The Tab Book at the Corner Grocery

He did not turn a page the whole time we were in there.

Neither of them pretended to read for very long. A small town knows when something is about to happen.

You can feel it in a room the same way you feel weather coming.

I stood beside Dad inside the door in my forest green wool coat, my silver hair in the same short bob I have worn since 1990. He looked at me, waiting.

“Get what you always get,” I said. “All of it.”

He hesitated. Then he walked to the second aisle and took down the coffee, and walked to the cooler for the bologna, and on down the line, carrying it all in the crook of his arm the way he always does.

Jace was behind the register. He saw us come in and his face went still.

He is a good looking boy, with Leif’s way of standing even though they share no blood, and he had on the store’s green apron over a pressed shirt.

Dad set his groceries on the counter in a row. Coffee first. Bologna. Bread, milk, eggs, the two cans of soup. Then he slid the little tab book out from its shelf and laid it beside them, because it was his book.

Jace rang them up without a word, and the girl at the end packed them into a paper grocery bag and handed it to Dad. The screen said $38.60.

I took the envelope out of my coat pocket and laid it down on the wooden counter, right beside the little tab book Dad had laid out.

“That’s $400 in cash, Jace,” I said. “Count it if you want. Put him on my tab.”

Jace looked down at the envelope for a long time. He did not touch it.

Then he looked up at me, and he looked tired, and young, and I loved him in spite of myself.

“Marlys,” he said, “I told Wendell yesterday. We don’t do tabs anymore. It’s not personal. It’s how every store runs now.”

“It isn’t credit,” I said. “It’s paid ahead. It’s money in your drawer before he takes a single thing out the door. You write his groceries against it, and when it runs out, I’ll bring more.”

He opened his mouth and shut it again. I watched him go through the binder in his head, page by page, and come up empty.

Nothing in there said a store could refuse to be paid in advance.

Burl folded his newspaper and set it on his knee. Agnes did not move at all. The girl bagging at the end had stopped with her hand on a paper sack.

Dad stood at the counter holding his paper grocery bag against his tan overcoat. He did not say a thing.

He looked at the envelope, and then out the window, and then at the floor. That was the part that hurt the most.

My father has never been a charity case in his life. I knew what it cost him to stand there while his daughter paid for his groceries in front of Burl and Agnes.