The woman at the paint counter held a gallon can up to the young man who’d mixed it and said, “Go find somebody normal, sweetie, I’m not explaining colors to you twice.” My eight-year-old daughter grabbed my sleeve. When the woman demanded the manager over $131 of paint, I said I’d go get him myself. She thanked me.
Nicolas had mixed paint for us twice that spring.
He was twenty-three, he had Down syndrome, and he tapped every lid shut with a rubber mallet exactly four times.
Layla counted along under her breath, every time.
That Saturday we only needed a quart of white for her bedroom door, and we were third in line behind a woman in a camel coat.
She had three gallons lined up on the counter like evidence.
“This is beige,” she said.
Nicolas looked at the lid where he’d dabbed the sample.
“It’s the gray,” he said. “From your card.”
“I didn’t give you a card.”
“You gave me the card,” he said. “Number forty-one.”
She laughed, one short sound, and got out her phone.
She held it up at his face with the red dot going.
“Kristy here, you guys,” she said to it. “Watch this. Tell them what color I asked for, sweetie.”
His ears went red.
He put both hands flat on the counter, the way people do on a boat.
“Gray,” he said. “Forty-one.”
“You don’t even know what gray is.” She turned the phone around to her own face. “They put him on the machine. On the MACHINE.”
The man behind us suddenly needed something from the caulk aisle.
I didn’t move either.
I’m not proud of how long that took.
Then Layla pulled my sleeve down hard and put her mouth right against my ear.
“Mom,” she said. “She put the paper in her purse.”
“What paper?”
“The little gray one. In the pocket with the zipper. When he turned around to the machine.”
I looked at the purse.
Brown leather, hanging off her elbow, the side pocket zipped shut.
“He mixed what you handed him,” I said.
She turned around slow, the phone still up.
“Were you asked?” she said. “Go back to your mulch, honey.”
“I’m buying door paint.”
“Then buy it.”
She swung back to Nicolas. “I want a manager. Not a lead, not a supervisor, a MANAGER. And I want him off that machine before he ruins somebody’s whole house. I’m not paying for this shit.”
Nicolas reached for the phone on the wall behind him to page.
“NOT you,” she said. “You’ll just call your little buddy in the back.”
His hand stopped halfway.
He put it back on the counter.
“I’ll get him,” I said. “I know where he is.”
She looked at me like I’d finally said something in English.
“Thank you,” she said. “See? Somebody in here has sense.”
I told Layla to stand by the paint chips and not move an inch.
Then I walked past the key machine and the bird seed and through the swinging door that said Employees Only.
The office was the size of a closet.
My father was at his metal desk eating cold sesame noodles out of a takeout box, his reading glasses pushed up on his head, the radio playing a polka station nobody in that building has ever admitted to choosing.
“Dad,” I said. “Paint counter.”
He was already setting the noodles down. “Is it Nicolas?”
“There’s a woman filming him.”
He stood up so fast the chair rolled into the filing cabinet.
Dad hired Nicolas four years ago, after his job coach called nine hardware stores in Kankakee and my father was the only one who called her back.
He taught him the tinting machine himself.
TWO weekends, on his own time.
When we came back through the swinging door, she was still filming.
She saw the green vest and the gray hair and put the phone right back up.
“Finally,” she said. “Your employee mixed me three gallons of garbage and lied to my face about it. I want my money back and I want him gone.”
My father didn’t look at her.
He looked at Nicolas.
“What card did she give you, bud?”
“Gray,” Nicolas said. “Forty-one.”
“There was NO card,” she said.
Layla stepped out from the paint chips.
“It’s in your purse,” she said, loud and clear across the counter. “In the zipper part. Grandpa, she put it there when Nicolas turned around.”
The woman’s hand went flat over the purse.
She looked at Layla.
Then at me.
Then up at my father’s face, properly, for the first time since he’d walked out.
“Grandpa,” she said.
“This is my store,” my father said. “Thirty-one years. And he’s the best tinter I’ve ever had.”
For a second her mouth worked and nothing came out of it.
Then it came back all at once.
“Oh, so it’s a FAMILY BUSINESS. You all set this up. You think I don’t have every second of this on video?”
“Good,” my father said, and pointed at the black dome over the register. “So do I.”
“Open the zipper pocket, ma’am.”
She pulled the purse in tight against her coat.
“I’m not opening ANYTHING for you.”
Nicolas picked up his mallet and set it back down without tapping anything.
She looked at the door.
She looked at the dome.
Then she set the purse on the counter between her three gallons and put two fingers on the zipper.
She pulled it about an inch.
And she stopped, and smiled at my father like they were old friends.
“Elliott,” she said. “Do you want to tell your daughter, or should I?”
The zipper
She took her fingers off the zipper and left it there, an inch open.
“I’m his sister,” she said to me. “Half. Same daddy. This was our daddy’s store, and your father has been sitting on my half of it for thirty-one years.”
She said it to the phone too. She’d turned it so it got all three of us.
I reached back without looking, found the hood of Layla’s red fleece and pulled her in against my hip.
My father didn’t say she was lying.
He didn’t say anything. He took his reading glasses off his head, folded them and put them in his vest pocket, which is what he does before he lifts something heavy.
“Open the pocket, Kristy,” he said.
“Oh, he knows my name.” She laughed for the phone. “Thirty-one years and he still knows my name.”
Nicolas was looking at the cans. His lips were moving. He was counting something.
“Dad,” I said.
He didn’t look at me either.
Kristy did. She tipped her head at me like I was a dog that had done something cute.
“What did he tell you happened to Daddy’s store, honey?”
Seymour
What he told me would fit on an index card.
Grandpa Seymour opened the store in 1971 with a loan from the Elks and a used key machine. He died the winter I turned three, and Dad took it over. There’s a picture of Grandpa by the key machine to this day, short sleeves, a pencil behind his ear, squinting like the sun was in his eyes inside the store.
Somewhere in there Grandpa had a second family over in Bradley. That was the whole sentence I got, once, when I was about ten. Dad said it the way he says the price of a bag of salt.
I grew up in that store. From the time I was fourteen I spent Saturday mornings in that closet of an office doing the books with him. Big green check registers, one a year. He read out the bills, I wrote the checks in my best cursive, and he signed them.
There was one every month for $612. Pay to K. Horowitz. Memo: S.P.
“What’s S.P.?” I asked him.
“Your grandpa. That’s the note on the store,” he said. “You never send that one late. Not one day.”
I wrote it every month until the summer I left for school. The last one he made me send certified, and when the green card came back with her signature on it, he stapled it inside the back cover and said, “That’s that.”
When they redid the office in 2019, he told me to throw the old registers out. I put them in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet instead, because the first one has his handwriting from when he was thirty-two, and I couldn’t do it.
He never asked. He never opens that drawer.
Nicolas came along four years ago. Dad taught him the system on those two weekends: the card is the order, you mix the card, you dab the lid, you show the customer. Nicolas never needed the system. He remembers every card he’s ever mixed. Our white is number two. He told Layla that in March, and she has called it “number two” every day since.
At the counter, Kristy lifted her phone off me and turned it on my father.
2,314
“Say it, Elliott,” she said. “Tell them how Daddy’s store went to you and I got a phone call after the funeral.”
“That’s not how it went,” my father said.
“I was twenty-one. I had a baby on my hip. You changed the locks.”
The man from the caulk aisle had come back. He was standing at the end of the counter with a tube of silicone, and his phone was up now too.
“Come on, man,” he said to my father. “That’s your sister. Give her the money back at least.”
Kristy pointed at him without looking. “Thank you. See? Normal people.”
Nicolas laid the mallet down flat on the counter, square with the edge.
I stepped up next to her. I kept it low, the way you’d talk to somebody in the next pew.
“My daughter is right here,” I said. “Put the phone down.”
She didn’t put it down. She turned it on me.
“And this is the niece,” she said to it. “The one who gets the store when he dies. Say hi, sweetie. They want to see you.” She tipped the screen up and read off it. “Margaret wants to know if you knew. Araceli says you look just like him.”
Then she swung the phone down toward Layla.
I got in front of it so fast I kicked one of the gallons. It rocked on its rim and came back down.
“There she is,” Kristy said. “Mama bear. Took her long enough.”
She’d seen me standing there too. Everybody had.
The screen was right in front of my face now. Under her face in the little square, a red box said LIVE, and next to it a number that kept going up.
2,314.
Sample quart
My father went around the end of the counter to the register. He hit the key that opens the drawer, counted out six twenties, a ten and a one, and laid them on top of her three gallons.
“There’s your hundred thirty-one,” he said. “Take it and go home, Kristy.”
That’s how he ends things. You pay, and they leave.
She didn’t look at the money.
“You think I drove over here for a hundred and thirty-one dollars?” She said it to the phone. “I want my half. Thirty-one years of my half.”
“I paid you,” my father said. “Every month. Fifteen years.”
“Not one dime.”
“A hundred and eighty checks.”
“Then show them one.” She swung the phone up to his face. “Go on. Show everybody one check, Elliott.”
He opened his mouth and shut it again. He looked over at me.
“Callie threw those books out when we redid the office,” he said.
Kristy laughed. “Of course she did. Callie. Hi, Callie.”
The caulk man shook his head and said, “Man.”
Nicolas had been quiet so long I’d forgotten he could talk to her at all.
“You came last Saturday,” he said.
She didn’t turn around.
“You came last Saturday at ten-fifteen,” Nicolas said. “You bought a sample quart. Forty-one. You paid cash.”
“I have never been in this store in my life.”
“You asked me which one was Elliott.”
The bottom drawer
“He doesn’t know what day it is,” Kristy said to the phone, and I was already walking.
“Stay with Grandpa,” I told Layla.
Past the key machine. Past the bird seed. Through the swinging door.
The polka station was still going. His noodles were still open on the desk with the fork standing up in them.
The bottom drawer of the filing cabinet sticks. You have to lift it and pull. I knelt on the floor and lifted and pulled, and there they were, sixteen green registers with the years on the spines in his marker.
I took 2010 first. My own handwriting at eighteen, round as a kid’s. August. K. Horowitz. $612. S.P. And inside the back cover, stapled, the green certified card with her signature on it. Kristy Horowitz. Big loops on the K.
Then I took 1995 off the end. I’d carried that book twice, in and out of a box. I had never once opened it.
His writing on the inside cover, in pencil, pressed so hard it came through on the next page.
Dad left everything to me. Will dated 1988. Kristy gets nothing in it.
Not right. She’s 21 with a baby.
In the margin a number, figured out the long way and circled. $110,160.
And under that, one more line, underlined twice.
Tell her it’s her half. Don’t ever tell her it isn’t owed.
The green card
When I came back out, she was in the middle of a sentence about our grandfather’s funeral.
I set both books on the counter between her gallons, open, facing her phone. The green card on the left. His pencil on the right.
“What is that,” she said.
“The checks,” I said.
She looked down. She looked for a long time, longer than she’d looked at anything else that day, and the phone dipped while she did it, so her two thousand people got a good minute of the ceiling tiles.
Then it came back up, on her own face.
“That’s his handwriting,” she said. “He can write whatever he wants in his own book. That’s not a legal anything. You know what six hundred and twelve dollars was by 2010? Nothing. A light bill. He sent me a light bill a month for Daddy’s whole store and he wants a medal for it. I had a baby. I had a husband who walked out. I cashed those because I had to, not because it was fair, and he knew I had to, that’s why he sent them. Don’t you look at me like that. You were in diapers.”
“I was fourteen when I started writing them,” I said.
That stopped her for about a second.
“Margaret says what does it say,” she said, reading her screen, and she didn’t read the next one. Her thumb went up to the corner to end it.
“Open the pocket first,” my father said. He pointed at the dome. “Or I put mine up next to yours.”
Kristy looked at the dome. She looked at the caulk man, who had put his phone away in his jacket.
She unzipped the side pocket the rest of the way.
The card was right on top. Gray, a 41 in the corner, and under it a receipt folded in quarters. She left the receipt where it was. She took out the card and dropped it on the counter like it was hot.
“Told you,” Layla said.
Nicolas picked up his mallet and tapped the nearest lid four times. Layla counted under her breath.
Kristy put the phone in her coat pocket without ending anything. Then she held her hand out flat at my father.
“I’ll take the hundred thirty-one,” she said.
My father picked the twenties up off her paint and put them back in the drawer.
“Tinted paint’s not returnable,” he said. “It’s on the sign. It’s been on the sign since Dad.”
She walked out without her paint. The door chime played its two notes behind her.
Number forty-one
Two Saturdays later the three gallons were on the mis-tint shelf by the front door with an orange sticker on each lid. Five dollars.
Her live video stayed up nine hours before she took it down. That was long enough. Somebody cut a clip that starts with me third in line, not moving, while she holds the phone in Nicolas’s face. Somebody else put a timer in the corner. Thirty-eight seconds. People in the comments did the math on me. I set my Facebook to private and left it there.
Dad took the 1995 register home. He hasn’t said a word about Bradley, and I haven’t asked.
Layla picked the gray for her walls herself.
I carried one of the gallons up to the paint counter and set it in front of Nicolas, lid up, the beige-gray dab still on it.
“Can you shake this one again?” I said.
He put it in the shaker. When it stopped, he set it on the counter and tapped the lid four times.
Layla counted every one.
“Forty-one,” Nicolas said, and slid it across to me.
If this one got to you, send it to the person you’d want standing third in line behind you.
For more stories about standing up for your family, read “The Last Thing I Told That Man Was To Stay Away From My Daughter” and “I Buried My Mom In April. My Husband Had Her Money Promised By October.”. And for another tense family showdown, there’s “My Stepfather Unscrewed Grandma’s Porch Bulb With His Sleeve on Thanksgiving Night”.
