“Can I wait by you? The lady up front says I’m BOTHERING folks.”
A girl about eight said it in an Owensboro steakhouse where half the room owes my pawn shop.
Pink rubber boots, a backpack squeezed to her chest, hair pasted down by rain that wouldn’t let up.
The hostess had shooed her twice and gotten the same answer. “Momma says stick near grown-ups, because a door is where kids go missing.”
I folded my paper. Men behind on their truck notes get one look from me and quit lying.
My nephew Glen, who’s driven me since my eyes went, leaned in. “I’ll get her outside.”
“Leave her be, Glen,” I said.
“That girl’s close enough to touch you.”
“She is EIGHT.”
She hauled herself onto the bench like a fence rail, then thanked Glen for keeping his hands to himself.
Her name was Paisley. She held up eight fingers and bent a ninth in half.
“Eight and a half, nearly nine. Momma says nearly is how promises start breaking.”
She dug through the backpack and laid a laminated card by my cup, one corner chewed soft.
Her rec center pass. The one on Parrish prints the birthday under the little ones’ names.
THE DAY AFTER VALENTINE’S. I counted back and kept landing on the SAME SPRING.
The front door banged open and a woman came in wet to the bone, eyes going booth to booth.
“PAISLEY.”
Brittany Cole got four steps in, saw whose booth it was, and stopped dead by the salad bar.
I got to my feet. I’d set her a plate every week, back when she was my Darrell’s girl.
“Momma, you know the serious lady?” “I know her,” Brittany said.
Paisley tipped her head and waited, like Darrell, like my answer was already hers.
“Valentine’s,” I said, and Paisley told me her cake was pink and the dog ate half.
Brittany sat across from me like her knees gave.
“Say I’m off by a year.”
“I can’t tell you that, Marlene.”
“Is she Darrell’s?”
She said YES with her hand on Paisley’s head.
Glen’s phone buzzed, and the color left his face. “A gun safe’s sitting on the shop’s back step with YOUR NAME painted on the door, and nobody saw it come.”
Kendra’s picture
Glen turned the phone toward me. I took it out of his hand and held it four inches from my nose, which is where things live for me now.
A green box on wet concrete. White letters across the door, big and crooked, the one thing on that screen my eyes could get.
MARLENE.
“Kendra took it when she carried the trash out,” Glen said. “The back camera’s got nothing. That thing’s been dark since spring.”
“I put it there,” Brittany said.
She didn’t look at the phone. She kept her hand on Paisley’s head.
“My cousin’s truck and a hand truck, twenty minutes ago.” She swallowed. “It’s Darrell’s, Marlene. The one he bought off you.”
Paisley quit working on the saltine the hostess had finally brought her. “Is Daddy’s box getting rained on?”
I set the phone face down next to my coffee and the rec center pass.
Glen was already halfway out of the booth. “Kids’ll have it in a truck bed before we get over there.”
“My name’s on it,” I said. “Find me the man in this town who’ll haul off a thing with my name on it.”
“Mar.”
“And why the back step?” I said to Brittany.
She looked at Glen, not at me.
“The back step’s where I pay.”
“Pay who?”
She didn’t answer. She was looking at my nephew, and my nephew was looking at the salad bar like it was two months behind.
“Mar, let me get you to the car.”
“Glen,” Brittany said. “Say what I owe. Say it to her face.”
Forty dollars a week
That safe came off my own floor the summer of 2016.
Green, with a gold stripe around the door, a little taller than me. A man from out by the airport put it up for a loan and moved to Texas, and when his time ran out it was mine.
Darrell was twenty-six. He stood at my counter every week that summer with two twenties folded the long way.
“Momma, just give it to me,” he said once. I said nobody walks out of my shop owing me a favor, and that included him. I’m not proud of that. I’m not sorry either.
He paid forty a week on a yellow card, same as anybody. I punched it. He signed it every time in capital letters, because Darrell printed his whole life, like somebody was going to grade it.
The day he paid it off he set the combination right there on my floor, down on his knees with the little paper from the factory.
I said thirty-one before he’d touched the dial.
He grinned up at me. His ball number at Apollo was thirty-one. It was on his shed, his bike lock when he was a boy, the padlock on his duffel when he went to work on the river. His number, three times around.
“A thief’ll get in that thing someday, Darrell.”
“Only a thief who knows me, Momma,” he said.
Brittany came the next spring.
She rang groceries at the Kroger on the bypass and laughed at things he said that weren’t funny. The night I cook, every week, I set her a plate. She brought corn pudding in a glass dish with masking tape on the bottom that said COLE so she’d get it back, and I never once gave it back clean enough to suit her.
Glen ate with us too. My sister’s boy, thirty-seven and between things, working my counter afternoons that year. He wrote a pretty cursive on the tickets. His mother made sure of that.
That spring Darrell held on to the rolls one night instead of passing them. He looked across the table at Glen.
“You still keeping your little notebook, Glen?”
Glen laughed. “Keeps me honest.”
“That right,” Darrell said.
I took the rolls off him and passed them myself. Cousins being cousins.
Darrell died that summer. He was twenty-seven. His truck went off the road on a wet night coming home from a river shift, and the rain didn’t let up for the visitation either.
Brittany came. She stood outside the glass doors of the funeral home with no umbrella. Glen went out to her. I stayed by my boy, and I didn’t ask what he told her.
I’d said some things that week. I won’t put them down here.
That fall Glen offered twice to go get Darrell’s safe out of her apartment before she sold it. I said leave it. I couldn’t have stood to look at it.
Then Glen told me she’d gone off to her people in Tennessee, and I let her be gone.
I’m sixty-four. My eyes went two years ago. I can see a face across a booth. I can see colors. Print I can make out if I hold it to my nose, the way I hold the phone. Handwriting I can’t, nothing past arm’s length, and I can’t drive.
Glen drives me now. He reads me the mail, and he sits beside me at the counter and reads me the cards, who’s paid and who’s late, and I give the late ones my look. The church ladies tell me what a good boy he is.
He was out of the booth. He walked to the front door and held it open on the rain, my keys in his hand.
The Malibu
I didn’t get up.
Glen stood there holding the door till a man coming in for his supper had to duck under his arm. Then he let it swing shut and came back and sat on the edge of the bench next to me, turning my keys over. My Buick key, the shop keys, and the little desk key he never takes off the ring.
“I was going to tell you,” he said. “I was sparing you, Mar.”
“Sparing me what.”
“She came in the shop the winter after. Big as a house and broke, and you were in the back, and you’d TOLD me you couldn’t have her in front of you.” He looked at his hands. “I lent her twelve hundred against that Malibu. My own money. For Darrell.”
I didn’t say anything to that.
“Never touched the shop’s books,” he said. “Never touched a dime of yours.”
“Ninety a month,” Brittany said.
“Interest,” Glen said. “She knows how it works. Everybody in this room knows how it works.”
“Ninety a month since she was in a car seat.” Brittany tipped her chin at Paisley. “I quit counting at nine thousand.”
I sat with that. NINE THOUSAND, on twelve hundred.
My rule is three renewals. Roll a loan in my shop three times and I sit you on the stool across from mine, and we go over your whole life till it fits on one card. I made that rule when Glen was in grade school, and I’ve broken it for nobody. Men behind on truck notes hate that stool. They pay.
“Brittany’s two months behind, Mar,” Glen said. “The wrecker comes for the car at seven tomorrow morning. I can’t carry her forever.”
“The car I take her to school in,” Brittany said. “The car I take to the plant.”
“Hand me her card,” I said to Glen. “I’ll put her on the stool myself.”
He laughed. He made it sound kind. “And read it how?”
The hostess came by with a coffeepot. We didn’t want any. She looked at Paisley like she’d been proved wrong about something and went away.
“Then we go over there,” I said. “Kendra reads it to me.”
“I’m not taking her to that step,” Brittany said.
“See?” Glen spread his hands. “Eight years I’ve met her where she’s comfortable. She won’t set foot in the front of your shop. Mar, you want to settle this, settle it with me.”
“His word,” Brittany said. “He says settle every month.”
She looked at me like I’d just signed for him.
I pushed Paisley’s saltine crumbs into a pile with the side of my hand. I’ve been wiping counters forty years and I can’t quit.
“Paisley, have you ever seen Glen before tonight?”
She looked at her mother first. Brittany didn’t stop her.
“He’s the back door man,” Paisley said.
The awning
The shop shares the lot with the steakhouse, which is why I eat there every week.
Brittany carried Paisley across the lot inside her jacket. Glen walked me, a hand on my elbow like always, and I let him, because the lot is dark and the puddles all look like asphalt to me.
Paisley talked from inside the jacket the whole way. The first of every month Momma parked by the back step and Paisley waited in the car with the doors locked. Momma knocked. The back door man opened it wide enough for an envelope and no wider. Momma said if he ever talked to her, she was to keep her hands to herself, and he’d keep his.
“He did,” she said to me. “Tonight he did.”
Kendra was under the awning by the back door with the trash can still on its wheels beside her and her phone lit up in her hand. Kendra is twenty-five, has worked my counter three years, and is the only one at the shop who talks to me louder than she has to without making a thing of it.
The safe stood on the step where the light fell. Green going black in the wet. White paint across the door, running a little at the bottom of every letter.
I put my hand flat on the side of it. Cold.
“He told me never to answer this door,” Kendra said. She said it to me, not him. “Said the back door was his business. I’d have pulled the tape for you, Marlene, but he never did get that camera fixed.”
Glen took his wallet out. “Her card’s right here. I’ll read it to you and we can all go home.”
He held it up under the light. I couldn’t read it. I didn’t have to. It was white.
My cards are yellow. They’ve been yellow for thirty-two years, so I can find one in a drawer without my glasses, and now without my eyes.
“Cole, Brittany,” Glen read. “Twelve hundred. Malibu. Behind two.”
“Ours are yellow, Glen,” Kendra said.
“I said it was mine. A favor.”
“Say the rest,” Brittany said. She’d set Paisley down under the awning, between her boots. “Say what you said last month.”
Glen put the card back in his wallet.
“He said bring Darrell’s safe and we’re square.” Brittany pushed wet hair off her face. “He’s been on me about it since she was a baby. Whether I still had it. Whether I’d got it open. Whether I wanted him to come haul it for me.”
She’d brought it, then. Tonight. To his door.
“I never got it open,” she said. “I don’t know what’s in it. But I wasn’t handing Darrell’s anything to him. I painted whose it was instead.”
Glen laughed. “Mar, it’s a box. Darrell’s deer rifle’s in there, probably. I’ll roll it inside before it rusts, and you can sit with it all you want in the morning.”
He had the shop keys out now, the right one already between his fingers.
“Darrell took that number with him,” he said.
I found the dial with my hand. It turned as easy as the day he paid it off.
His ball number
“Paisley,” I said. “I need your eyes.”
She came out from between her mother’s boots. Brittany held her phone light on the dial.
“I’ll turn. Say the numbers as they go by. Loud.”
Glen said, “Mar, it’s pouring. This is crazy.”
I turned it the way Darrell did on my floor, the long way first, the way he’d been turning locks since he was big enough to reach one.
“Close,” Paisley said. “Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one.”
“Stop me there.”
“Stop.”
I went back the other way. She read them off again. Glen had gone quiet behind me. Kendra took a step, and when I looked around she was standing in the back door, filling it.
“And thirty-one,” Paisley said, for the third time, and I pulled the handle down.
The door was heavier than I remembered. It came open about a foot and caught on the wet step, and Brittany got her shoulder behind it.
Darrell’s deer rifle was in there, standing in the rack, like Glen said.
His duffel padlock hung on a hook.
A yellow card in a plastic sleeve, punched clear across. Forty dollars, forty dollars, forty dollars. DARRELL, DARRELL, DARRELL, in capitals on every line, all summer long.
And on the shelf over the rifle, a freezer bag with a notebook in it. A little spiral one, the kind you buy at a gas station, the cover gone soft.
“Mar, leave that,” Glen said.
I handed it back over my shoulder to Kendra without looking, the way I’ve handed her tickets for three years.
She held it under the awning light. She turned pages for a while before she said anything.
“Dates,” she said. “Spring of ’16 into the summer after. A name, a thing, a dollar amount. Then sold, and a price. Then a G.”
“Give me one.”
“A wedding set, fourteen karat. Lent sixty. Sold four-forty. G.” She turned a page. “A pump shotgun. Lent fifty. Sold two-ninety. G.”
“I never had a pump shotgun on my books for two-ninety in my life,” I said.
“They’ve got no ticket numbers,” Kendra said.
“Whose writing.”
“Cursive.” She held the page up like I could see it. “Real pretty cursive. The whole thing, till the last page.”
“And the last page?”
She turned to it. She read it twice to herself before she read it to me.
“Printed,” she said. “Capitals.”
GLEN’S BOOK. TOOK IT OFF HIS DESK. GOES TO MOMMA.
The desk drawer
Glen talked first and longest. He always did.
“Darrell wrote that,” he said. “Darrell was in my desk every week of his life. You made him pay for that safe and he was sore about it, Mar, he was sore for a year, and he was skimming you and writing it down in my name so it’d land on me.”
“Darrell printed,” Brittany said. “He printed his name on my birthday card.”
“Then he printed the end and wrote the rest. Hell, I don’t know how he did it.”
We were in the back room by then, under the one bulb, with the safe left in the doorway because it wouldn’t go over the sill. A box of trombone mouthpieces sat on the shelf over the desk, where it has sat since 2019. A trombone mouthpiece has never once been asked for in my shop.
Brittany had sent Paisley up front with Kendra to look at the guitars. The connecting door stood open a crack.
I held out my hand. “Keys.”
“Mar.”
“Keys, Glen.”
He didn’t give them to me. He talked.
“Mar, I kept this place open while you sat on that stool. I read you every card and every bill. A stop sign, you can’t read. I took twenty here and forty there when I was working your counter for wages and you were feeding your boy’s girl every week like she was blood. Big deal. The men in that steakhouse owe you more than I ever took.”
“Nine thousand of hers,” I said.
“And her.” He pointed at Brittany. “And now she’s family? I stood at that funeral home door because you TOLD me to. ‘I don’t want that girl in here,’ you said. ‘She put him on that road.’ I didn’t make it up, Mar. I carried it out there to her in the rain, and you let me.”
Brittany looked at me then. That close, I can see a face fine.
“He said you’d said it,” she said. “Standing out there. I never would believe you said it.”
“I said it,” I said.
Up front, Paisley wanted to know if the guitars were for sale. Kendra said some of them.
Glen leaned in, as close to me as Paisley had been in the booth. He could see he had me. “I’m the only one who’ll drive you, read to you, put up with you, you blind old bitch. Inside a week you’ll be calling me for a ride.”
I gave him the look. He’s seen it since he was a boy, on men twice his size, and he’s never seen it come his way.
He put the keys in my hand.
I found the desk key by feel. Short, the only one on the ring with a square head. I opened his drawer and put my hand in.
White cards, a stack thick as a sandwich, with a rubber band around them. And under them, in a plastic sleeve, a car title. I can’t read a title. I know the shape of one.
I held it out to Brittany. She took it and sat down on my stool.
“Call your wrecker,” I said to Glen. “Seven’s off.”
He made the call with me standing there. I can’t see a man lie across a room anymore. I could hear him not try.
I set the white cards on the desk. “Kendra calls every name on these in the morning.”
That was when he went the color he’d gone in the booth.
My own safe is the old one under the counter. I’ve opened it by feel for thirty-two years. I opened it and called Kendra back and had her count on the desk where I could hear the bills.
“Nine thousand two hundred,” I said.
“That’s the shop’s money,” Glen said. “Mar. That’s the shop’s money, you can’t just…”
“It’s mine,” I said.
“Marlene, I can’t take that,” Brittany said.
I didn’t argue. Kendra put it in a bank bag and set it in Brittany’s lap, on top of the title, and Brittany sat there with both hands on it and didn’t move.
I put Glen’s notebook back in Darrell’s safe, on top of the yellow card. I shut the door and spun the dial.
Glen stood in the back door with the rain coming in past him. He had no car. I had his keys and mine, and they were the same keys.
“And who’s driving you home, Mar?”
“I am,” Brittany said.
The day after Valentine’s
It rained the day after Valentine’s, cold enough to mean it.
Brittany drives me now, the mornings the shop opens early and the nights I eat out. The rest of the time I take the city bus, and the driver knows my stop.
Kendra reads me the cards. Yellow ones only. She’s been calling the names off Glen’s white ones, one or two a day, and writing down what each of them paid him, and I’ve been paying it back out of the drawer. I don’t ask her the total anymore.
My sister doesn’t call. The church ladies have quit telling me what a good boy he is.
The green safe stands behind my counter with MARLENE across the door. Customers want to know about it. I say my son’s girl painted it.
I gave Brittany her corn pudding dish back the week before, COLE still on the tape. I’d washed it twice.
Paisley went in ahead of us, pink rubber boots squeaking, straight past the hostess to my corner booth. The hostess let her go.
She hauled herself onto the bench like a fence rail and turned around to face me.
She held up nine fingers, none of them bent.
Send this one to somebody who still keeps a plate for a person they let walk out in the rain.
For more tales of family, finance, and the unexpected, check out There Is A Sponge, My Stove Was on Fire When His Mother Came Through the Back Door, and My Son Had Sewn Eleven Money Order Receipts Into That Cushion, One Each Month.
