I turned the green ledger toward the light of the window and read the last page one more time, though I already knew the figure by heart, and I had to hold on to the counter. Six thousand two hundred and fourteen dollars. It was written in the careful hand of Stan, the numbers climbing down the page in columns, a total of forty one years of neighbors who could not pay on a Friday. Under it, in the same blue pencil, he had added four lines I had never seen in my life.
Mark stood on the other side of the counter with his hands pressed flat on the wood. “Ma, read it out loud,” he said. “Please.” So I did, with my glasses crooked and the bell over the door silent for once. “Rosie, if you are reading this, I am gone, and I am sorry I did not tell you how bad it got. Never collect any of it. These are our people. If anybody wants to settle up, put it in the coffee can for the next family. The store was never about money. Love, Stan.”
I could not go on. Mark came around the counter and put his arms about me, and we stood there among the loaves of rye with the sign on the door turned to Closed. “Why did he never tell us?” he asked, his voice rough. I thought about it. “Because you would have told him to stop,” I said, “and he could not have stopped. It would have been like asking him to stop breathing. He wanted you to go to college without carrying this on your back.”
Outside, Mrs. Kowalczyk was waiting with her cart, patient as a saint. I opened the door and brought her in, and Mr. Nowak came with her, still holding his lottery tickets in his fist, because he had forgotten his change. I told them nothing. I only held up the ledger. Mrs. Kowalczyk looked at the page with her name, and the figures beside it, two hundred and twelve dollars from the winter of the surgery of her husband, and her mouth began to tremble. She did not say a word.
Kindness that is extended in secret and never collected is the only debt that grows richer the longer it goes unpaid.
The next morning she was at the door at seven sharp with an envelope. Inside was a twenty dollar bill, folded in quarters, and a note on the back of a church bulletin. For the can, it said. I will bring twenty every month until it is paid. I tried to refuse. She put her small hand over mine and said, “Rosemarie, Stan carried me when I could not walk. Let me carry something now.” I placed the bill in the coffee can on the shelf behind the register.
I did not make an announcement. I never had to. By Monday, three more envelopes had been slipped under the door. By Friday, Mr. Nowak had settled sixty dollars from 1994 and apologized for the delay. A young man in a work jacket, whose name I will not say, came in and set down forty dollars and told me his mother had owed it when he was a boy. By Christmas, nearly four thousand dollars had gone into that can, and not one of them had been asked.
Mark counted it for me on Christmas Eve at the kitchen table, in the little sums he used to make on the back of his math homework. He said nothing for a long time. Then he said, “Ma, I thought the store was a burden.” He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I thought I was rescuing you from it. I did not know it was the only thing in this neighborhood that still held anybody up.” I told him I understood. He had been afraid for me, and fear can speak very loudly.
He took down the sign of the realtor himself, the one that was leaning in the back of his car, and he threw it in the dumpster behind the Giant. Then he asked if he could stay on Saturdays and help with the books. He is better at it than Stan ever was. He set up a small notebook by the register for orders by telephone, so that Mrs. Kowalczyk and others like her can call in a list and have it carried to their door. He delivers them himself, in the rain, in his good coat.
We opened a new ledger in January, a plain black one from the stationer on Hamilton Street. On the first page, in his neat adult handwriting, Mark wrote the date and a single line. Opening balance, six thousand two hundred fourteen dollars, forgiven. Beneath it, he started a new column, titled The Can, and each month he writes down what has come in, never a name, only an amount. By spring, the column had passed five thousand dollars. It is spent on bread and milk and medicine for whoever needs it, and no one is asked.
The store is still open from seven to two, six days a week, and the neighbors say it smells like rye bread and good coffee and a little like the Old Country. The hand painted sign of Stan hangs above the door where he put it in 1979, freshened up by a boy from the art school who refused to be paid. I wear the apron of Stan behind the counter, washed at last, because Mark insisted. It still smells faintly of kielbasa and pine soap.
Sometimes in the evenings, when the street is quiet, I sit on the stool behind the register and open the green ledger to the last page, to the four lines of Stan. I read them twice and then I close it. I say a rosary for him, and for the people on every line, and for my son, who came back through the door with the bell ringing. The can stands on the shelf, never quite full, never quite empty, exactly as Stan wished.