The thing I needed to see to was a crooked shelf I never got to finish squaring the day they walked me out. Foolish, maybe. But I could not stand the thought of leaving it wrong after twenty-eight years of leaving it right.
So I got there before the doors opened, let myself in, and I fixed that shelf. And while I had the ladder out, I went up to where we keep the receiving records, the clipboards nobody but me ever bothered with.
That pallet of copper fittings, the one that walked off on my watch. I found the delivery slip. I signed for what came in, same as always. But the count that got entered into the system that night was off by a full pallet, entered under the login of the seasonal kid the chain manager hired and never once checked.
The copper never went missing off the truck. It went missing off the paperwork, after I had gone home.
I did not take a thing. I clipped the real slip next to the doctored count and left both hanging where the founding family would see them Friday. Then I climbed down, put the ladder back, and stood a minute in a store I had kept running for most of my life.
When I turned around, there were three ranchers standing at the counter, hats in hand, come to walk in with me.
Word gets around a small town faster than any chain manager knows. These were men I carried on credit through dry years, a young couple I once floated the lumber for a porch. They heard what happened, and they were not going to stand for it.
Friday the founding family drove in for the cookout, same as planned. But it was not the send-off that manager expected. They had already found the clipboards. They had already pulled the seasonal kid aside. By the time the burgers were off the grill, the man the chain sent in to replace the old crew with part-timers was cleaning out his own office.
The founder shook my hand in front of the whole town and asked me, plain, to come back and run that counter as long as I wanted it.
I thought hard on it. Twenty-eight years is a long time to know where every bolt lives. In the end I told him I would come in two days a week, to train the young ones right, so the store stayed the kind of place a whole town could bring its troubles to.
He said that was the best deal he ever made.
I still square that shelf every time I walk past it. Some habits a man earns the right to keep.