Tuesdays in Dad’s Old Aisles

Neil had one hand on Dad’s shoulder when I came through the front doors that afternoon in September. It looked kind from across the store. It was not kind.

He was steering Dad toward the exit past the registers, past the lottery counter, past three women from the Methodist circle who stopped talking all at once.

Dad was wearing his tan zip jacket and one house slipper and one work boot. He did not know that. He was smiling at everyone as if he were walking the receiving line at a funeral.

“Nance,” Neil said when he saw me. His voice was low and tight. “I called the house. Nobody picked up.”

“I was at work. What is going on?”

“He can’t be back here. Not on the floor. Not like this.”

I took Dad’s arm. It felt thinner than it had at Easter. He looked down at my hand and then up at my face, and for a moment I watched him decide who I was.

“There she is,” Dad said. It was the right answer, and I let out a breath I had been holding for a month.

Neil walked us to the car. He did not say a word until I had Dad buckled in, and then he leaned on the roof of my Buick and stared at the grain elevator across the road.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry. But I can’t have it.”

I want to tell you how that afternoon had gone, because I did not know it yet either. I found out in pieces over the next two days, from Walter and from Agnes and finally from Neil himself.

Dad had come in a little after one, the way he had been coming in for twenty-four years of retirement. He bought a newspaper and a pack of spearmint gum. Agnes rang him up and he told her the Cubs were done for the year, which was true.

Then he went to the back. He knew the swinging door by the meat counter, and he knew the code for the stockroom because it had been his code first. Nobody had thought to change it. Nobody ever thinks of that.

Inside, he found a pallet of milk crates waiting to be stacked, and he did what his hands had done ten thousand times. He stacked them. Then he went looking for the truck.

There was no truck at that dock anymore. The dock had been rebuilt in 2011 when the family sold the business to the regional chain, and Dad’s old receiving door had become a loading bay with a keypad and a camera.

Dad pushed the bar and the door opened and he walked out into the lot with the sun in his eyes. He was looking for a 1998 Ford pickup he had sold to a man in Griggsville in 2004.