The Tab Book at the Corner Grocery

So he made a sign, closed the three accounts that were left, and did not stop to ask who was on them or why.

I could understand all of that. I worked in a church office for twenty-two years, and I have seen plenty of young pastors come in with a binder.

What I could not understand was doing it to a 90 year old man at the register with a line behind him, instead of taking him aside, or calling his own stepmother, or simply asking Ardith.

I sat at my kitchen table after supper with a cup of tea and the church bulletin I was supposed to be proofing.

I read the same announcement four times and did not see a word of it.

I said a short prayer, the kind I say when I do not know what else to do.

Not for anything in particular. Just for a little wisdom, and for my father’s coffee.

Somewhere in that prayer the idea came to me, plain and simple, the way the good ones do.

Jace would not take credit. Fine. But no store in the world turns away cash.

Friday morning I was standing at the bank door at nine o’clock when the teller turned the sign around.

I asked her for $400 in twenties, and she counted them out twice on the counter.

“Christmas shopping early?” she asked, smiling.

“Something like that,” I said. She put the bills in a plain white bank envelope, and I folded the flap down and put it in my coat pocket.

I drove to Dad’s and found him already in his overcoat, sitting at the kitchen table with his list.

He writes his list on the back of an old envelope every week, in fountain pen, in his tall careful hand.

“I’m going to the store with you,” I said.

“I’m going Monday,” he said. “I’ve got eleven dollars and a bit.”

“Dad,” I said, “come with me today. Please. I need you to trust me on this one thing.”

He looked at me over his glasses for a while. Then he stood up, slow, his hand on the table edge, and took his gray fedora off the hook by the door and set it square on his head.

He wore the tan overcoat my mother bought him in 1994 at a department store in Fergus Falls.

It still fits him, though it hangs looser every year now, and he stoops a little at the shoulders.

We walked in at ten o’clock, the two of us. The sun was full on the front windows, and the light came across the old wood floor and the wooden counter like warm water.

Agnes was at the coffee pot by the window where she always is, eighty-four years old and sharp as a tack, with her purse in her lap. She looked at Dad, then at me, then back at Dad.

Burl was on the bench under the window with the Fergus paper, the way he has been every morning since he sold his dairy herd in 2009.