Tuesdays in Dad’s Old Aisles

Walter, who is twenty-six and drives the forklift, found him standing between two shopping cart corrals asking a woman in a minivan whether she had seen it.

“Where’d you leave it, Art?” Walter said, easy as anything.

“Right here,” Dad said. “Right where I always do.”

Walter walked him to the front, one hand at his back, and that was when Neil came out of the glass office and took over.

Nobody was hurt. Nobody fell. The woman in the minivan was not even upset. She told Walter afterward that her own father had done something similar.

But Neil had a district manager named Mr. Keene who had sent a memo in August about unaccompanied persons in stock areas. And Neil had a store that had passed its last safety audit by two points.

He told me all of it later, standing in my kitchen, with his cap in both hands. That day, in the lot, all he could say was I’m sorry.

I drove Dad home to the house on Fourth Street where I had grown up, the house where my mother had hung the kitchen curtains in 1979.

He was quiet the whole way. Halfway there he said, “Neil doesn’t want me in the store.”

“No,” I said. I do not lie to my father. I had decided that after the diagnosis, because there was so little else left that I could give him.

“I stocked that store,” he said.

“I know you did.”

“I stocked it before Neil could drive.”

“I know, Dad.”

He turned toward the window. A grain truck passed us with a trail of corn dust. Harvest was just starting, and the first combines were out in the fields along Route 36.

“Well,” he said, in the voice he used for bad weather and bad news. “That’s his store.”

That sentence has stayed with me longer than anything Neil said.

I should tell you who I am. My name is Meredith Dietz. I am fifty, I do billing for Dr. Haas’s dental office on the square, and I have been the daughter on call since my mother died six years ago.

Dad is Arthur Brandt. Everyone in the county calls him Art. He worked at Brandt’s Market from 1971 until 2002, when his knees quit. He started as a bag boy for his brother Vince, who owned the place, and finished as the man who knew where everything was.

Thirty-one years. He opened the store at six most mornings. He knew which farm wives wanted their ground beef cut thick and which widowers needed their canned peaches carried to the car and set on the seat.

When Uncle Vince sold to the chain in 2011, the sign changed and the carts changed and the music changed. Dad did not. He kept coming in every day to buy his paper.

For fifteen years nobody minded. In fact, they liked it. He stood at the end of the soup aisle and answered questions. Customers who could not find the cornstarch would say, “Go ask Art.”