I unwrapped that old drugstore receipt right there in my hallway, and I had to sit down, because inside was a little coil of paper and a note, and the paper was covered in tally marks, thousands of them.
The old pharmacist who ran that drugstore, a man named Herb, had left the note. He wrote that the phone booth in the back saw more of this towns heart than any confessional, and that he had done a small foolish thing for years that he could not bring himself to stop.
Every evening, he wrote, he watched a shy young man come in, feed that booth his dimes, and call the same girl, night after night, for a whole courtship. That young man was me, in 1962, calling my Ruth. And Herb, behind his counter, had quietly kept count.
For the length of my entire courtship, an old druggist made a tally mark every single night I called that girl, and he saved the count, because he said a man ought to know, someday, exactly how many times he reached across a town to say goodnight to the woman he loved.
Nine hundred and forty-one. That is how many marks were on that coil of paper. Nine hundred and forty-one nights I fed dimes into that booth to hear Ruths voice before I slept, and a kind man I barely knew counted every one and kept the number safe inside the booth for sixty years.
His note said: You never knew I was counting. A young man in love does not notice anything but the girl. But I noticed, and I kept it, because that many goodnights ought to be remembered. You earned her, son. Nine hundred and forty-one times over.
Ruth and I had forty-one years after all those phone calls. I lost her a while back. And I sat in my hallway with that little coil of tally marks and I cried like the young man who used to stand in that booth with a pocket full of dimes.
The count is framed now, next to the booth, in my hallway. Nine hundred and forty-one goodnights.
I bought back an old phone booth because the door stuck. It came with the exact number of times I told my Ruth I loved her before bed, tallied and saved by a druggist with a soft heart, waiting behind the coin box for the day I would need to know.