I worked it out, saw what it was, and had to grab the workbench, because it was a key ring with two keys on it, and the brass tag hanging off it said HOLLIS HARDWARE, 114 DEPOT ST.
My father’s store. My father’s store that closed in 2004 and has sat empty on that corner ever since with brown paper in the windows.
Wrapped around the keys was a land contract.
Buyer: Della Faye Hollis. Seller: the Nunnery estate, who took that building at auction when my daddy’s health went. Two hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, sixty months, balance due and deed to transfer in September of next year. Signed the eleventh of March, 2021.
Behind it was a payment book, the kind the credit union used to give out, with a stamp in every square. Thirty-nine squares stamped. Not one late.
She cleaned three houses a week in Sharpsburg. She had been doing it since 2016 and she told me it was to get out of the house and keep herself busy, and every dollar of it went to a building I drive past twice a day and can’t look at.
And the nails. I dumped that can out on the bench and looked at what I’d been calling a can of hardware for a year.
Square-cut nails. Old ones. The kind that came out of that store’s floor when the Nunnery boys pulled the shelving out, and out of the crates in the back, and out of the sign brackets. Cut nails and the flat-head screws my daddy used to sell by the pound out of bins with a scoop, and a handful of the little brass escutcheon pins he kept in a drawer under the register.
She had gone in there with a paper sack and picked my father’s hardware up off the floor by hand.
Her note was underneath the rag, in the bottom of the can.
You’ve said for twenty years you’d open it back up if you were a younger man. You’re not a younger man and neither am I and I’m tired of waiting on the right time. It’s paid to September. Get the boy to help you with the roof. I know you wanted a reel. There’s a whole store of reels in it if you’d go and look. — Della
There’s a whole store of reels in it if you’d go and look.
A month later she was gone in the night, and that can sat on the garage shelf for eleven months while I told myself I couldn’t touch it, and the payment book was in it the whole time and I have since learned that our son had been making those payments since the funeral out of his own pocket without saying one word to me about it.
Not one word. He’s thirty-one and he did what his mother would have done.
We got the paper off the windows in April. The floor is shot and the ceiling has a bad spot and the counter my grandfather built is still in there under a tarp, and my son and I are working Saturdays.
I said well, aren’t you thoughtful, in the sour way, to a woman who had bought me back my father’s building one bucket of nails at a time.
We open in the spring if the roof holds. Same name on the glass. The nails are going in a jar on the counter and they’re not for sale.