The Tab Book at the Corner Grocery

I knew, and I did it anyway, because the alternative was eleven dollars and no coffee.

“Marlys,” Jace said again, lower, “can we talk about this in back?”

“We can talk right here,” I said, as kindly as I knew how. “You did yesterday.”

He flushed red up to his ears. He reached out, finally, and put two fingers on the envelope, and I thought he was going to slide it back to me.

That was when the office door at the back of the store opened, and Ardith Sell came up the center aisle between the canned goods and the bread rack.

Ardith is 70 years old. She has run that store since her father had his stroke in 1994.

She is small and quick and wears reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she has never in her life raised her voice.

Under one arm she carried a ledger. It was long and narrow, the cloth cover gone pale at the corners, and the spine was taped with old brown tape that had dried and curled at the edges.

Agnes had called her. I found out later that Agnes went home Thursday afternoon and dialed the number she still knows by heart from when Ardith’s mother was living.

“Ardith,” Agnes had told her, “you’d better come in tomorrow. You’re going to want to see this yourself.”

Ardith walked up to the counter and set the ledger down beside my envelope. She did not look at me.

She did not look at Dad. She looked at Jace, steady, over the top of her glasses.

“Is this the book you closed?” she asked, and she picked up the little tab book from beside my envelope and set it on top of the ledger.

“Ardith,” Jace said, “we talked about this. House accounts are a risk. The binder…”

“I know what the binder says,” Ardith said. “I read it. I want you to read this.”

She opened her father’s ledger. The pages were thin and gone the color of weak tea. The first page had a date at the top in her father’s square hand. April 1971.

She turned it around on the counter so Jace could read it. She ran her finger down the column. Ostrom, Wendell. Groceries, $6.40. And beside it, two days later, Paid. Paid. Paid.

“My dad wrote that,” Ardith said. “That’s his hand. Wendell was the first account he ever opened that wasn’t a farmer. Mom was against it. She said a creamery man’s wages wouldn’t carry it.”

She turned a page, then a handful of pages, then a whole thick section. The years went by under her finger. 1974. 1980. 1987. The column never changed. Every Friday, paid.

“Twenty-eight years of Fridays,” Ardith said. “Then the creamery closed, and he came in and asked Dad if it would be all right to settle on the 3rd instead. Dad wrote that down too. Right here. Pension day.”

She tapped the page. Jace leaned over and read it. I watched his face, and I saw something change in it, the way a field changes when a cloud moves off it.