The Tab Book at the Corner Grocery

I went home and sat in my car in my own driveway for a long time before I went in.

The sugar and the filters were still sitting on the end of that counter. Somebody would put them back.

Leif came in from the county highway shop at four thirty, still in his coveralls, smelling like diesel and cold air.

They had spent the day mounting plows on the trucks before the first big snow.

I told him at the sink while the potatoes boiled. I told him all of it, the Mr. Ostrom, the eleven dollars, the coffee walking back to the shelf.

Leif dried his hands slowly on the dish towel. He did not say anything for a minute.

Then he reached over to the hook by the back door and took down his truck keys.

“Where are you going?” I asked, though I knew.

“To talk to my son,” he said.

“Leif, please. Sit down a minute.” I turned the burner down and put my hand on his arm, the way my father had put his on mine that morning.

He stood there with the keys in his fist. He is a big man, quiet, sixty years old, and I have seen him angry maybe four times in seventeen years of marriage. This was one of them.

“If you go over there tonight,” I said, “you’ll be standing between your boy and my dad. Whatever you say, one of them is going to lose a piece of you. I won’t have that.”

“He embarrassed your father in front of the whole town,” Leif said.

“He did,” I said. “And Dad doesn’t want a fight. He wants his coffee. Let me handle it. Let me try something first.”

Leif looked at me a long time. Then he hung the keys back on the hook and sat down at the table.

He did not eat much supper, and I heard him up in the night, walking the kitchen.

I understood more about Jace than Leif wanted to hear just then. That is the thing about being a stepmother.

You get to see the boy from a little farther off, without all the love fogging the glass.

Jace spent eight years at a big chain store in Fergus Falls, working his way up from stocking to assistant manager.

He was good at it. They gave him a plaque and a binder of procedures as thick as a family Bible.

When Ardith decided this fall that she was ready to step back, she called Jace. She had known him since he was a boy buying penny candy.

She hired him to run the place in October, with the idea he would take it over someday.

I think he wanted to show her he could make that old store run like a real business.

I think he walked in the first day and saw a cardboard tab book and thought it was the most old fashioned thing he had ever seen.

The binder said house accounts were unsecured risk. The binder said every sale is cash or card.