him.”

“He called you Mr. Ostrom,” I said.

“Well,” Dad said, “that’s my name.” And he kept walking.

At his kitchen table, after he put the milk in the refrigerator and the soup in the cupboard over the stove, I sat down without being asked and looked at the calendar on his wall.

It is the same kind of calendar he has hung there for sixty years, the free one from the elevator, with a picture of a combine on it.

On the 3rd of every month he writes a small check mark in pencil.

“What’s the check mark for, Dad?” I asked, though I knew.

“Pension day,” he said. “Social Security and the creamery both come in on the 3rd. I walk down and settle up with the store the same morning. I never once went past the 3rd.”

He said it the way another man might tell you he had served in the Navy. Not bragging. Just a fact about who he is.

Dad started at the creamery in 1961, when he was 25, hauling cream from farms out past the lakes.

By the time it closed in 1999 he was running the butter churn and training every young man they hired.

My mother kept house and raised the three of us on what he brought home, which was never much.

They did not have a charge card until 1988, and Dad cut that one up after the first statement because he did not like the interest.

The tab at the corner grocery started in the spring of 1971.

Mom was in the hospital in Fergus Falls with her gallbladder, and Dad had three kids at home and a paycheck that did not come until Friday.

Ardith’s father ran the store then. He told Dad to take what he needed and sign for it, and to settle up on payday.

Dad did. Every Friday after that, for twenty-eight years, he paid it on his way home from the creamery.

When he retired, the payments moved to the 3rd of the month, pension day. Mom died in 2011.

Dad kept the tab. He kept the fountain pen she gave him the Christmas of 1970, too.

I sat at his table while he made coffee from the old can he still had in the cupboard, the last of it.

I watched him measure it with a spoon, very careful, so it would stretch.

“I’ve got coffee at home,” I said. “I’ll bring you a can.”

“Don’t you dare,” Dad said. “I’ll get it next week. They’ll take my cash. Eleven dollars goes further than you’d think if you’re not foolish.”