The Store Across the Street

The Story

There is a town in central Illinois called Ashgrove, where the road comes in through the corn. Center Street runs four blocks from the water tower to the grain elevator, and then stops. Halfway down it, facing each other across forty feet of asphalt, are two hardware stores. On the west side, under a blue awning, Tavares Hardware. On the east side, under a red one, Rooney Hardware. They sell the same washers and the same wood screws. They both open at seven. They both close at six. Their owners have not spoken face to face in forty-one years. The town has arranged itself around this, with the patience of people who live there. The Chamber of Commerce prints two separate Founders Day flyers. The one year somebody tried printing a single flyer, it took a lawyer. When Gus Tavares put a bench outside his door, Margaret Rooney put out two. Not different benches. The same bench, twice, directly across the street. When she painted her awning in the spring, he painted his the following Saturday. Then he stood in the street with his arms folded until everybody had seen him do it. Ashgrove enjoys the feud the way a town enjoys weather. Children grow up and move away and come home at Thanksgiving. Before they ask after anybody's health, they ask whether those two are still at it. They are still at it. But at five fifty-five, every evening, something else happens.

Nora Bishop has worked the register at Rooney Hardware for thirty-four years. There is one thing about that job she has never been able to explain to anybody. Every evening, the telephone rings exactly five minutes before closing. Five fifty-five, every weekday, for as long as Nora has stood behind that counter. Margaret picks it up on the second ring. She does not say hello. She says, Anything? And the voice on the other end is flat and low and unhurried. It is a voice Nora has heard through a receiver ten thousand times, and in the same room not once. Nothing tonight, says Gus. Across the street, his free hand rests beside the register. And Margaret says, All right then. Three sentences. That is the whole call. Then the click, and her face does not change. Nora goes back to the receipt. A summer clerk named Desmond asked her about it once, in the way eighteen-year-olds ask things. Margaret told him it was inventory. She went on putting washers into a paper bag. He asked what happened if one of them had a part the other one needed. Margaret said that had not come up. She folded the top of the bag. Desmond, who was eighteen and polite, let the matter rest. He did not think to ask the obvious question: if it had never come up in forty-one years, why were the two of them still calling? There had been one store, once.

Center Street Hardware. Both names on the window in gold leaf, before either awning became a flag. In nineteen seventy-one, a young man and a young woman swept the same floor for the same old man. When he died, he left the building to the two of them in a will four sentences long. She kept the books. He knew the building. They learned where the other kept everything. A farmer would come in with a broken part in a paper bag, not knowing what it was called. Gus would turn it over twice, walk to the drawer bank, and put the right one in his hand. Fourteen years, and neither of them ever had to finish a sentence the other had started. In the spring of nineteen eighty-five, Gus's brother was about to lose his farm. Gus had guaranteed the loan against his own half of the shop. He had not told Margaret. Now the lender wanted payment. A regional chain offered enough to clear his debt. They wanted the whole building. His letter needed Margaret's signature before a sale could happen. On Tuesday, he signed his part. He meant to tell her after he had found the words. On Thursday, she found it in the drawer under the register, folded in thirds. She read it twice. Fourteen years together, and he had left her a space to sign. You were going to let me find out here? she asked. He could not look at her. On Friday, she leased the empty pharmacy directly across the street. Only then did Gus sell his house to settle the debt. He bought her share in instalments. The chain got nothing. What she could not forgive was how readily he had made her future part of his rescue. He had been frightened. He had also decided her answer did not matter. The debt was paid. That was the part he never put right.

The years did what years do. Both stores stayed open, which nobody in the county could account for. Nineteen hundred people, and a big-box store forty minutes up the highway. Somehow there was enough. Both of them got old at it. Gus's hands went thick and slow. Margaret's hair went from red to white without appearing to pass through grey. Neither window carried a closing sign. Every evening, Gus called at five fifty-five. Then, on a Tuesday morning in February, Rooney Hardware did not open. Nora waited at the door at seven, and again at half past. Then she drove to Ash Street. The ambulance was already in the driveway of Margaret's white house. It was a hip. It was not the other thing the whole street had braced for. But Margaret was seventy-six. After the hospital came rehabilitation, and after that a niece in Ohio. The niece had a spare room on the ground floor. Nobody had to say what that meant. Slowly, Rooney Hardware stopped being a store that was closed and became a store that was finished. That first Tuesday evening, Gus dialled the shop. Nobody answered. He tried again at twenty past six. Then he put down the receiver and left his hand flat on the wood.

The closing sale ran through April. Half the town came and bought things they did not need. That is what people do at the end of something. Nora worked the register and let them. Late on a long afternoon, Desmond asked whether the two of them had ever made it up. He asked kindly, with no idea what he was asking. Nora stopped counting the change. They never did, she told him. Neither one of them ever said sorry. Not once in forty-one years. Then she reached for the telephone and turned it around. Stuck to the back, gone the colour of weak tea, was a strip of masking tape. On it was a number, written in the small, steady hand that had priced things for decades. It was not the number of Tavares Hardware. It was Gus's number at home. He had lived by himself on Cedar Court since nineteen ninety-eight. She had kept the number current. Margaret had never once dialled it. Dialling it would have been forgiveness. And she was not going to give him that. She had made it clear to God and Ashgrove and herself. She had simply kept it where she could see it. That was all Nora said. Across the street, beneath the counter at Tavares Hardware, there is a second strip of tape. The writing is heavier. The pencil line is darker. It is in Gus's hand. It has her number on it.

The sign came down on a Thursday. Two men, a ladder, and forty minutes. Afterwards there was a paler rectangle on the brick, where the sign had been. Gus watched from his own doorway, arms folded, the way Ashgrove had watched him stand for forty-one years. From the sidewalk, nobody could tell what his face was doing. That evening, at ten to six, he shut off the lights over the paint aisle. At five fifty-five, he stood beside the telephone. Two months of calls had gone unanswered. This time, before he could dial, it rang. The little caller display showed an Ohio number. Gus picked it up on the second ring. He did not say hello. Five hundred miles away, Margaret sat in the ground-floor room in Ohio. A voice he had not heard in the same room since nineteen eighty-five said, Anything? And he said, Nothing tonight. And she said, All right then. Neither of them hung up. They stayed like that a long while, with the street going dark. Then she said, Gus. Just his name, after all that quiet. And he said, I know.