My boss’s son made a seventy-four-year-old cemetery caretaker count a coffee can of dimes onto his counter for $41.60 of fence primer, then told her, “Out loud, sweetheart, so the whole line learns what charity looks like.” Half the line laughed. I didn’t know whose dimes those were until I found the note in the lid.
Corey Vollmer was taking over Vollmer Hardware in Owatonna on the first of next month.
Everybody on payroll knew it.
I had nineteen years at the paint desk and a mortgage that didn’t care whose name was on the sign.
So when Delores set that can on the counter at ten past four on a Saturday, I kept my head down and shook her quart.
She came in every spring. Black primer, two wire brushes, a roll of blue tape.
She painted the iron fence around the veterans’ section at the cemetery by herself, and nobody paid her a cent for it.
The can was the big kind ground coffee comes in, with the paper label gone and dents along the bottom.
“Ma’am,” Corey said. “What is that.”
“Dimes,” Delores said. “It’s ALL counted. Four hundred and sixteen.”
“Four hundred and sixteen,” Corey said, loud enough for the back of the line. “Everybody hear that? We’re getting paid in DIMES today.”
The man behind her had a bag of birdseed under one arm and was eating sunflower seeds out of his shirt pocket.
He laughed first.
Then the woman behind him.
Then most of them.
Delores pushed the can an inch closer to the register.
“I rolled them at home,” she said. “I just ran out of wrappers.”
“Then count them out loud, sweetheart,” Corey said. “So the whole line learns what charity looks like.”
He leaned back on the battery rack with his arms folded like he’d paid for a seat.
She started counting.
“Ten. Twenty. Thirty.”
Her hands shook in the forties. She lost her place at a dollar sixty and had to start the stack over.
Corey clapped every time she finished a dollar.
Slow claps.
I put the lid on her primer and hammered it down harder than it needed.
“Shari,” he said, without turning around. “You want to help Grandma, help her on your own time.”
At eighteen dollars somebody near the door said, “Come on, man, open another lane.”
Corey didn’t open another lane.
He picked up the can instead, looked into it, and tipped it.
Not a lot. Just enough.
Maybe sixty dimes went off the edge of the counter and rolled under the key machine and the propane cage and the end cap of mousetraps.
“Oops,” Corey said. “Guess you’re COUNTING ON THE FLOOR now.”
Delores looked at the floor.
Then she started to get down.
I was around the paint desk before I decided to be.
“DON’T YOU DARE get on your knees in here,” I said to her. “I’ve got them.”
I crawled. In my apron, in front of eleven people, with Lizette coming back from break and stopping in the aisle with her coffee.
I found fifty-three dimes. Seven were gone for good, under something bolted to the floor.
Corey rang her up and stood there with his hand out.
“She’s seventy cents short,” he said. “Store policy.”
I put a dollar on the counter.
“Keep the change,” I said. “Buy yourself some manners.”
“Take that tone again and you can take it to the unemployment office,” he said. “Thirty days, Shari. THIRTY DAYS and this is my counter.”
Delores picked up her bag.
She looked at the empty can a long time.
“Willie said I could keep it,” she said. “I don’t think I want it.”
And she walked out with her primer.
I went to toss the can in the back and felt paper under the lid.
Folded small. Taped flat.
Willie Vollmer signs our checks by hand in green ink, because his wife bought him a box of green pens in 1998 and he’s still using them up.
I knew it was his before I unfolded it.
Three lines in green.
Delores. For the fence. Spend it at my store and nowhere else, then come tell me who treated you right.
I read it twice standing by the register while Corey restocked the batteries and whistled.
Willie had put that money in her hands.
Willie had sent her here.
On a Saturday, when he knew exactly who’d be on the register.
I didn’t sleep much.
Sunday afternoon my phone rang, and it was Willie, and Willie doesn’t call.
“Delores came by the house,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“She won’t tell me what happened. She keeps saying to ask the paint lady.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’ve got a man from Rochester who wants the building, the stock and the name,” he said. “And I’ve got a son who thinks it’s already his. I sign one set of papers tomorrow at nine.”
The dog was barking somewhere on his end.
“I watched the register camera four times,” he said. “There’s no sound on it.”
“Willie.”
“I need what he said to her, Shari. Word for word. And I need you to say it with him sitting right here.”
Behind him a screen door banged, and Corey’s voice came through the kitchen asking his mother what was for dinner.
Then Willie said, “Corey, come in here,” and put me on speaker.
Willie’s kitchen phone
A chair scraped on his end. Somebody set a glass down on a table.
“Go ahead, Shari,” Willie said.
I was at my own sink with a frying pan half scrubbed. I turned the water off.
“He told her to count them out loud,” I said. “He said, ‘Out loud, sweetheart, so the whole line learns what charity looks like.’ He clapped every dollar. Then he tipped the can and said, ‘Oops. Guess you’re counting on the floor now.'”
The dog had quit barking.
“That’s not what I said,” Corey said.
“Which part,” Willie said.
“Any of it. Dad. I said out loud because she kept losing count and there were eleven people standing there. That’s it. And she’s leaving out the part where she threw a dollar at me and told me to buy manners. In front of customers. Ask Lizette.”
“I put a dollar on the counter,” I said.
“She threw it.”
“I put it down, Corey.”
“She’s got thirty days and she knows it,” he said. “She’d tell you I kicked the old lady if she thought it bought her a year.”
Willie didn’t answer him. I could hear him breathing through his nose, the way he does over an invoice that’s wrong.
“Shari,” he said. “You still have the can?”
It was on my counter next to the toaster, where I’d set it Saturday night because I didn’t know what else to do with it.
“Yes.”
“Bring it in tomorrow. Eight-thirty, my office. Before Lindahl gets here.”
Then Corey, closer to the phone than before.
“Dad. Who’s Lindahl?”
The Christmas party story
Every Christmas Willie closes at three on the twenty-third and we eat in the back room off the loading dock. Ham, somebody’s bars, a sheet cake from Fareway with the store’s name spelled out in frosting. And every year, after his second cup of coffee, Willie tells the dime story.
I’ve heard it eighteen times. I could tell it for him.
Corey was nine. Willie paid him a dime an aisle to sweep, fourteen aisles, out of his own pocket so it wouldn’t go through the books. Corey’s mother gave him an empty coffee can to keep it in. He kept that can on the shelf over the time clock, and he climbed the stepladder every Saturday to drop his dimes in.
“Fall of ninety-two he drops the whole thing off the top step,” Willie always says. “Dents it all along the bottom. And he’s bawling. Not because of the can. He thinks he broke the money.”
Everybody laughs at that part, every year. Corey too, when he comes to the party, which isn’t every year.
“Then he wrote on it so I’d keep my hands off,” Willie says. “And I put it in the safe with the deed to the building, and that’s where it lives.”
Somebody always asks how much is in it. Willie always says enough to buy a lot of nothing.
I’d never seen it. The safe is in Willie’s office, and you don’t go in Willie’s safe.
That was the only can of dimes I knew anything about, and on Saturday I didn’t think of it once. I was on the floor, under the end cap of mousetraps, with eleven people looking at the back of my apron.
So that’s how it was on the inside of the store. On the outside, Corey was the face. He did the store’s Facebook videos, the ones that start with him holding a snow shovel and saying “Vollmer Hardware, neighbors since 1961.” He drove the store truck in the Fourth of July parade and threw Tootsie Rolls. Ladies at church told me how lucky we were that Willie had a son who wanted it.
My mortgage is $1,140 a month. I refinanced in 2021. Twenty-two years left on it, and I’m fifty-four.
Sunday night I sat at the table and read the note again. I didn’t turn the can over. I didn’t think to. I put it in a Fareway bag by the back door so I wouldn’t leave without it, like a dish I owed somebody.
At twenty to seven Monday morning, Corey’s truck was in my driveway.
Barton Supply
He didn’t get out. He rolled the window down and waited for me to come to him, which I did, because I had to get past him to get to my car anyway.
He had a coffee from the Kwik Trip and he looked like he’d slept about as much as I had.
“Lindahl,” he said. “Ben Lindahl. Barton Supply. You know Barton?”
I knew Barton. Eleven stores between Rochester and Mankato. Blue signs.
“Mom told me last night,” he said. “Dad’s had him on the phone since February. Building, stock, the name, all of it. He’d keep the name on the sign for a year so nobody gets upset, and then it’s Barton.”
He drank his coffee.
“You know what Barton doesn’t have, Shari?”
I didn’t say anything.
“A paint desk. I looked. I called the one in Faribault and asked for the paint desk and the kid laughed at me. They sell it premixed off a pallet. There’s a tint machine by the registers and whoever’s on runs it. You’d be on a register at Barton for eleven-fifty an hour. If they keep you. They’re not keeping people over fifty with nineteen years of raises. Nobody does that.”
“Corey.”
“I’m not threatening you. I’m telling you how it is. You go in there this morning and you say it was a joke that went too far. Which it was. I say I’m sorry to Delores, I’ll go out to the fence and say it to her face. Dad signs my papers, and you keep your desk. I’ll put it in writing if you want. You can have Saturdays off.”
He’d thought about it all night. He had the whole thing in order.
“And if I say what I said on the phone,” I said.
“Then he sells it to Barton out of spite, and you get eleven-fifty, and I get nothing. You’ll have done that. Not me.”
My keys were in my hand. I hadn’t unlocked the car yet. The Fareway bag was hanging off my wrist and he looked at it.
“Is that it?” he said. “In the bag?”
“Willie asked me to bring it.”
He looked at the bag for a long time. Longer than he’d looked at anything else.
“Bring it, then,” he said. “I want it back.”
The break room, 7:55
The store doesn’t open until eight. I went in the back, the way I always do, and Lizette was at the microwave heating up one of those egg cups.
She’s twenty-three. She’s worked for us since she was nineteen, register and returns, and she’s the only one under forty who knows where we keep the wing nuts.
“Hey,” she said, and didn’t look at me.
“You were there Saturday,” I said. “You came back from break.”
“I came in at the end.”
“You heard him say counting on the floor.”
The microwave beeped. She didn’t open it.
“Shari, I came in at the end,” she said. “I saw you on the floor. I didn’t hear what he said before that. I was back here.”
“He’s going to ask you. Willie is.”
“Then I’ll tell him I was back here.”
She opened the microwave and took the egg cup out with her sleeve over her hand, and then she just stood there holding it.
“He told me Saturday night I’d be assistant manager,” she said. “First of the month. Three more an hour. I’ve got the car, and my mom’s got me on her phone plan until June, and that’s it, that’s all I’ve got. I didn’t hear anything.”
She went out to the floor with her egg cup and her keys.
I stood there. On the bulletin board by the time clock, under the OSHA poster, there was a new sheet of paper with a pushpin through the top. A schedule. Typed, which nobody here does. Next month, the first through the thirtieth.
Lizette’s name was at the top with ASST MGR next to it.
PAINT DESK was at the bottom, in its own box. Sat 9–1.
There was no name in the box.
The bottom of the can
Willie’s office is the size of a horse trailer. Desk, two chairs, the safe, a calendar from the propane company that’s three years behind because he likes the picture.
The safe door was standing open.
Corey was already in one of the chairs. Willie was behind the desk with a manila folder squared up in front of him and a green pen lying across it with the cap on. The folder had a blue sticker on the tab.
“Close the door, Shari,” Willie said.
I closed it. I stood, because Corey had the good chair and the other one had a box of hinges in it.
“The can,” Willie said.
I took it out of the Fareway bag and set it on his desk. It was lighter than it had been Saturday, which was a stupid thing to notice. It was empty. Of course it was lighter.
Willie picked it up. He held it a second like he was weighing it too. Then he turned it over and set it down on its lid, so the bottom faced up.
The dents were all along the rim on that side, a row of them, like somebody had hit it on the edge of a step.
In the middle, in black marker that had gone brown and soft at the edges, in big crooked letters:
COREYS. DAD KEEP OUT.
And under that, rows of tally marks. Little bundles of five with a line through them. Dozens of them, scratched in with something sharp after the marker ran out.
I counted the first row without meaning to. Fourteen. An aisle a mark.
Corey didn’t lean forward to look. He didn’t have to. He was looking at his father.
“I took it out of the safe the week before Easter,” Willie said. “Drove it out to the cemetery. Delores was out there scraping the fence with a putty knife, eight in the morning, by herself, same as every year. I gave it to her. I told her it was from somebody who swept floors at my store when he was a boy, and he’d want it to go to the fence.”
He touched the tally marks with one finger.
“She didn’t want to take it. I made her take it. I told her spend it at Vollmer’s. I told her come tell me after.”
“So it was a setup,” Corey said.
“It was a can of dimes.”
“On a Saturday. With me on the register.”
“You’re on the register every Saturday,” Willie said. “You asked for Saturdays.”
Corey laughed through his nose. It wasn’t a laugh.
Willie looked at me then. He uncapped the green pen and laid it back down.
“Shari,” he said. “Word for word.”
Nine o’clock
I said it.
All of it, the same as I’d said it on the phone, in the same order. Out loud, sweetheart. What charity looks like. The clapping. Oops. Counting on the floor. Seventy cents short, store policy.
It took maybe thirty seconds.
Corey let me get all the way to the end. Then he stood up, and the chair rolled back into the safe door and banged it.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Yeah. I said it.”
“Corey,” Willie said.
“No. You want word for word, here’s some. I picked that can up and I knew it was mine the second I had it in my hand. I knew the dents. I put those dents in it. I looked inside and there’s my dimes, Dad, there’s my Saturdays, and the old lady’s telling me she rolled them at home. You gave her my can. You took it out of the safe where you kept it with the deed, the deed you’re about to hand to some guy from Barton, and you gave it to a stranger, and you sent her to my counter so you could sit at home and watch me on a camera with no sound on it.”
He was pointing at the bottom of the can.
“So, yes. I tipped it. I gave it back to you. That’s what that was. You don’t get to call it something else.”
“She was getting down on the floor,” Willie said.
“She didn’t get down. Shari got down. Shari always gets down.” He turned on me. “And you. You couldn’t keep your mouth shut for thirty days. You know what you just bought? You just bought a register at Barton. Eleven-fifty. You’ll be ringing up birdseed for kids who don’t know what a quart is. I offered you your desk. I put it on the wall.”
“There’s no name in the box, Corey,” I said.
He opened his mouth and nothing came out of it for a second.
“I was going to fill it in,” he said.
Out front, the bell over the door went. Somebody said good morning to Lizette, a man’s voice I didn’t know.
Willie didn’t look at the door. He looked at his son for a long time. Then he opened the folder with the blue sticker, turned it around so it faced him the right way, and picked up the green pen.
“Dad,” Corey said. “Dad, don’t. Not over a can.”
Willie signed the first page. Then he turned it and signed the second.
Corey picked the can up off the desk, turned it right side up, and held it against his stomach with both arms like he was nine. He went out the side door to the dock without closing it behind him.
Willie capped the pen.
“They don’t keep the paint desk,” he said. “I asked him. I’m sorry, Shari.”
“I know,” I said. “Corey told me.”
“There’s severance. It’s not enough.”
He didn’t say anything else and neither did I. The man out front said good morning again, louder, like he’d been waiting.
“Would you go get Mr. Lindahl,” Willie said. “Tell him to come on back.”
I went and got him.
Seven dimes
The last day under the old sign was a Saturday. Barton sent two guys with a pallet jack and a list.
They took the paint desk out in pieces. I’d already cleaned out the drawers. Stir sticks, my good scraper, nineteen years of chip cards, and a coupon for a free oil change in Waseca that expired in 2014.
Around two they got to the key machine. One of them unbolted it from the floor and tipped it back on the dolly, and there they were in the dust, against the baseboard, where the vacuum never reached.
I picked them up one at a time. Seven.
Lizette was at register two in a blue Barton vest that was too big for her in the shoulders. She watched me do it and didn’t say anything, and then she went back to scanning.
I drove out to the cemetery after. Delores was at the veterans’ section with the gate open and a drop cloth down, and half the fence already black. She had her primer and her two wire brushes and the blue tape, and a different can for the brushes, a Folgers one with the label still on.
I held out my hand and opened it.
She looked at the dimes a long time, the way she’d looked at the can on the counter.
“That’s seventy cents,” she said.
“That’s yours.”
She took them and put them in her jacket pocket and zipped it. Then she knelt down on the drop cloth, slow, one knee and then the other, and didn’t let me help her.
She started on the next section of posts.
“Ten,” she said, touching each one with her brush handle. “Twenty. Thirty.”
She stopped and held a second brush out to me over her shoulder, handle first.
“You take the forties,” she said.
If somebody you know has ever gotten down on a store floor for a stranger, send them this one. They’ll know.
For more family stories about old promises and unexpected loyalty, read the crayon picture that held the key to an uncle’s land and the letter that made one sister accuse a preschool teacher of being a gold digger. And in this story about a mother who pressed the button despite the risk to her child’s job, one brave choice changes everything.
