The next morning, I got up at six, same as every day for three years, drove down to Hartley’s, and sat in that lot with the brass key in my hand and no earthly reason to be there.
It was Sunday. Store’s closed Sundays. My body did not know that yet.
I was going to drop the key through the mail slot and go home. Then I saw Dolores’s Buick around the side by the loading dock, where she parks when she does not want it seen from the road.
Seventy-eight years old, alone in a closed furniture store at ten after six.
I let myself in. She was on the blue sectional with the lights off and the daily book open on her lap.
Hartley’s has kept a daily book since 1961. One page a day: the weather, the total, and one line about the day. Roy’s father did it, Roy did it after him, and I have done it since the funeral because somebody had to.
She had it open to the eleventh of March, three years ago. My husband’s handwriting. The last page he ever wrote, the day before he died on a Sunday morning driving to that store.
Sat 11 March. Rain all day, sold the blue sectional. Rachel opened at seven again. She has opened this store more mornings than my daddy ever did and my mother still calls her the girl from the trailer park at church. Have to fix that. Doing it Monday.
He never got to Monday.
Dolores has been coming to that store alone every Sunday for three years to read that page. She told me so in the dark with her shoes off. Same three years I have been opening it at seven, thinking I was the only one who could not let go of the building.
She said she has hated me for a reason that had nothing to do with me: her son loved me more than he loved the store, and then he died on his way to it.
She said that out loud, at seventy-eight. Then she said the loudspeaker was the worst thing she has ever done and she would not ask me to forgive it.
I did not forgive it that morning. I sat down on the other end of that sectional and we did not say much for about an hour.
I came back on the twelfth. Not as staff. My name is at the top of the schedule board now where it says manager, and on the paperwork with the manufacturers. The nephew works Saturdays and does what I tell him.
And on my first Monday back, with a floor full of customers, Dolores Hartley picked up that microphone behind the register and said one sentence into it.
She said, “Attention, Hartley’s shoppers. This is Rachel’s store, and I would appreciate it if you all treated her accordingly.”
Then she put it down and straightened a lamp shade that did not need straightening.
She is not an easy woman. She is at my kitchen table every Thursday now.
People do not always hurt you for who you are. Sometimes it is for what they never got to say on a Monday, and the only cure is somebody finally reading the page.