Chapter 23: New Sign

The new sign went up over the door of the store on a Monday in November, at eight in the morning.

Dominic held the ladder.

My father stood on the sidewalk in his green apron with his glasses on their cord and refused to look until it was straight.

"A little left," he said.

"It's level, Dad."

"A little left."

The man from the sign shop climbed down and wiped his hands.

"That's it," he said. "Haldane & Daughter. Hardware and Lumber. Want me to take the old one?"

"Leave it in the back," my father said. "I'll hang it in the office."

The old sign had been painted every spring for thirty-one years.

The new one had the same name in the same green, with one more word under it.

I stood on the curb and read it twice.

Dominic came to stand beside me.

"Does it work?" he asked.

"It's a hardware store."

"That's not what I asked."

"It works," I said.

He put his arm around my shoulders in front of the whole street, and nobody on Front Street looked away.

Everyone knew.

The paper had printed the story on Sunday, with a photograph from the church steps, and the headline had a word in it my father would not say aloud.

Constance had gone to her sister's house in Florida the day after the wedding.

She sold nothing and signed nothing, and the yard foreman said she had not called once.

Preston ran the scale house now, under a man who had been at the yard longer than he had been alive.

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