Skipped by the Altar, Taken by His Uncle novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: One Nail

I read it twice.

The second time the words wouldn't stay still.

"Earl," I said. "I can't..."

"You can. The board voted four to one." He jabbed his cane down the table. "Junior was the one."

Blaine didn't look up.

"It's worth a lot more than a dollar," I said.

"It's worth what your father charged for a nail when a nail was all you needed." Earl held out his hand, palm up. "Pay me."

I didn't have a dollar.

I never carry cash. Reporters don't.

Reuben reached into his jacket, took out his wallet, and put a dollar bill in my hand without a word.

"That's a loan," I told him.

"It's community property," he said.

I put the dollar in Earl's palm.

He folded it in half, then in half again, and tucked it into his shirt pocket behind the fountain pen.

"Sold," he said. "Now somebody pass the jam."

We opened the store on a Saturday, the second week of November.

It took ten days to get it ready.

The paper came off the inside of the windows in long yellow strips.

Behind it, the store was empty and gray and smelled like river mud and old oil.

The shelves were still there. So was the counter, long and oak and scarred, with a groove worn into the front edge where forty years of customers had leaned.

So was the register.

So was the corkboard behind it, with three rusty thumbtacks still in it.

The flood line ran across the back wall at four feet.

The barber and the baker and the bar owner scrubbed it off in one afternoon. They were good at it now.

The shoe repair man rehung the door.

Reuben fixed the wiring and only shocked himself once.

On Friday night Connie hung the photo wall.

Six years of Halbrook on one long brick wall.

The barber's chair going up. The bakery at five a.m. A football game in the rain. The clerk with the beaded chain, laughing behind her window.

Earl on the Miss Loretta at two in the morning, at the wheel, in a flash of searchlight.

And at the end, by the door, one she'd taken without telling me.

Me, on the dry pavement of Front Street, my back to the camera, facing my father's paper-covered window.

"That's the one," Connie said. "That's the cover."

"I'm not putting my back on the cover."

"You are. You're the only one who never turned around to see if anybody was looking."

On Saturday at nine I stood on the front steps.

His steps. My steps.

Front Street was full. People stood out in the road, and the barber had his chairs out again.

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