FORTY YEARS AGO, when it was over, Dad Lewis was only surprised that it had taken so long to find him out. He hadn’t been all that clever about it.
After he’d made the discoveries, Dad wouldn’t put it off and on Saturday after they’d closed for the day and the last meager purchase had been made and the change tendered across the scarred wood counter and the last customer had gone out the front door onto the cold darkening sidewalk on Main Street, Dad said, Are we locked up?
Clayton was standing before the front door looking out at the empty winter street. It looks like it wants to snow, he said.
Does it, Dad said. Has everybody gone?
Yeah, they’re all out. I’m ready to go too. I’m wore out today. We were busy.
Come back here to the office first, Dad said.
Something more to do?
No. Just come back to the office.
He turned and walked past the long narrow ranks of plumbing supplies and the assortment of plastic elbows and metal clamps, past the spools of chains and nylon ropes and thin cording hanging at the end of the aisle and went into the office at the rear of the building back at the alley and sat down behind the desk.
Clayton, the young clerk, followed him and stood at the door, leaning against the doorframe, rolling down his blue shirt cuffs as he did every day after they closed.
Sit down, Dad said.
Something going on?
Come in and take a seat.
I hope this won’t take too long. Tanya’s waiting on me. We was talking of getting a sitter and going out for dinner somewhere. Having a night out.
Were you. Have a seat first, Dad said.
Clayton stepped into the room and sat down. What is it? he said.
Dad looked at him and looked past him out through the open office door for a moment. A car went by in the alley, the top of it visible through the square window in the outside door. He turned in the swivel chair and took down the wide blue-backed cash receipts ledger from the shelf behind him and turned forward again, coming around slowly in the chair, and opened the book on the desk, finding the pages he wanted, and turned the book a half turn so it was right side up to Clayton. You want to say something about this? Dad said.
Clayton looked at him and then down at the ledger pages. He studied the figures and then looked up quickly. I don’t get what you mean.
I think you do.
No, I don’t neither. Are you accusing me of something?
Are you going to make this harder than it needs to be? Dad said. You sure you want to do that?
He pointed his finger at the total for the month just finished and turned back a page and indicated the total for the previous month.
Have you got those numbers in your head?
I don’t get what this is about, said Clayton.
I’m showing you. Keep watching.
He turned back the pages in the ledger to the same months four years earlier. You see these? he said. He pointed to the total for the earlier year.
The store’s making an average of three hundred dollars a month less than it did four years ago, Dad said. How would that be? What would be the cause of something like that, do you think?
I don’t have no idea. People started going someplace else maybe.
Where would they go? This is the only hardware in town.
Maybe we’re just not as busy.
No. We’re still as busy. Inventory tells us that.
Then I don’t have no answer for you.
You could be missing something.
Like what do you mean?
Like something you lost. Something that might of fell out of your jacket pocket when you hung it up on the back hook this morning and never noticed.