The Jar on the Feed Store Counter

The Jar Now

I took them down to the store on Monday morning before the doors opened, the three of us, with Elsa carrying a thermos.

Junie stood at the counter with both hands flat on the oak and studied that jar a long time. Then she asked if she could write one. I gave her a feed ticket and the pencil on the string, and she bent over it with her tongue between her teeth, wrote something, and folded it very small.

“May I know what it says?” I asked.

“You are not supposed to ask,” she said. “That is the rule.”

Somebody had told her about the rules. I looked at Elsa, and Elsa looked at the ceiling.

The first Saturday he came, Tobin sat on the same bag of cattle cubes, and I read a name aloud with my son in the room and thought my voice would not hold. It did. There were no printed slips that week, or after. Elsa does not need them now. She still sits in the lot some Saturdays, but these days Tobin drives up from Lubbock about once a month and sits in the Buick with her, and the two of them listen through the screen door together.

The second Saturday, there was a name in the jar I had not expected, in a hand I knew well. It was Lavon’s. It said “Linus.”

I read it out loud in my own store. I prayed it myself, for the man at the counter, for the first time in fifteen years. I think it was her way of telling me again that the jar goes both ways.

I still do not know the stories behind most of the names I carry, and I still do not ask. But I understand now that there are two kinds of not asking. One is a door you hold open for somebody until they are ready to walk through it. The other is a door you lock from your own side because you are afraid of what is standing there. For eleven years I did the second and called it the first, and only God, who read those slips with me every Saturday, knew which I was doing.

There are sixteen Folgers cans on the back shelf now. The newest has only a few slips in it, and on the lid, in marker, in my own hand, I have written the year. Under it, in smaller letters, a word I could not have written a month ago.

Home.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.