My cousins flew home after nineteen years away to sell our grandmother’s feed store for $410,000, and Barry nodded at my pawn shop next door and said, “Good. Ronan can sell off her rocking chair once she’s in the home.” Nana didn’t argue with him. She reached under the register and told the realtor to read the slip taped there first.
Nana was eighty-one that spring.
She had unlocked the front door of Rennie Feed & Seed at six every morning since 1971, and she still did the books by hand in a green ledger.
I ran the pawn shop on the other side of the gravel lot.
Barry and Elise hadn’t set foot in Wakeeney since the week they left for college.
They came in on a Tuesday with a realtor named Mai Larson and a folder as thick as a phone book.
Nobody had called Nana first.
Mai had a sticker of a cartoon peach on the back of her phone.
“We’re doing this for you,” Elise said, and she said it to me, not to her.
Barry walked the aisles like he was pricing them.
He picked up a bag of chick starter, read the tag, and put it back on the wrong shelf.
“Forty-one hundred square feet, the lot, the two grain bins,” Mai said. “Four-ten is fair for this county.”
“Four-ten is a gift,” Barry said.
Nana was standing right behind the counter with a pencil behind her ear.
NOBODY looked at her.
Elise put a hand on Nana’s shoulder like she was a coat rack.
“Nana, you forgot to order the mineral blocks twice last winter,” she said. “Ronan told Mom.”
I had told my aunt that.
ONCE.
On the phone, because I was worried about her.
My stomach dropped.
“I forgot once,” Nana said. “The second time the truck broke down.”
Elise patted her. “Okay.”
Barry came back to the counter and leaned on it with both elbows.
“Look, I get why you stayed,” he said to me. “Army’s done with you, the knee’s shot, you need cheap rent next to Grandma. It makes sense.”
“But you buy people’s wedding rings for forty bucks. Don’t stand there acting like the responsible one.”
I’d paid more than forty for every ring I ever took in.
I didn’t say that.
Nana took the pencil from behind her ear and wrote something in the ledger.
“Mrs. Rennie,” Mai said, gently, “you’d need to sign as the owner of record.”
“Course she’s the owner,” Barry said. “Who else would it be?”
Then he said the thing.
“Sign it, Nana. You’ll have a nice room and a nurse by Christmas, and Ronan can stick your rocking chair in his window with a price tag on it.”
Elise laughed.
Not a big laugh, just air out of her nose.
I’ll hear that sound until I die.
Nana set the pencil down.
She didn’t look at Barry. She looked at me.
“Ronan,” she said. “What did I give you in 2017?”
I had to think.
Then I didn’t have to.
It was a February, and she’d walked across the gravel in her barn coat with a manila envelope sealed shut with packing tape.
She put it on my counter and asked for a loan.
Two dollars.
I laughed. She didn’t.
“A dollar’s an insult,” she’d said. “Make it two. I want a coffee.”
So I wrote her a ticket like anybody else.
One sealed envelope, contents per customer, ninety days.
She made me promise I’d never open it, and she never came back for it.
For nine years it sat in the bottom of my safe under a shoebox of class rings.
I’d forgotten the yellow copy even existed.
“Nana, what are you talking about?” Barry said.
She reached under the register and felt along the side, and her fingers found the corner of a yellow slip under a strip of old Scotch tape.
“Miss Larson,” Nana said. “You read that before anybody signs anything.”
Barry reached across the counter for it.
Nana put her whole hand flat over the slip.
“DON’T YOU TOUCH MY REGISTER, BARRY.”
It was the loudest I had ever heard her.
A man buying fencing staples at the back stopped and turned around.
Barry’s hand stayed in the air.
Mai bent down and read it out loud, slow, the way you read something you don’t understand yet.
“Rennie Pawn and Loan. Ticket 0083. One sealed envelope. Loan amount two dollars. Forfeit if unredeemed by May 14, 2017.”
“She pawned you an envelope,” Barry said. “For two bucks. That’s what we’re doing NOW?”
“It’s a pawn ticket,” I said. “That’s all it is.”
“Then what’s in it?”
“I don’t know. I never opened it.”
Elise stopped smiling.
Nana slid her key ring across the counter to me.
My safe key wasn’t on it, and she knew that.
She was telling me to go.
So I went.
Across the gravel, in my back door, down on my bad knee in front of the safe.
The envelope was right where I’d left it, gone soft at the corners.
When I walked back in, Barry stood up straight.
“Give it here,” he said. “That’s family business.”
“It’s my inventory,” I said. “The ninety days ran out in 2017.”
I set it on the counter in front of Mai, not him.
She turned it over.
There was a raised stamp on the back flap, the kind you can feel with your thumb, and under it, in Nana’s handwriting, a date and two initials.
Mai looked at that stamp for a long time.
Then she laid her pen on top of the listing folder and said, “Mrs. Rennie, does your family know what this is?”
The back flap
Nana didn’t answer right away.
She took her glasses off, folded them, and put them in the pocket of her barn coat.
“No,” she said. “They don’t.”
Mai put her thumb on the stamp again. “That’s the Trego County Register of Deeds. I’ve carried about forty closings through that office. It means something got recorded.”
I reached over and felt it myself.
A circle with a wheat sheaf in the middle and tiny letters around the edge. Under it, in pencil gone silver, Nana had written 2-9-17 and R.R.
I knew those letters. I’d put them on the bottom of every ticket I ever wrote.
Barry leaned over Mai’s shoulder.
“Recorded what?” he said.
“I don’t know,” Mai said. “That’s why I asked.”
Elise had her phone out. She wasn’t calling anybody yet. She was holding it the way you hold a phone when you want people to know you might.
The man with the fencing staples hadn’t moved from the back aisle. He had a box in each hand and he’d stopped pretending to read them.
Barry straightened up and looked at me, and the cousin who’d been so understanding about my knee two minutes ago was gone off his face.
“R.R.,” he said. “Ronan Rennie.”
“Those are my initials,” I said.
“What did you have her sign, Ronan?”
Two dollars and a coffee
I hadn’t had her sign anything. That was the true answer, and it sounded like the worst one.
In the fall of 2016 the Army sent me home with a knee brace and a disability check, and I rented the old tire shop at the far end of Nana’s lot because nobody else in Wakeeney wanted it.
Grandpa Doug changed tires out of it until his back went. After that it held empty seed sacks and wasps.
I paid Nana three hundred a month for it. I tried to pay her nothing and she wouldn’t have it.
“You’ll pay me on the first like anybody,” she said. “I’ll write it down.”
She did. Every month for nine years, in the green ledger, in pencil. R. – rent – 300. I’ve read that line upside down from across her counter a hundred times.
That’s Nana. A bag of mineral salt goes out the door, it goes in the book. The truck breaks down outside Ogallah, it goes in the book with the time it broke.
So that February, when she walked over with the envelope, I figured it was papers she didn’t want in the house. Insurance, maybe. Grandpa’s discharge. Something she wanted locked up by somebody who owned a safe.
She wanted the two dollars in two ones. I gave them to her out of my drawer.
She walked to the Cenex on the corner and came back with a large coffee, black, and drank it standing at my counter while I filled out the ticket.
“You don’t open that,” she said. “Not you, not your aunt, not anybody, until I say.”
“What if you never say?”
“Then I’m dead and you’ll figure it out.”
Barry and Elise sent her cards every Christmas after that. Elise put pictures of the store on Facebook every Fourth of July with where I come from under them. Barry called on her birthday and talked to her for six minutes, and Nana wrote that down too.
They were always nice to her. That was the thing about them. Nice and gone.
“She asked me for two dollars,” I told Barry now. “I gave her two dollars.”
Elise laughed through her nose again.
“Two dollars,” she said. “For a store worth four hundred and ten thousand.”
Barry didn’t say anything. He walked to the pegboard by the work gloves and took down a box cutter.
Aunt Lynda on speaker
“Nobody’s opening it,” I said.
Barry thumbed the blade out. “It’s a piece of paper, Ronan.”
“It’s a ticket I wrote. I made her a promise on it.”
“You made a promise to a woman who forgets to order salt.”
Nana held her hand out across the counter, palm up, the way she used to for the keys to Grandpa’s truck.
Barry looked at the hand for a while. Then he closed the blade and put the box cutter in it, and she dropped it in the drawer under the register and shut the drawer.
Elise had the phone to her ear by then. Then she put it on speaker and laid it on the counter by the register so we’d all get to hear.
“Mom. You need to hear this.”
My aunt Lynda lives outside Denver. I talk to her maybe four times a year, and one of those times, last winter, I was the one who called, because Nana had sounded tired on a Sunday and I didn’t have anybody else to say it to.
“Ronan?” Lynda said. “Honey, what’s going on?”
Barry told her. He told it fast, and he told it like I’d been running a con out of a tire shop for nine years.
“Ronan, sweetie,” Lynda said. “You told me yourself she’s slipping. You said you were scared.”
“I said I was worried about one order.”
“Well, we’re all worried. That’s why we’re doing it this way.”
I tried the only thing I had.
“Let’s stop for today,” I said. “Nana’s been on her feet since six. Everybody comes back tomorrow, and she can have somebody here with her. A lawyer, if she wants one.”
Barry pointed at me like I’d just made his case for him.
“See? Even he thinks she needs to go lie down.”
Nana’s pencil stopped.
“I don’t need to lie down,” she said.
“Mom,” Elise said to the phone, “tell them about June.”
There was a little pause on the line, the kind people take before saying something they’ve already said to other people.
“The room in Hays is held through the first of June, Mom,” Lynda said. “It’s a nice room. We put the deposit down in February.”
Mai’s folder
Nana wrote something in the ledger and pushed it away from her.
“February,” she said. “You put money down on a room for me in February. And nobody said.”
“We were going to tell you this weekend,” Elise said.
“Over Easter,” Lynda said on the phone. “We wanted it to be nice.”
Mai hadn’t said a word since the stamp. She’d opened her folder flat on the counter and was turning pages with one finger, and she stopped on one and kept her finger there.
“Mr. Bosch,” she said. “When you called me in March, you said Mrs. Rennie had asked the family to handle the sale for her.”
“She did,” Barry said. “More or less.”
“You sent me an email after.” Mai turned the page around so it faced the counter. She’d printed it. Of course she had. “‘Grandma’s memory is going. Our cousin Ronan lives next door and says she’s slipping. She’ll sign whatever’s in front of her if we’re all standing there.'”
My face went hot the way it does when a deputy comes in with a list of serial numbers and I already know one of them is in my case.
Nana looked at me.
“Did you say slipping?”
“I said you sounded tired.”
“On a Sunday,” she said. “In January.”
She licked her thumb and turned the ledger back. She didn’t hunt for it. She knew the page.
“Jan. 12. Ronan called. Sounded worried about me.” She turned the book so I could read it. “I wrote it down because nobody calls me to be worried.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that.
Barry did.
“So she remembers a phone call. Great. Mom remembers it too.”
“Is this you, Barry?” Mai said.
She had moved her finger. Under the email, clipped to it, was a letter on heavy paper from a truck stop outfit out of Salina that wanted a lot right off the interstate, with a number on it, four hundred and ten thousand, and a line for the seller to sign.
It was dated three weeks before anybody got on a plane.
Ticket 0083
Nobody said anything for a while.
Lynda said “Hello?” on the speaker, and nobody answered her either.
Then Nana opened the drawer under the register, took out the box cutter, and held it out to me handle first.
“Open it, Ronan,” she said. “I let you off.”
I did it the way I’d open anything a customer brought in sealed. Along the bottom seam, not the flap, so the stamp stayed whole. The packing tape had gone stiff and came up in one strip.
There were two things in it.
The first was a single page torn out of a green ledger, folded in thirds. February 9, 2017, in pencil, in the same hand as every other page in that book.
Sold store, lot, bins and tire shop to Ronan. $2.00 rec’d. Bought coffee.
The second was four pages stapled at the corner, with the same raised stamp on the top sheet and a typed recording time underneath it. 10:52 a.m.
Quitclaim Deed.
My grandmother, a widow, to Ronan D. Rennie. The store and the lot and the two grain bins and the building at the far end of it, written out in lot numbers and feet. And then the line in the middle of the first page.
For and in consideration of the sum of Two Dollars ($2.00), receipt of which is hereby acknowledged.
I read it twice and handed it to Mai, because I didn’t trust what I was reading.
She read it once. Then she picked up her phone with the peach on it and typed something with her thumb, and we all stood there while it loaded.
“Trego County has its records online,” she said. “Owner of record, since February ninth, 2017. Rennie, Ronan D.”
Elise sat down on a stack of feed sacks.
Barry laughed, one hard laugh, and it had nothing in it.
“She charged you rent,” he said. “Nine years. She’s been charging you rent on your own goddamn building.”
“He never missed the first,” Nana said.
Mai closed her folder. She took the pen off the top of it and slid it across the counter, past Barry, to me.
“Mr. Rennie,” she said. “You’d need to sign as the owner of record.”
Four-ten, three ways
“Okay,” Barry said. “Okay. Fine. So you sign.”
He put both hands flat on the counter.
“Four-ten. We split it three ways, like Grandpa would’ve wanted, that’s a hundred thirty-six and change each. You get out of that tire shop. You get your knee done right. She’s in Hays with a nurse. Everybody wins. Nobody has to be the bad guy.”
“No,” I said.
“No? Ronan. Think for one second. You know what a judge in Hays sees? A pawnbroker with a bad knee who got his grandmother to sign over four hundred thousand dollars of property for two bucks. You think anybody in this state buys that she was all there in 2017? You told Mom yourself she’s slipping. Mom’ll say so under oath. Won’t you, Mom?”
“Barry,” Lynda said, “I don’t know about under oath.”
“She’ll say it. We’ll get a lawyer. We’ll get the deed thrown out, and then she signs, and the only thing you’ll have bought for your two dollars is a lawsuit.”
Nana had her glasses back on. She ran her finger down a page of the ledger and stopped.
“Jan. 14,” she read. “Mineral blocks not ordered. My fault.” She went down two lines. “Jan. 28. Truck down outside Ogallah, 3:15. Blocks Thursday.“
She looked up at Barry.
“You write that down for your judge.”
Barry’s ears had gone red.
“You don’t get to wreck this,” he said to her. Not to me. To her. “I’ve got people waiting on that money. Salina wired ten thousand earnest money to me in March. It’s gone, Nana. It’s spent. You understand what that means? I don’t get to just give it back.”
The man with the fencing staples set both boxes down on the floor and walked out the side door without paying.
Mai had gone very still.
“You told me no money had changed hands,” she said. “You told me that twice.”
“It’s a deposit.”
“It’s a deposit on a property you don’t own, from a buyer I was about to represent you to.” She tucked the folder under her arm. “I’m out, Mr. Bosch. And I’ll have to call their agent today and tell her what you told me.”
“Barry,” Lynda said on the speaker. “What money? Barry, what ten thousand?”
Elise reached over and took the phone off speaker and put it to her ear and walked out to the porch with it. Through the window she was bent over with her free hand on her forehead.
Lynda said something to her I couldn’t hear. Then Elise came back in and held the phone out to me.
“She wants you.”
I took it.
“Ronan,” my aunt said. “If you do this to your cousin, I don’t know you anymore. You understand? Don’t call me at Christmas.”
“Okay,” I said.
I gave Elise her phone back.
Then I walked to the front door of my grandmother’s store, my store, and held it open, and the bell over it rang.
Barry stood there a long time with his hands on the counter.
He picked his jacket up off the seed rack. On his way past the end of the aisle he stopped, because Nana had said his name.
“Barry,” she said. “Chick starter goes on the second shelf.”
He picked up the bag he’d put back wrong, set it where it went, and walked out the door.
The first of June
Barry’s lawyer sent a letter in May. It was two pages long and used the word undue four times.
The lawyer I went to in Hays wanted four thousand dollars up front. I didn’t have four thousand dollars sitting around, so I took the shoebox out from under the safe shelf and sold forty-one class rings to a scrap buyer in Salina, some of them I’d been holding since the week I opened.
The lawyer read the deed and the ledger, both, and kept the ledger an extra day. He said Barry’s man could write as many letters as he liked.
Lynda didn’t call on Nana’s birthday. Elise did, for four minutes, and Nana wrote that down.
On the first of June I went across the gravel at six, before I opened, with a check for three hundred dollars in my shirt pocket.
Nana was already at the front door with her key in it. She turned it, pushed, and the bell went.
I put the check on the counter by the brass register. The yellow slip was gone from the side of it, and the old tape had left a clean square there.
She took the pencil from behind her ear and opened the green ledger to June.
R. – rent – 300.
“Nana,” I said. “It’s my building.”
“Then you can afford it,” she said.
If someone you love still opens up at six every morning, go stand at their counter this week and let them write you down.
Family history has a way of coming due when you least expect it – read the story of a crayon drawing that changed a ninetieth-birthday celebration or the uncle who was glad his niece remembered nothing. And for another family gathering full of tension, see the woman whose in-laws finally recognized her.
