Last Day at Wong's Grocery

The Notice in the Window

I lettered the notice on the back of a feed-store calendar because it was the stiffest cardboard in the building, and I used the red marker because the black one had been dying since Easter. CLOSING SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 26. THANK YOU FOR 88 YEARS. Then I stood back and saw that the S in September leaned like a drunk on a porch rail, so I did it over. A man who has written prices on butcher paper for fifty-some years should be able to letter a sign. My father could write a price so straight you could hang a picture by it.

It was a quarter past five in the morning. Nelson Street was still dark except for the security light on the pole at the corner, which hums at a pitch my late wife said was B-flat. Pat had a piano in her mother's house in Clarksdale and an opinion about everything that made a sound. The light hummed. The cold case hummed a little lower. Between them was the sound of the store waking up, which is mostly the sound of me.

I taped the notice inside the front window, low, below the faded paper that says WE ACCEPT and lists the kinds of cards we accept, which is now all of them. I had to move a pyramid of canned tomatoes to do it. The glass was already warm. September in Greenville does not cool off at night so much as it rests. By seven the air would be wet as a dishrag and by noon you could smell the defoliant blowing in off the cotton west of town, that sour chemical sweetness that means the pickers are coming.

Then I did what I have done every morning since 1977, when my father's knees went bad and he handed me the keys and went to sit on a crate by the door for the next eleven years and tell me what I was getting wrong. I swept the front walk. I hosed the walk down. I rolled out the rack of sweet potatoes and the basket of onions. I made coffee in the percolator and drank the first cup standing at the register looking at nothing.

Wong's Grocery sits on the corner of Nelson and a short street the city renamed twice and everybody still calls by the first name, which I will not write down because there is no point arguing with the city in print. One story of brick, with a pressed-tin ceiling painted pool-table green and a floor of pine boards that have been oiled so many times they are nearly black. There are four aisles. There used to be five. In 1983 I took one out to put in a chest freezer for ice cream and pork neck bones, and Mr. Otis Pettway told me it was the worst decision a Chinese man had made in the state of Mississippi since my father bought a mule. He has not stopped saying so.

My father opened this store in the spring of 1938 with four hundred dollars he borrowed from a cousin in Leland and a stock of rice, lard, salt meat, coal oil, matches, snuff, flour, tobacco and canned milk. I have the list. He wrote it in Chinese on the back of the cousin's receipt and I have kept it in a frame behind the register for most of my life without telling anyone what it said, so customers have assumed for decades that it is a blessing or a curse. It is a grocery list. It ends with "nails, small."

At six the bread man came. His name is Ricky and he is the third bread man I have had named Ricky, which my granddaughter will later tell me is statistically unremarkable and which I continue to find remarkable. He looked at the notice in the window while I signed for the loaves.

"Mr. Henry," he said. "That right?"

"It's spelled right," I said.

"I mean is it true."

"I'm seventy-one years old, Ricky. I have stood behind this counter since before your daddy was courting. My knees sound like a bag of ice when I bend over. The chain store out on the highway sells a loaf of your bread for forty cents less than I do, and I'm the one who taught half this street how to count change." I handed him his clipboard. "It's true."

He shook his head and said he would miss me and I said he would miss the coffee, which was also true, and I poured him a cup in a foam cup and he stood in the door and drank it and looked at the notice again as if it might have changed while his back was turned.

That was going to be the problem. Not the closing. People would have to look at it, every one of them, every day, and say something, and I would have to say something back.

---

Otis came at seven-ten, which is late for him. He is eighty-four and walks with a cane he made himself out of a hickory limb and a brass doorknob, and he carries it more than he leans on it. He fixed cotton gins for forty years. He knows the inside of every machine that ever made a noise in Washington County, and he treats my cold case like a patient he has given up on but still visits.

He stopped on the walk and read the notice and did not say a word. Then he came in and went to the drink box and got his orange soda and came to the counter and put down a dollar and a quarter, exact, as he has put it down for years, with the quarter on top.

"Twenty-six," he said.

"Twenty-sixth."

"That's a Saturday."

"That's why I picked it. A store shouldn't close on a Tuesday. It looks like it gave up."

"It did give up." He twisted the cap off the bottle with a sound like a small gasp. "You give up."

"I retired."

"Your daddy didn't retire. Your daddy sat on that crate and supervised."

"My daddy," I said, "had me."

He drank about a third of the orange soda in one pull and looked at the pressed-tin ceiling. There is a water stain up there shaped like the state of Tennessee, and Otis has been telling me to fix the roof above it for so long that I believe he would be disappointed if I did.

"Who's getting the building?"

"Don't know yet."

"Who's getting that scale?"

"Don't know yet."

"Who's getting them books?"

He meant the credit books, and he said it lightly, and neither of us looked at the safe under the counter where they live.

"Otis," I said. "I put the notice up an hour and a half ago."

"I'm just asking before the vultures come." He picked up his bottle and went out to the crate by the door, my father's crate, which nobody else sits on but Otis, and he sat down on it with his cane across his knees and watched the street get light.

---

The morning went the way mornings go. Buddy Carr came in for his lunch at ten in the morning, because Buddy has been eating his lunch at ten in the morning since he flew crop dusters and had to be in the air by eleven. It is a can of sardines, a sleeve of saltines, a marshmallow pie and a cold drink. Forty-one years. He had a stroke in 2019 and his doctor put him on a diet and Buddy came in the day he got home from the hospital and bought sardines, saltines, a marshmallow pie and a diet drink, and that was the only concession.

Buddy read the notice, came in, put his lunch on the counter, and said, "Well, hell, Henry."

"I know it."

"Where am I supposed to go?"

"The chain store on the highway has sardines."

"Not these sardines."

"They're the same sardines, Buddy. I buy them off the same truck."

"They are not the same sardines," Buddy said, with real feeling, and paid, and went out, and I heard him say "Well, hell" again to Otis on the crate, and Otis said something I did not catch, and they both laughed. Buddy is white and Otis is Black and they are both old and they have been insulting each other on my front walk since 1978. I do not think either of them has ever been inside the other's house.

At eleven Ora Mae came over from next door with a dozen tamales wrapped in newspaper and a face like thunder.

Ora Mae Tillman runs the tamale counter in the shotgun building that shares my north wall. Her mother ran it before her, from 1952, out of a cart before there was a building, and before that her mother's mother sold tamales from a bucket on a stick down at the cotton compress. They are Delta tamales, which if you are not from here I will have to explain: small, the size of a cigar, simmered not steamed, the cornmeal gritty and red with spice, the meat inside a fine dark grind of beef and pork, and the whole thing sitting in a juice so hot and greasy it soaks through the corn shuck and the newspaper and the paper bag, so that you carry them home with the bag held out away from your shirt. They are, in my opinion, the best thing in Greenville. I have said so in print, in the garden club cookbook my wife was in charge of in 1994, and I have not changed my mind.

Ora Mae put them down on the counter. The newspaper had already gone see-through in spots.

"You were going to tell me when," she said.

"I was going to tell you this afternoon."

"You put it in the window before you told me. I had to hear it from Ricky the bread man."

"Ricky gets around."

"Henry." She is sixty-six and has a voice that carries over a pot of boiling water, a kitchen fan and a radio, and she was not using all of it yet, which is the dangerous part. "Sixty years we've shared a wall."

"Seventy-four," I said, "if you count your mother's cart."

"Don't you get cute with me."

I took the tamales and gave her a five, which she pushed back across the counter, and I pushed it back, and she pushed it back, and that is how it has always worked, and we both know the five goes in the box of tea bags on her side eventually, and nobody says so.

"I didn't want you to hear it from me," I said finally, "because I didn't want to say it to you. That's the truth."

She looked at the pressed-tin ceiling, too. Everybody looks at that ceiling when they don't want to look at me. Tennessee is getting bigger.

"What about the building?" she said, more quietly.

"I don't know yet. My granddaughter's coming."

"Ashley? The planner?"

"She's going to help me plan."

"Lord," said Ora Mae, but she almost smiled. "Lord help us all." She went back next door, and through the wall I heard her turn the radio up, which is how she ends an argument.

---

My son David called at noon from his office in Atlanta. He is a dentist. Every Chinese family in the Delta, after the war, raised children to leave the Delta, and they did, the doctors and the pharmacists and the engineers, to Houston and Memphis and Atlanta and California, and the stores shut one after another, and we all went to one another's closing days and said what a shame. David did exactly what we raised him to do.

"Dad. Ashley's on the road. She left at six. She says she'll be there by three, which means four."

"She drives like your mother."

"She drives like you. She says she's going to record people. For a history night."

"I know. She told me. The Heritage Circle wants something for their program the week we close."

"You're all right with that?"

"Why wouldn't I be?"

David was quiet in the way he has, a dentist's quiet, a man waiting to see if you'll flinch. "You didn't want me to tape you when Mom died."

"That was different."

"How?"

"Because that was about me," I said, "and this is about the store."

He let it go. He asked about my knees and I lied and he knew it, and he said he and Laura would come over for the last day if they could get coverage at the practice, and I said don't, it's just a store closing, and he said, "Dad, it's not just a store closing," in a voice that made me tighten my grip on the receiver, so I told him a customer had come in. No customer had come in.

I stood behind the counter after we hung up and looked at my store. The light comes in from the street side in the afternoon and goes slanting down the aisles and lands on the floor in long panels with the dust turning in them. The canned goods. The motor oil and the fly swatters and the mousetraps. The jars of pickled pig feet and the jar of pickled eggs, pink with beet juice. The bin of long-grain rice with the scoop in it and the burlap sacks of seed potatoes leaning against the bin. The hanging scale over the meat block with its brass pan and its big round face. My father hung that scale in 1941. You can still see where he wrote the date on the beam in pencil, very small.

Four o'clock came, and at four-twenty a little blue car with Georgia plates and a cracked windshield pulled up crooked along the curb out front, and I watched my granddaughter get out of it and stretch, both arms over her head, and then turn and read the notice in my window.

She read it twice. I watched her do it. Then she looked up and found me through the glass, and pointed at the S in September, which still leaned a little, and shook her head.

Highway 82

The hills quit at Greenwood. I had been told this my whole life, by my grandfather, by my father, by Auntie May on the phone from Houston, and I had driven it maybe six times as a kid asleep in the back seat, so I had never actually seen it happen. This time I was awake and alone and it happened the way they said. Somewhere past the Yalobusha bridge the road came down off the last red-clay rise and the land just went flat, flat like somebody had ironed it, and the sky took up three quarters of the windshield, and I said "Oh" out loud to nobody.

Cotton both sides of the road, the bolls open and ragged white, the leaves gone brown and crisp from the defoliant. Big rectangular bales wrapped in yellow plastic sat at the ends of the rows like loaves of bread somebody had forgotten. A crop duster came in low over a field on my left, so low I flinched, and pulled up at the tree line in a long climbing curve, and I thought about Buddy Carr, whom I had met once at my grandmother's funeral when I was twenty-two and who had told me, holding a paper plate with three deviled eggs on it, that he had personally sprayed every acre between Leland and Indianola at least once and was surprised he was still alive.

I am an urban planner. I work for the city of Atlanta. My job, mostly, is to stand in middle-school cafeterias on Tuesday nights with an easel pad and a box of colored dot stickers and ask people what they want their neighborhood to look like in twenty years. Green dots for things they like, red for things they don't. Then I go back to the office and turn the dots into a report that a council committee receives and files. I am good at my job. I have a master's degree from Georgia Tech and a certificate in something called equitable engagement and a coffee mug from the regional commission that says I MAKE PLANS in a font I would not have chosen. I had taken four weeks of leave, my whole year of it plus a week unpaid, and my supervisor Shreya had said, "Is everything okay?" in the voice people use for a death, and I had said, "My grandfather is closing his store," and she had said, "Oh," exactly the way I said it on Highway 82, like a door had opened on something.

I made Indianola by two and Leland by three and stopped at a gas station in Leland to pee and buy a bag of boiled peanuts, which were cold and salty and soft and which I ate in the car with the air on high and my phone in my lap, reading the email from the Washington County Heritage Circle one more time. They were holding a program on the Thursday before the store closed. They wanted twenty minutes. They had seen my name in Auntie May's group messages, which Auntie May sends to everyone she has ever met, and they had written to ask whether the granddaughter in Atlanta might "gather some reminiscences." I had written back in eleven minutes. I had a plan. I had a legal pad with the plan on it. I had release forms printed on the good paper at the office after hours, which I am fairly sure is a violation of something.

Then I came into Greenville past the casino billboards and the shuttered motor lodge with the swimming pool full of cattails, and down toward the levee, and onto Nelson Street, and there it was.

---

I want to describe it the way I would in a site report, because that is the only way I can look at a building without getting sentimental, and I was trying very hard not to get sentimental in the first five minutes.

Corner lot, roughly forty by ninety. Single-story brick commercial, probably 1920s, parapet front, pressed-metal cornice painted a green that has gone chalky in the sun. Recessed entry with a wood-framed glass door, two display windows. Shares a party wall on the north side with a narrow frame building, a shotgun, painted bright coral, with a hand-lettered board over the window that says TAMALES HOT and a line of four people already waiting on the step at four in the afternoon. Across the road, a low cinderblock building painted red to shoulder height and white above, no windows on the street side, a steel door, a string of unlit bulbs along the eaves. The Red Top. On the corner diagonal, an empty lot of Johnson grass with a single concrete step in the middle of it, which used to lead into somebody's house, and now leads into the air.

And over the store, the sign. Painted sheet metal, maybe ten feet long, bolted to the brick on angle irons. White ground, gone to cream. Red letters outlined in black, blocky, a little uneven: WONG'S GROCERY. Under it, smaller, in black: GROCERIES MEATS NOTIONS. I had seen it in photographs my whole life. I had a framed print of it in my apartment in Kirkwood that a friend had made from one of those photographs, and people asked me about it at parties, and I said, "That's my family's store in Mississippi," with the little lift in my voice of a person who has a thing other people don't.

The site report fell apart about there.

I got out. I stretched. My back cracked in three places. The heat landed on me like a quilt somebody had left in a dryer, and the air smelled of hot asphalt and cut grass and something sweetish and chemical blowing in from the west, and over all of it, from the coral building, chili and pork fat and corn. Then I turned and read the notice in the window.

CLOSING SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 26. THANK YOU FOR 88 YEARS.

He'd done it in red marker on the back of a calendar. The S in September was falling over. I read it twice to make sure, and when I looked up he was standing behind the glass at the register in his short-sleeved white shirt and his gray trousers and his reading glasses parked up on his forehead, watching me, and I pointed at the S and shook my head, and he shrugged one shoulder in the exact way my father does when he is not going to discuss it.

---

"You're late," was the first thing he said.

"Dad told you three."

"Your father told me three meaning four. You're twenty minutes past four."

"I stopped for peanuts."

"In Leland?"

"Yes."

"The gas station by the bayou?"

"Yes."

"They're better at the place in Indianola." He came around the counter and hugged me, quickly, with one arm, the other hand still holding a pencil. He smelled the way he has always smelled, of starch and coffee and bar soap and, underneath, the faint sweet mustiness of the store itself, which I have never been able to name and which is in all his clothes, his car, his house, the cards he sends on my birthday. He stepped back and looked at me over the glasses. "You cut your hair."

"In March."

"It's short."

"That's what cutting does, Yeh-Yeh."

He grinned. He has very good teeth for seventy-one, which my father takes personal credit for. Then he bent under the counter and came up with a folded white butcher's apron with WONG'S stitched on the bib in red thread, a little crooked, and held it out.

"Your grandmother made six of those in 1978," he said. "This is the last one nobody's ruined."

"I'm here to do interviews."

"You're here to help me close a store. The interviews happen while you're helping." He shook the apron at me. "Put it on. Mrs. Gaines is coming for her neck bones and she's going to want to meet you and she's going to tell you about her gallbladder."

I put on the apron.

---

Here is what I learned in the first three hours, written down that night on the legal pad underneath my plan, which by then I could see was going to need revising.

One. Nobody walks into Wong's Grocery without saying something about the notice. Nobody. Not the kid who bought a single loose cigarette—he does not sell them, it turns out; the kid was trying his luck—not the woman with the toddler on her hip, not the mail carrier. They say "Mr. Henry, that true?" or "Well, I saw your sign" or, in one case, nothing at all, just a long look at him and then a long look at the ceiling, which has a water stain shaped like what I eventually figured out was meant to be Tennessee.

Two. He knows what everybody is going to buy before they buy it, and he rings it up before they set it down, and he is right about nine times in ten, and the tenth time he says "Changing it up, huh," and they laugh like he caught them at something.

Three. Mrs. Gaines's gallbladder is a long story with a twist in the middle.

Four. The woman next door is named Ora Mae Tillman and she came over at five-thirty with a dozen tamales in a newspaper and looked me over from my hair to my sneakers and said, "You the planner," the way you'd say "You the dentist" to a person holding pliers. She was wearing a hairnet and an apron that had once been white and had gone a deep stained orange down the front. Her forearms were dusted with cornmeal to the elbow. She put the tamales in my hands. They were hot all the way through the paper and the paper was wet.

"Hold it out," she said. "Away from you. Like a baby with a diaper."

I held it out.

"Eat one now. Standing up."

"I should wash my—"

"Eat it now."

I peeled back the newspaper. Inside, in a little nest of red grease, a dozen narrow husk-wrapped cylinders were packed in rows. I unrolled one and burned my thumb on the juice and said a word I do not say in front of my grandfather, and Ora Mae laughed so hard she had to steady herself on the counter. The tamale was the size of my finger. It was gritty and soft and so spicy the heat came on slow, like a sunburn, after I'd already swallowed. The grease ran down my wrist to my elbow.

"That's the one," she said, and wiped her eyes. "Now you've been to Greenville."

Five. My plan was wrong. My plan said: Week one, identify twelve to fifteen key informants; schedule sixty-minute recorded interviews in a quiet setting; obtain written consent. My plan did not account for the fact that there is no quiet setting within a mile of this corner, and no one I met that afternoon would sit still for sixty minutes, and the minute I mentioned writing anything down they looked at me the way Ora Mae looked at my sneakers. Mr. Otis Pettway, who sits on a wooden crate outside the front door all day like a lion outside a library, listened to my whole pitch about the Heritage Circle and the release forms and the history night and then said, "Baby, you want my story, you got to come sit on the crate."

"There's only one crate."

"That," said Mr. Otis, "is the point."

---

We closed at seven. My grandfather counted the drawer by hand, the bills in stacks of twenty, the coins slid off the edge of the counter into his palm in a practiced sweep, and wrote the total in a pocket notebook in pencil, and put the money in a canvas bank bag, and the bag in the safe, and spun the dial. He pulled the string on each light in turn, front to back, so that the store went dark one aisle at a time, like a theater.

Then we stood on the walk while he locked the front door and the iron gate across it, and the air had not cooled at all. The street was blue. Tree frogs going in the Johnson grass of the empty lot. Somewhere over toward the levee a dog explained something at length.

And across the road at the Red Top the string of bulbs along the eaves came on, red and white and one green one that had obviously been a mistake, and somebody inside propped the steel door open with a cinder block, and out came a sound I didn't have a word for yet. A bass line, round and slow, like someone walking downstairs in no hurry. Then a guitar on top of it, bent notes that slid and wouldn't settle. Then a man's voice, high and rough, holding one word so long I thought he'd forgotten the next one.

"Toot," said my grandfather, and put the keys in his pocket. "Every night but Monday, since nineteen and seventy-two. He's going to want to be recorded. Don't let him tell you he wrote it. He didn't write any of it."

"Yeh-Yeh." I was still holding my tamales out away from my body like a baby with a diaper. "Why didn't you tell anybody? Before the sign. Dad says you didn't even tell him till last week."

He looked across at the Red Top for a while, at the propped door and the slice of red light, and the voice inside held its long word and finally let go of it.

"Because the minute you say it," he said, "people start asking who gets what. And I didn't know yet." He jingled the keys in his pocket. "I still don't know. That's what you're for."

What Was in the Safe

The first thing a grocer learns about inventory is that it lies. The shelf says twelve and the box in the back says nine and the book says fourteen, and none of them is the truth, and the truth is whatever you count with your own finger on a slow Tuesday with the radio off. My father taught me that when I was eight, and then he taught me to count with my finger, and then he went next door to Ora Mae's mother's cart and ate tamales while I did it.

On Tuesday morning my granddaughter came in at six-thirty in her apron with a computer under her arm wearing a look I recognized from her father at the age of twelve, the morning he decided to organize the garage.

"We need a baseline," she said.

"We need coffee," I said. "Baseline's in the back."

She set the computer up on the meat block, on a folded towel, because I would not let it touch the wood, and she made a grid on the screen with a column for every aisle and a row for every item, and she said, "Okay. Aisle one. Read it to me," and I said, "Aisle one is canned vegetables, beans, rice, flour, meal, sugar, lard, salt and baking powder, and you don't read a store, you walk it," and I handed her a pencil and a clipboard from under the counter. The clipboard had a calendar from a feed store in Hollandale stuck to it from 1996. She held it like a fossil.

But she walked it. I'll give her that. She walked it with me all morning, between customers, counting with her finger, and calling out numbers, and writing them on the clipboard, and then typing them into her grid on her lunch break while I watched over her shoulder and told her where she'd gone wrong.

We found things. You will find things in a store that has been open for eighty-eight years. In the back room behind the potato sacks, on a shelf I have not personally lifted anything from since the Bicentennial, we found a case of lamp wicks still in their cardboard sleeves, a carton of corncob pipes, nine boxes of laundry bluing, a gross of wooden clothespins in a paper sack that had gone soft as cloth, three cans of a kind of hair pomade I do not believe has been manufactured since 1971, and a pair of men's work boots, size eleven, in a box with a name penciled on the lid: Arthur Kemp.

"Who's Arthur Kemp?" said Ashley.

"I have no idea."

"He ordered boots and never picked them up?"

"Somebody ordered boots for somebody." I turned the box in my hands. The leather was dry and stiff as bark, the laces rotted to threads. "My father did special orders up through the sixties. Overalls. Shoes. Shotgun shells. A wedding dress one time, from a catalog, for a girl over in Metcalfe whose mother had died." I put the lid back on. "Put Arthur Kemp on your list. Somebody might know."

She typed it in. ARTHUR KEMP BOOTS 11. QUERY. I have read a lot of lists in my life, and that was a good one.

---

The trouble came after lunch, and it came because of me, which is the way trouble usually comes in this store.

Ora Mae's grandson Dre came over at three-thirty, after school. He is seventeen, a senior, tall and bony as a fishing pole, with a soft voice and a hard handshake, and he has been sweeping my floor and breaking down my boxes after school for two years for ten dollars an hour and all the cold drinks he can stand. He also grows vegetables in a lot behind his grandmother's house with his granddaddy's old rototiller, peppers and greens and okra and tomatoes, and on Saturdays he sells them off a folding table at the market downtown. He sells them by the piece, because he does not have a scale. I have offered to lend him mine. He has declined, because he is seventeen.

He came in, and saw the lamp wicks, and said, "Oh, Mr. Henry, what are those," with real delight. Then he saw my granddaughter, and said, "Oh," quite differently, and stood up straighter.

"This is Ashley," I said. "She's a planner. Plan to break down those boxes."

He went to break down boxes. Ashley watched him go, and then she looked at me, and then she looked down at the safe under the counter, the old gray safe with the brass dial, which my father bought in 1946 from a bank in Rosedale that was closing, and which took four men and a mule to move.

"Yeh-Yeh," she said, "what's in the safe besides the money?"

That is the question she had come six hundred miles to ask, I think. She asked it lightly, the way Otis asked it, and I answered it the same way, which was a mistake.

"The books," I said.

"Can I see them?"

So I knelt, and my knees made the sound like a bag of ice, and I spun the dial and opened the door, and took out the books.

---

There are thirty-four of them. I can tell you exactly because I counted them in 1977 when I took the keys, and I have added to them since, one every two or three years, and every one has come out of the same stationer's catalog, a ledger in a black cloth binding with a red leather spine, ruled in blue and red. The oldest are my father's. Thirteen books, 1938 to 1977. They are written in Chinese, from the front to the back, every entry in his small careful brush hand, done with a fountain pen he filled with ink he made himself from a stick and a stone, until 1960, when he gave in and bought a ballpoint, and his writing got smaller and angrier for about a year and then got used to it.

The other twenty-one are mine. English. Pencil, mostly. I'm a pencil man.

Each book has an index in the back where every family has a number. Then each family has a page, or a run of pages, and on the page is every time they bought on credit, and every time they paid, and the balance carried forward. When a page fills you start a new one in the next book, and you write "from 14, p. 62" at the top so you can find your way back. The Pettway family is in twenty-eight of the thirty-four books. They are on page nine of the first book. Otis's father opened the account in 1939 with a sack of flour, a can of lard and a pound of coffee.

I set them on the counter in two stacks, my father's and mine, and Ashley looked at them for a long time without touching.

"Is this—everybody?"

"Everybody who ever ran a tab."

"How many is that?"

"Over eighty-eight years? I don't know. Two thousand families. Three. Some for a week. Some for sixty years."

She put out a finger and laid it on the top book of my father's stack, just laid it there, on the cloth, like you'd touch a sleeping dog to see if it's warm.

"How did it work?"

So I told her. I have told it before, to a man from the university in Jackson who came with a tape recorder in 1988, and to a woman writing a book on Delta Chinese in 2003, and I told it again now, and I could hear myself telling it better than I had either of those times, because she was family and I didn't have to be careful.

How in my father's time most of the families who bought here worked on the plantations west of town, and got paid once a year, at settlement, when the cotton was in and the owner figured up what they had earned against what they owed. How the plantation commissaries would carry them through the year and charge them whatever they pleased. How a Chinese grocer in a Black neighborhood could get their trade by carrying them too, and charging them fairly, and writing it down where they could see it. How my father would turn the book around on the counter so the customer could read the page, even the ones who couldn't read, because he wanted them to see that the numbers were there and the numbers didn't move.

"That's why the Chinese stores lasted," I said. "Not because we were nice. Because we wrote it down and turned the book around."

"And they paid?"

"Mostly. At settlement, or a little at a time. Some years they couldn't, a bad year, the river came up, the cotton got the worms. Then he carried it forward. Some he carried forward for ten years." I touched the top of my own stack. "I still carry about forty families. Small. Ten dollars, forty, a hundred twenty. Most pay on the first of the month when their check comes. One rule. You never let a family run up more than they can pay in a month. That's my rule. My father's was two months. I changed it in 1979, after I lost money on a man I liked too much."

"Can I scan them?"

She said it fast, like she'd been holding it.

"For the history night," she said. "I wouldn't show anybody's balances. I'd just show what they look like, your dad's writing, the—"

"No."

She stopped.

I hadn't meant to say it so loudly. Dre had stopped breaking down boxes in the back. Out on the crate I could see Otis's head turn a little, the way a dog's ear turns.

"Those aren't mine to give," I said, more quietly. "You understand? That's the Pettways' business on page nine. That's Mrs. Gaines's mother buying on credit in a bad year. That's people's grandmothers who couldn't pay for a sack of meal in 1957 and didn't want anybody to know it, not even their own children, and my father wrote it down because they asked him to and he promised them nobody else would see it. He didn't promise the Heritage Circle."

"Yeh-Yeh, it's history—"

"It's people's business."

"It's both."

I looked at her. She looked right back at me. She has her grandmother's chin, Pat's chin, which in an argument becomes a kind of shelf you could set a cup on.

"It's both," I said finally. "That's why I don't know what to do with them. You see? If it was one or the other I'd have done it already."

---

She went quiet after that, and I let her. We finished aisle two, which is canned meats, crackers, soup, peanut butter, syrup and the pickle jars. I rang up an hour of customers. Dre finished the boxes and asked if he could have the lamp wicks, and I asked him what in the wide world a boy his age wanted with nine dozen lamp wicks, and he said he didn't know yet but they were cool, and I gave them to him, and he went home with the case on his shoulder like he'd won a prize at the fair.

At closing she helped me put the books back in the safe, the two stacks, my father's on the bottom. She handed them to me one at a time and I set them in. When she passed me the first one, the oldest one, 1938, she held on to it a second longer than she had to.

"Can I at least look at his?" she said. "I can't read it anyway. Nobody can read it but you."

That was nearly true, and it shamed me a little, and it was also, I thought later, very clever.

"Saturday," I said. "After we close. You bring the tamales. I'll bring my reading glasses. We'll see what he wrote."

"And the boots?"

"What boots?"

"Arthur Kemp's boots."

I had forgotten them. They were sitting on the end of the meat block in their box, the lid with the name on it, size eleven. I picked them up and set them on the shelf by the register, next to the framed grocery list that everybody thinks is a blessing.

"Arthur Kemp's boots," I said, "stay where they can be seen. Somebody will come."

The Crate

The crate is a wooden soft-drink case from a bottling company in Greenwood that went out of business in 1966. It has four slots on each long side, worn smooth as soap by a half century of hands, and the name of the bottler burned into one end in letters so faded you can only read them with your fingertips. It sits on the walk to the left of the front door, in the shade of the awning until about eleven, then in the sun until about three, then in the shade again when the sun goes behind the Red Top. My great-grandfather sat on it from 1977 to 1988. Mr. Otis has sat on it since the day after the funeral, when, he told me, he came by to pay his respects and saw it sitting there empty and "couldn't stand to look at it like that."

"So you sat on it."

"So I sat on it." He was peeling a boiled egg from a paper sack, slowly, getting the shell off in one long curl. "Your granddaddy come out and saw me and didn't say a word. Went back in. Come back out with a cold drink and put it down by my foot. Been that way thirty-eight years."

"Has he ever asked you to move?"

"He has asked me," said Mr. Otis, "to move my foot."

It was Wednesday, mid-morning, the shade still holding. I had brought a folding stool from the back room, a metal one with a cracked vinyl seat, and set it at a polite distance, and he had looked at it, and at me, and said, "That's not a crate," and I had said, "I know, Mr. Otis," and sat on it anyway. He let me. I think he was pleased I'd made the effort to be wrong in a respectful way.

I had my recorder in my lap. It's a small one, silver, no bigger than a candy bar, and I'd bought it for a class in graduate school and used it exactly twice. I had my release forms on a clipboard. I had a pen. I had my plan, revised, which now said in its entirety: Sit. Ask. Shut up.

"Mr. Otis," I said, "before I turn this on. I want to tell you what it's for."

"You already told me."

"I want to tell you again. I'm going to record you if you say yes. I'll write your name on it. Not 'a neighbor,' not 'a longtime customer.' Otis Pettway. I'll play it back to you after, all of it, and anything you don't want kept, I'll cut. Then I'll ask you whether some of it can be played at the Heritage Circle program. You can say no to that and still say yes to me keeping it. And if you change your mind next week, or next year, you call me and I'll take it out."

He finished peeling the egg. He held it up to the light, a smooth white egg with a little blue tint, and turned it like a jeweler.

"You do this in Atlanta?"

"I do something like it."

"For what?"

"For the city. When they want to change a street, they're supposed to ask the people who live on it first. I'm the person who asks."

"Do they listen?"

I thought about the reports going to committee and being received and filed, received and filed, like letters into a slot in a wall.

"Sometimes," I said.

"Mm-hm." He ate half the egg in one bite. "Well. Turn it on, then."

---

I'll tell some of what he said. Not all, because he asked me to cut parts, and I cut them, and they're gone, and that's the deal.

He was born in 1942 in a house on the Belle Arbor place, a plantation south of town that he said I would not find on any map now. His mother picked and his father drove a mule for the gin. His father opened the account at Wong's in 1939, three years before Otis was born, because the commissary on the place charged fifty cents for a pound of coffee and Joe Wong charged twenty-eight. "And Joe Wong would write it down where you could see it. My daddy couldn't read but he could read numbers. He'd stand there and watch that pen go."

He picked cotton from the age of six. He was very fast. He was, he said, the fastest picker under twelve years old in the history of Washington County, "and you can put that in your history, because nobody alive can prove it wrong." At sixteen he went to work at a gin in Leland sweeping lint. The head mechanic was a white man named Mr. Talbert who would not teach him a thing, not one thing, so Otis watched, and when a gin stand jammed on a Saturday night in the middle of the season with Talbert gone fishing, Otis took it apart and found the broken saw and put it back together by lantern light. "And Monday Talbert come in and looked at that stand running and looked at me, and said, Who did this, and I said I did, and he said, Well, you better come here then. And he taught me everything. Took him a while to get over it. But he taught me."

The cane across his knees, the hickory one with the brass doorknob for a handle, had come off the front door of that gin office when they tore it down in 1980. "I asked for it. Man thought I was crazy. Forty years I been turning that knob."

He got his first paycheck in 1959, and he came to Wong's to cash it.

"Not the bank?"

He just looked at me.

"Okay," I said.

"Joe Wong cashed it. Took a nickel. I said, That's a nickel, and he said, That's for the ink. I paid my daddy's balance off with that check. All of it. Forty-one dollars and some cents. He'd been carrying it since the dry year, fifty-four." He laughed, a big rumbling laugh, a sound like furniture being moved upstairs. "And Joe Wong drew a line across the page and wrote something in Chinese, and I said, What's that say, and he said, Says you a man now. I found out later what it really said. Your granddaddy told me."

"What did it really say?"

"You'll find out," said Mr. Otis. "Saturday. He told me you all going to read the old books Saturday." He wagged a finger. "You going to find out a lot of things Saturday."

He talked about the phone. Joe Wong had the only telephone on the block from 1946 to about 1960, a black one on the wall by the register, and he let people use it, a nickel a call, and when calls came in for people he'd send a child running to fetch them. Otis courted his wife on that phone. Vernell. She lived in Hollandale and worked for a family in Leland and they'd talk Sunday evenings for exactly three minutes, which was what he could afford, "and Joe Wong would stand right there at the register reading his Chinese newspaper and pretend he couldn't understand a word, and every once in a while he'd turn a page real loud." He laughed again, then stopped, and looked down the street a while. Vernell died in 2011. He said so plainly and went on.

He talked for seventy minutes. The shade went off the walk. Customers came and went around us, stepping over his foot, saying "Morning, Mr. Otis," and he'd nod without breaking his story. A freight horn blew long and low from the railroad yard. Gnats found the egg sack. My thighs stuck to the vinyl. When he finally stopped, it was because he was done, not because I'd asked a question, and I clicked the recorder off and the red light went out and I realized I'd been holding the clipboard so hard the edge had printed a line across my palm.

"Well," he said. "Play it."

So I played it. Right there on the walk, the speaker tinny and small, his voice coming out of the little silver bar. He listened with his eyes closed. About four minutes in he opened them.

"That's not how I sound."

"That's exactly how you sound."

"I sound like a tired auctioneer at the end of a long sale."

"You sound like you, Mr. Otis."

"Do it again."

"The whole thing?"

"Not the whole thing. That part about the gin. I told that wrong. I put Talbert in Leland, he was in Arcola. And I want to say the thing about the saw better. You don't put a saw back. You put a saw in. Do it again."

So we did it again. He told the part about the gin over, and he told it better, and he put the saw in instead of back. Then he made me cut a section near the end that he said was "between me and Vernell," and I cut it while he watched over my shoulder to be sure, and then he made me play him the whole thing, start to finish, again, and he listened all the way through without opening his eyes, and when it ended he said:

"All right. You can keep that. You can play the gin part and the phone part at the history night. Not the check. That's family."

"Not the check."

"Write it down."

I wrote it down. On the back of the release form, under his signature, which he had done in a slow, careful, beautiful hand, the capitals tall and looped: Gin and phone yes. Check no. O.P. He initialed it. Then he took the pen out of my hand and added, underneath, in the same careful capitals: SAW GOES IN.

---

His grandson came to pick him up at one. I didn't know that was going to happen. A pickup pulled to the curb, a dusty white one with a dented tailgate, and a man got out, early thirties, tall, a sunburn across the back of his neck and a T-shirt so faded you could only guess it had once said something, and he came up the walk saying "Pop, you ready?" and then saw me and stopped.

"This is Ashley," said Mr. Otis. "Henry's granddaughter. The planner. She been recording me."

"Oh, Lord," said the man. "How long?"

"Hour and a half," I said.

"Oh, Lord," he said again, and grinned. "You got the gin story?"

"Twice."

"Did he put the saw back or put it in?"

"He put it in. The second time."

He laughed out loud at that, the same laugh as his grandfather, a little higher, and put out his hand. "Calvin," he said. His hand was rough as a rasp across the palm and the fingers were scarred in thin white lines, old cuts. "Calvin Pettway. I'm off the boat for two weeks, so I'm the driver."

"What boat?"

"Towboat. On the river." He pointed with his chin toward the levee, as if the river were just past the Red Top and not a mile off. "Pushing barges. Twenty-eight days on, twenty-eight off. Memphis to Baton Rouge and back, mostly. I'm a mate."

"Is that—a lot of responsibility?"

"It is if you ask my captain. If you ask Pop, I just stand around on a boat."

"You stand around on a boat," said Mr. Otis.

Calvin helped him up off the crate. It took a minute. The cane, the knee, the hand on Calvin's forearm. Then Mr. Otis was upright and dignified again and he said to me, "Can he hear it?"

"Can who hear what?"

"Calvin. Can he hear it. The recording. Can you put it somewhere the family can get at it and nobody else."

"Yes," I said. "Yes, I can do that. I can put it where only the people you say can listen. And it'll have your name on it. Told by Otis Pettway. Recorded on the crate, Nelson Street."

"Put Vernell on it too. Put that she was my wife." He thought. "And put the date. And put that I put the saw in."

"I'll put all that."

Calvin was looking at me with an expression I couldn't read, half amused, half something else, and he said, "You going to be here all month?"

"Till the twenty-sixth."

"I'm off till the twentieth." He opened the truck door for his grandfather. "Maybe you want to hear the river part sometime. Pop doesn't know the river part. He's a land man."

"I'm a gin man," said Mr. Otis from inside the cab, with great scorn. "There's no story on a river. It's just water going downhill."

I stood on the walk and watched them pull away. The crate sat empty in the sun beside me, the slots in its sides worn smooth, and I did not sit on it. It wasn't mine. Through the glass behind me my grandfather was weighing out a pound and a half of hoop cheese on the hanging scale for a woman in pale blue nurse scrubs, and he glanced up at me and raised his eyebrows, and I held up the recorder and nodded. He nodded back, once, and went back to his cheese.

That night on the legal pad I wrote, under SIT, ASK, SHUT UP: Play it back. Let them fix it. The saw goes in.

Rice by the Pound

I was born in the back of this store. Not in the hospital. In the back room, on a Thursday in March of 1955, on a cot between the potato sacks and the kerosene drum, because my mother had a shelf of canned peaches to finish pricing and did not believe me when I told her I was coming. That is how my sister May tells it. My sister was four at the time and was sent next door to Ora Mae's grandmother, who was then making tamales in a washtub on a fire in the yard, and May says she ate eleven tamales while I was being born and was sick on the steps, and that is the first thing she remembers in her life and she has held it against me ever since.

We lived in three rooms behind the store until I was twelve. The back room, with the stock. A kitchen with a two-burner stove and a sink and a table covered in oilcloth printed with cherries. One bedroom, with a bed for my parents and a bed for May and a cot for me, and a curtain between, and a window onto the alley where my mother hung salted fish to dry on a wire, so that our clothes and our hair and our schoolbooks smelled of it, faintly, all winter. A little boy at the white school told me I smelled like bait. I told him he smelled like a boy whose mother didn't feed him salted fish, and he hit me, and I hit him back, and my father, when he heard, did not ask who had started it. He asked whether I had won. I said I didn't know. He said, Next time know.

My mother came from Hong Kong in 1948, a year after my father went back to marry her. She was nineteen. He was thirty-six. She had never seen him before the wedding and she had never seen a cotton field in her life, and she stepped off the train at the Greenville depot in a wool coat in July and stood beside the tracks, she told me once, and thought she had been sent to the bottom of a pot of boiling water as punishment for something. She learned English in the store, from customers, which is why for the rest of her life she said "fixing to" and "might could" and called a paper sack a poke. She ran the register while my father ran the meat block. She could add a column of prices in her head faster than the adding machine, and when the adding machine disagreed with her, she sent it back.

Every morning she made jook. Rice boiled down to a white porridge, thin and silky, in a pot on the back burner from five a.m., with a slice of ginger in it and sometimes a bit of salted pork and sometimes nothing, and we ate it with a spoonful of soy and a few peanuts and slivers of preserved egg, and on Sundays strips of fried bread from the bakery in Leland that a cousin brought by. I have eaten jook every morning of my life that I could. I eat it now, alone, at my kitchen table in the house on Alexander Street, out of the same chipped blue bowl with the rice-grain pattern you can see through when you hold it to the light. Ashley ate it with me on Thursday. She said it was "very comforting," which is the word young people use for food they find bland.

---

On Saturdays May and I went to Chinese school. It was in a rented room above a dry cleaner on Washington Avenue, and it smelled of steam and solvent, and twelve of us sat on folding chairs while Mr. Gong, who had a dry goods store in Leland and a voice like a gravel truck, made us copy characters with brushes on newsprint. We learned to write our names, the numbers, the words for rice and water and mother and store. We learned the old stories in English translation, because half of us could no longer follow them in Cantonese. We learned to hate Saturday. Then we went down the stairs into the hot afternoon and walked to the drugstore for a cold drink and became, for the rest of the weekend, Mississippians.

There were maybe forty Chinese families in Greenville when I was a boy. Every one of them had a store, or worked in one. The Lums, the Chows, the Gongs, the Jues, the Wongs, three families of Wongs, none related, all of them annoyed by it. Each store was on a corner in a Black neighborhood or on the line between a Black one and a white one, and each family lived behind its store, and on Sunday the families visited one another, and the mothers compared prices and the fathers compared suppliers and the children compared grades. We were not allowed to compare anything but grades. My grades were good. May's were better. May became a pharmacist in Houston and married a man named Raymond Chow who sold insurance and could recite the actuarial tables the way some men recite baseball, and she calls me every Sunday at four o'clock to tell me what I'm doing wrong.

She called on this Sunday, too, and Ashley answered.

"Is that Ashley? Put your grandfather on."

"Hi, Auntie May. How are you?"

"I'm fine, how are you, put him on. Henry. Henry. I've been adding the cousins."

"What cousins?"

"To the family tree. Ashley's tree. The one she made, the private one, the family can all get into it and put names on." I could hear her typing, hard, with her two pointer fingers. "I've put in all Raymond's people and all of Ma's people from Hong Kong that I remember, and I've put in Uncle Fong's second wife, who you will remember was not his first wife."

"I remember."

"And I've put in the year everybody came. You know nobody wrote down when Uncle Fong came? I put 1931. I'm fairly sure. And I put Ba coming in 1936 to Leland and then 1938 to Greenville and then going back in '47 and Ma in '48. I put all of that on the line of moves. You should look at it."

"I'll look at it."

"You won't look at it. Ashley, make him look at it."

So Ashley, that night after dinner, made me look at it. She set her computer on my kitchen table, next to the blue bowl, and showed me the tree that she had started from Atlanta two years ago and that had grown, branch by branch, while I wasn't paying attention, because every Wong and Chow and Lum with a cousin in Houston or Oakland or Memphis had been told about it by May and had gone in and put down their own people. There were photographs. My mother at nineteen in her wool coat at the depot, labeled in May's hand, Ma arrives, Greenville, July 1948 (she is HOT). My father at the meat block in a paper hat. A long line, the line of moves, that started at a village in Toishan I have never seen and went to Hong Kong and San Francisco and Leland and Greenville and then broke apart, after about 1970, like a river at its mouth, into a dozen little channels: Houston, Memphis, Atlanta, Sacramento, Chicago, one cousin in Perth.

"You're the only one who didn't move," said Ashley.

"I moved. I moved from behind the store to Alexander Street."

"That's eleven blocks."

"It was a big step," I said. "Your grandmother made me buy a lawn mower."

---

Monday morning I started selling down.

There is an art to closing a store, and I learned it from going to everybody else's. You cut the prices by a quarter the first week and a half the second, and you don't restock, and you let the shelves empty from the top down, so the eye level stays full longest. You call the suppliers and cancel the standing orders one at a time and listen to them say what a shame. You sell what you can and you give away what you can't, and what you can't give away, you carry home in your car, and it sits in your garage for ten years until your son comes and throws it out.

The first call I made was to the meat house in Memphis that has sent me hoop cheese, salt pork, neck bones and souse in a refrigerated truck every Tuesday since 1981. The man who took the call was named Gerald and he had been taking my calls for nineteen years, and I had never once seen his face. I told him to stop the order after the fifteenth. The line went quiet, and I could hear a forklift beeping behind him, backing up, backing up.

"Mr. Wong," he said at last, "who's going to order the souse?"

"Nobody, Gerald."

"You're my last souse," he said. "In the whole Delta. You know that? The last account on my sheet that orders souse every week."

I did not know that. I told him I was sorry. He said he'd put a note on the account, and I asked what the note would say, and he said, "It'll say closed," in a voice that suggested it would say more than that if it had room.

Ashley wrote the new prices. She has nice lettering, square and even, a planner's hand, and I let her, because her S stood up straight.

Buddy Carr came in at ten on Monday for his lunch and saw the shelf tag on the sardines, which now said twenty-five percent off, and stood in front of it with his lips moving. Then he went out to his truck and came back with an empty produce box, the kind with handholes, and began loading sardines into it. Thirty-eight cans. Every one on the shelf. Then he went in the back without asking, because Buddy has never once asked, and came out with the case I hadn't opened, another twenty-four.

"Buddy," I said.

"Don't say a word."

"That's sixty-two cans of sardines."

"I can count, Henry. I flew an airplane with a hopper full of poison sixty feet off the ground for thirty years, I can count to sixty-two." He set the box on the counter. It was very heavy. The counter creaked. "That's two months."

"It's two months and a day."

"I'll take a day off." He got out his wallet. "And all the saltines."

"I'm not selling you all the saltines."

"Why not?"

"Because they'll go stale, and you'll come in here in November and tell me they were stale, and I won't be here, and you'll have to tell it to the chain store on the highway, and they won't care."

He looked at me for a while across the box of sardines with his pale blue eyes, which are always a little watery from forty years of chemical spray, and then he began laughing and couldn't quit, and Otis on the crate outside started laughing too, without knowing what at, which happens.

"Six sleeves," said Buddy finally, wiping his eyes. "And the marshmallow pies."

"All of them?"

"All of them," said Buddy. "Those don't go stale. Those don't do anything. Those'll outlive all of us."

He paid in twenties and carried the box out to his truck in two trips, and I watched him go with the bed of the truck sagging a little on the right, and I stood behind the counter and looked at the shelf where the sardines had been.

That was the first empty shelf. I had expected it to bother me. It did not bother me, exactly. It looked like a shelf. A plank of painted pine, a little dusty, a ring where a leaking can had once rusted through in 1999, the price tag clip with its tag at twenty-five percent off and nothing behind it. You could see the wall. The wall is painted a pale green under the shelves that I had forgotten about. My father painted it in 1962. He had been very proud of that green.

"You okay?" said Ashley from the end of the aisle.

"I'm fine." I took the tag off the clip and put it in my apron pocket. "Your grandmother picked out that green. Not my father. I forgot that. She went to the hardware store with a cabbage leaf in her purse and held it up to the paint chips until they found one that matched."

She took out her notebook and wrote that down. I watched her do it.

"Why are you writing that?"

"Because nobody else knows it," she said. "And you just told me."

Tall Hat

On Saturday at seven my grandfather pulled the light strings front to back, and the store went dark in stages, and then he went back and pulled the one over the meat block on again so there was a single pool of yellow light on the scarred wood and the brass pan of the hanging scale above it. I had two dozen tamales from Ora Mae's in a doubled paper sack, already soaking through. He had his reading glasses, the strong pair, and a magnifying glass with a bone handle that had been his father's. He spun the dial, knelt, made the bag-of-ice noise, and brought out the oldest book.

1938 to 1941. The cloth on the cover had worn through at the corners to gray board. The spine was cracked in two places and mended with tape that had gone the color of a manila folder. When he opened it, the smell came up: dust and old paste and something faintly sweet, like pressed flowers or tobacco, and under that the smell of the store itself, eighty-eight years compressed into paper.

"All right," he said. "You hold the light."

I held my phone over the page with the flashlight on, and he leaned in with the bone-handled glass, and I looked at my great-grandfather's handwriting for the first time in my life up close.

It was beautiful. I didn't expect that. I had seen Chinese writing on menus and signs and in my grandfather's Sunday newspaper, but never like this, in a ledger, in columns, small and crowded and absolutely regular, each character the same size as its neighbor, the ink a deep brown-black that had gone a little rusty at the edges. The numbers were in Western numerals, to the right of each line, in a separate hand that was still his but clearly made for other people's eyes. The characters were for his own.

"What does it say? At the top."

He ran a finger under the line. "It says, Page nine. Then it says—" He stopped. He started laughing. Not a big laugh, a kind of helpless leaking through the nose. "Oh, Ba."

"What?"

"It says Tall Hat."

"Tall Hat?"

"That's the name of the account. Tall Hat." He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes on his wrist. "He didn't know their names. Half of them, at first. He couldn't write the English, or he couldn't spell it, and anyway half of the men on the plantations went by three different names. So he wrote what he saw. This is Otis's daddy. Ezra Pettway. He wore a hat. Felt hat, high crown, Sundays and weekdays both. Otis told me. He wore that hat to the field."

"Tall Hat," I said.

"Tall Hat." He put the glasses back on and turned a page, and then another, and then started reading aloud, translating as he went, sliding his finger down the left side of the pages where the account names were. "The Woman Who Argues About Eggs. That's—I think that's Mrs. Gaines's mother, or her grandmother. Mule With a Bad Leg. That would be the man with the mule, not the mule. Quiet Teacher. Red Shoes. Sings While Paying." He stopped. "Sings While Paying is Toot's uncle. Lucius's uncle. The one who taught him."

"He sang? At the counter?"

"Every time, apparently." He turned another page. "The Twins Who Are Not Twins. Big Laugh. Small Laugh. Planter's Son, Pays Late." His voice changed slightly on that one. He kept going. "Short Arm. Fixes Radios. Woman From Arkansas. Gold Tooth." He set the glass down. "Gold Tooth is Ora Mae's grandmother."

"Did she have a gold tooth?"

"She had three. He only wrote one. He didn't want to be rude."

I laughed so hard I had to put the phone face down on the meat block, and the light went out, and we sat for a second in the dim yellow from the one bulb with the tamale grease soaking into the paper sack and the cold case humming, and then I picked up the phone and turned it back over.

"What did he write when Mr. Otis paid off the account? In fifty-nine. Mr. Otis said he wrote something across the page. He said you told him later what it really said."

He found it. It took a while; it wasn't in this book, it was in book seven, and he had to get book seven out of the safe, and the knees, and the dial. The page said Tall Hat at the top in the same hand, smaller now, and twenty years older, and under the long columns of flour and lard and coffee and meal and the payments in small amounts at settlement time, year after year, a single long line had been ruled clear across the page in ink. Under the line, four characters.

"It says—" He read them twice. "It says, Tall Hat's son pays all. Then it says, Quick hands. Watch him."

"Watch him?"

"Watch him."

"Like, keep an eye on him? Or—watch him, like he's going places?"

"Yes," said my grandfather. "That's the thing about Chinese. It's both." He took off his glasses. "I told Otis it meant he was going places. Years later. Nineteen eighty or so, sitting right out there. He laughed till he cried. Then he said, Henry, your daddy was right both ways. Then he told me about the time he took a dollar out of my father's cigar box when he was nine." He shook his head. "So you see. These are people's business."

---

That was where it went wrong, and I'll tell it straight because I was the one who did it.

I asked him if I could photograph the nickname index. Just the names, I said, not the numbers. He said all right. I asked if I could photograph the Tall Hat page for Mr. Otis, because Mr. Otis had asked, and he said all right. Then I asked if I could take pictures of the pages for Mrs. Gaines's family, and for Toot's uncle, and for Gold Tooth, so I could show the families what the old books said about them, and he looked at me a while over his glasses, and said, "Show them, don't give them. And ask them first."

What I heard was: Show them.

On Sunday I took my printouts around. I had made them at the library downtown on Saturday morning, on the public machine, eighteen cents a page. I'd put each family's page in its own manila folder with the name written on the tab in my square lettering. I'd translated the nickname on a sticky note inside the cover. It was a good system. It was the kind of system that wins you a certificate in equitable engagement.

Mrs. Gaines was first. She lives on Clay Street in a yellow house with a chain-link fence and a concrete goose on the porch dressed for the season, which was apparently something to do with football. She is eighty-one and her gallbladder story I had heard in full on Tuesday. She opened the folder on her porch, read the sticky note, and shrieked.

"The Woman Who Argues About Eggs!" She hit me on the arm with the folder. "That was Mama! That was absolutely Mama! She'd hold every egg up to the light at that counter and find something wrong with it, every one, a speck or a crack or a pale yolk, she said she could see the yolk, and old Mr. Wong would just stand there and stand there—" She was crying from laughing. She went in the house and came back out with a shoebox of photographs, and we sat on her porch swing for ninety minutes with the folder between us and the photographs on our laps, and she named every single person in every single picture while I wrote the names on the backs in pencil and then, with her permission, photographed them, front and back, so the names would stay with the faces. Her mother in a wide straw hat, unsmiling. Her mother in an apron, smiling, holding up an egg to the camera like a prize. "That one was a joke," said Mrs. Gaines. "Daddy took that one for a joke. Write that. Write it was a joke."

I wrote it was a joke.

Toot's family was easy too. Toot's niece Sharon runs the Red Top now and she took Sings While Paying and pinned it to the wall over the bar before I'd finished explaining it.

Then I went to the Hales.

I should have stopped. Planter's Son, Pays Late. I should have heard my grandfather's voice change on it Saturday night and understood that the change was information. But I had a system, and the system had a folder for every name in the index that I could trace, and Mrs. Gaines had given me the Hale family address because she knew everybody's address, and the Hales lived out on the Highway 1 side of town in a white house with columns and a magnolia and a long gravel drive, and I drove up it.

Mr. Dale Hale was seventy. Retired from insurance. Polite. He came to the door in a golf shirt and slippers and listened to my whole speech on the porch, the store closing, the history night, the old books, his grandfather's account, and he took the folder, and read the sticky note, and the change in his face was the change in my grandfather's voice.

"Planter's son," he said.

"It's what he called accounts," I said. "He didn't know the names. He wrote descriptions. Everybody got one. Mrs. Gaines's mother was The Woman Who—"

"Pays late." He was reading the numbers now. The long columns. The small payments, spaced far apart. "My grandfather owed a Chinese grocer on Nelson Street for three years."

"I'm sure it was a hard time for—"

"Young lady," said Mr. Hale, very quietly, "who else has seen this?"

"Nobody. I mean, me. My grandfather. The library printer."

"Is it going to be in your history night?"

"No. No, sir, only if you—"

"I'd like it destroyed." He closed the folder and held it out to me. "This page. Whatever's in your camera. And I'd like your grandfather to call me."

---

My grandfather did not raise his voice. That was the worst part. I would have preferred he raise it. He listened to the whole thing standing at the register on Monday morning with a pencil behind his ear, and when I finished he took the pencil down and turned it end over end on the counter, tap, tap, tap, for a long time.

"What did I say," he said. "Saturday."

"Show them. Don't give them."

"And?"

"Ask them first."

"Did you ask Dale Hale first?"

"I asked him. On the porch."

"You asked him with the folder in your hand." Tap. Tap. "That's not asking, Ashley. That's delivering."

"I know."

"The books turn around," he said. "They don't walk. You understand? My father turned the book around on this counter. Right here. So the man could see his own page, standing here, with nobody else in the store if he wanted it that way. He didn't carry it to his house. He didn't carry it to his porch where his wife could see and his neighbor could see and the man next door with the leaf blower could see." He put the pencil down. "Dale Hale's daddy and I went to school together. He was a decent boy. Dale's a decent man. He's proud. His granddaddy was proud. That's why my father wrote it down that way. Pays late. Not doesn't pay. Pays late. You know how many people my father wrote down as doesn't pay, in forty years?"

"How many?"

"None. Not one. He'd write a name and a line and nothing. You'd have to know."

I stood there in my grandmother's apron with the shame running up my neck like heat out of an oven door.

"I'll call him," said my grandfather. "I'll go out there. I'll take him the page myself. The real page, not your copy. We'll sit in his kitchen, and he can look at it, and then he can do as he likes with it, and then we'll talk about his daddy, and he'll tell me some story about the bird dog they had, and I'll tell him one about mine." He peered at me over his glasses. "Delete what's in your camera."

I did it right there at the register, all of it, the Hale page, and he watched me do it.

"The others," I said. "Mrs. Gaines. She loved it. She gave me forty photographs. She named everybody in them."

"I know. She called me at six this morning." For the first time all morning, something in his face let go a little. "She said you were a nice girl with terrible handwriting."

"My handwriting is excellent."

"Not on the backs of photographs, apparently." He picked the pencil up again and put it behind his ear. "You can't pick up the whole town in a folder, Ashley. You have to turn it around one page at a time." He went to wait on a customer. Then he came back. "But you were right about one thing."

"What?"

"The Woman Who Argues About Eggs," he said, "deserves to be in a history."

Bird Dogs

Dale Hale's kitchen had been redone since the last time I was in it, which was 1971, for his brother's sixteenth birthday, when I was the only boy from my side of town invited and his mother put me at the end of the table next to the dog. Now it was all white cabinets and a gray stone counter and a refrigerator so big and silent I thought for a minute it was a closet. The window over the sink looked out on a field of soybeans gone gold and rattling, and past that, a line of pecans along a ditch, and past that the long flat nothing that goes all the way to the river.

I put the page on the counter. The real page, from book six. I had cut it out of the binding that morning with my father's razor, slowly, along the gutter, and it was the first page I had ever cut out of any of the books, and my hand shook more than I liked.

Dale didn't touch it at first. He poured us coffee in two mugs from a bank in Cleveland and sat down across from me and looked at the page from a distance, like you look at a snake you aren't sure is dead.

"My granddaddy," he said finally.

"Your granddaddy."

"He lost the place in '31. Most of it. Kept the house." He turned the mug in his hands. "Daddy never talked about it. Never once. I found out from a cousin at a funeral."

"Mine didn't talk about much of anything," I said. "He wrote it down instead."

Dale picked up the page then. He read it the way his own grandfather would have read it, standing at my father's counter in 1940, with the book turned around: slowly, every line, his lips moving a little on the numbers. Flour. Coffee. Lard. Coal oil. Shotgun shells, a box, three times in one fall. A pair of children's shoes. Payment, payment, a gap of eleven months, payment. At the bottom, in the right-hand column, my father had drawn the long line, and under it, in the small careful characters, two words.

"What's that say?"

"It says Paid. And then it says Thank you."

Dale looked up.

"He didn't do that for everybody," I said. "I went through the whole book last night. Most of them, he just drew the line."

He set the page down very gently on the gray stone. Outside a combine had started up somewhere out of sight, a deep grinding hum you feel in the backs of your teeth before you hear it.

"I'll keep it," he said. "If that's all right with you."

"It's yours. It was always yours. It was just at my house."

"Your granddaughter," he said. "I wasn't fair to her."

"You were fair. She came to your porch with a folder. That's not how it's done."

"She's going to put the others in her history night?"

"The ones who want to be in it. That's the rule now." I drank some of his coffee. It was very good coffee, much better than mine. "Dale, you remember that bird dog your brother had? The liver-spotted one that ate the birthday cake?"

His face changed. It did what faces do when somebody hands them back something they forgot they had. "Duke," he said. "Lord. Duke. He ate the whole top layer. Mama went after him with a spatula."

"He was sitting next to me," I said. "I always figured I was going to get blamed."

"You did," said Dale. "For about a week. I'm sorry about that."

We sat in his kitchen for an hour. He told me about Duke and two more bird dogs after Duke. I told him about Rusty, the yellow mutt who slept in our alley for six years and ate my mother's salted fish off the wire. When I left he walked me out to the truck, and stood with his hand on the door, and said, "Who's buying the building, Henry?" and I said I didn't know yet, and he said, "If you need somebody to look at a contract," and I said thank you, and that was the most anybody from that house had ever offered me, and I drove home through the soybeans with the windows down and the dust coming in.

---

On Sunday morning I took Ashley to the cemetery.

I go once a month, the second Sunday, early, before it's hot. I have done it since my father died in 1990. My mother did it before me, every week, and she brought oranges, because her mother had brought oranges in Toishan, and she would sit on the little concrete curb at the edge of our plot and peel one in a single long spiral and eat it in sections and tell my father what had happened at the store. I do the same. I couldn't tell you what it means. I do not ask myself. A man is allowed to eat an orange where he pleases.

The Chinese section is at the back of the city cemetery, out past the old part with the iron fences and the marble urns, past the big oaks with the moss hanging, in a corner by the drainage ditch where the ground stays soft. There are a hundred and some graves. The old ones have stones carved in Chinese, a column down the center with the village name and the family name, and they face, if you notice, a little differently from the American stones, slightly to the southwest, because a man in Greenville in 1925 with a compass decided that was the direction home. The newer ones are in English. Some are in both. The names run across both halves of the century: Wong, Lum, Chow, Gong, Jue, Joe, Quong, Fong, Pang, Gee. Some graves are empty. In the early days, the families sent the bones back after ten years, packed in a box, by train to San Francisco and by ship to Hong Kong and by boat up the river to the villages, so the dead could lie with their own people. My great-uncle went home that way in 1939. The stone is still here with nobody under it, and every month I pull the grass from around it anyway, since it's a stone and the grass doesn't know.

Ashley had brought gardening gloves, which I had not told her to bring. She knelt beside me at my parents' stone and started pulling crabgrass out of the gravel border without being asked.

The stone says WONG on the top in English and has the characters underneath, and then my father, Kwok Leung, 1912 to 1990, and my mother, Lai Ying, 1929 to 2008, and, beside them, a smaller stone in the same gray granite: PATRICIA LUM WONG, 1957 to 2019, and under her name, at her request, a carving of a treble clef, which the stonemason in Leland had never carved before and got slightly wrong, so that it looks a little like a seahorse. Pat would have found that very funny. I find it very funny. I come here and look at the seahorse and laugh, and anybody watching from across the cemetery would think I was a man who had lost his mind.

It was warm already at eight. The ground smelled of cut grass and wet clay from the ditch and something sweet from the honeysuckle that grows in the fence. A mockingbird on an urn two rows over was running through every song it knew, and some it didn't.

I sat on the curb and took out an orange. A good Florida one, from the box I'd held back from the sale. I peeled it in a spiral. My mother could take the whole peel off in one piece, every time. I get about two thirds before it breaks.

"Can I ask you something?" said Ashley, pulling grass.

"You've done nothing but ask me things for two weeks."

"Why did you stay?"

I had known she would ask that. I had known since she got out of the car. I had had two weeks to come up with an answer, and I gave her the first one, which is the one I give everybody.

"Somebody had to mind the store."

"That's not an answer, Yeh-Yeh."

"It's the answer I've got." I handed her a section of orange. She took off a glove to take it.

"Dad says you got into Ole Miss. Engineering. In 1973. He says you had a scholarship."

"Your father talks too much for a dentist."

"He says Great-Grandpa told you to go, and you didn't."

I ate a section of orange. The mockingbird did a car alarm. It does that now; they learn them.

"He told me to go," I said. "That's true. He said, Go, you'll be an engineer, you'll build bridges, you won't have to stand behind a counter for forty years selling neck bones to people who can't pay. And I said all right. And I packed. And the night before I was supposed to leave, I went down to the store late to get something—I don't remember what, a bar of soap—and the light was on, and he was sitting at the counter in the dark with the books open, and he was doing the accounts, and he was crying."

Ashley stopped pulling grass.

"Not because I was leaving," I said. "He wasn't that kind of man. He was crying because his hands didn't work. The arthritis had gotten into the knuckles that year and he couldn't hold the pen to write the characters right, and he'd been trying all night, and they were coming out crooked, and he couldn't stand it. You could see on the page. Two weeks of entries, and the characters getting worse and worse, shakier, and him crossing them out and doing them over." I ate the last section. "So I sat down and did the accounts. In English. That night. And I didn't go. For four years after that we kept the books both ways, his characters when his hands allowed and my English underneath, until he gave me the keys in seventy-seven."

"And he let you?"

"He sat right there and told me I was writing the numbers wrong," I said. "Every one. All night."

She was quiet. She put her glove back on. She went back to pulling crabgrass from the gravel around my mother's name, carefully, so as not to scrape the stone.

"You could have gone later," she said.

"I could have. I didn't want to. That's the other answer, the true one, the one nobody wants. I liked it. I was good at it. I liked knowing what Buddy was going to buy before he bought it. I liked that the Woman Who Argues About Eggs had a daughter who argued about eggs. I liked your grandmother, who came into the store in 1979 to buy a jar of pickled okra and told me my pickled okra was too sour, and was right." I folded the orange peel into a little pile on the curb. "Your father wants a story where I gave something up. I didn't give anything up. I got a store."

"And now?"

"Now I'm giving up a store." I stood, and my knees did their famous trick, and Ashley got up fast and took my elbow without making a thing of it, the way Calvin took Otis's. "And I get a lawn mower."

---

My phone rang on the drive back. I don't answer the phone in the car. Ashley answered it for me and put it on the speaker, and a man's voice came out of it, very smooth, a voice that had sold something to a great many people.

"Mr. Wong? This is Brent Lassiter with Delta Commercial out of Jackson. I'm calling about the property on Nelson Street. I represent a client who's very interested."

"What client?"

"I'm not at liberty to say just yet, sir. But I can say the client's prepared to offer forty thousand over your asking. Cash. Close in thirty days."

"I don't have an asking."

There was a little pause while Brent Lassiter adjusted.

"Then I'd love to hear one, sir," he said. "At your convenience."

Ashley looked at me from the passenger seat. I looked at the road. The cotton was being picked now in the field on our left, the big green machines going down the rows in a line of three, each one trailing a cloud of lint and dust that hung in the still morning air and drifted across the highway and caught on the weeds of the ditch like a dusting of early snow.

"I'll think about it, Mr. Lassiter," I said.

"Who's the client?" said Ashley when he'd hung up.

"Somebody who builds check-cashing places," I said. "Or a liquor store. Or a chain. It's always one of those three." I turned onto Nelson. "Tasha Tillman offered me sixty-one thousand on Thursday. Ora Mae's daughter. She wants to put a lunch counter in, and a kitchen, and grow the tamale business into my side of the wall."

"How much is forty over your asking?"

"I don't know. I don't have an asking."

"Yeh-Yeh."

"About twice what Tasha offered," I said, and pulled up to the curb in front of the store, where the crate sat empty on a Sunday, and the notice in the window had started to curl at one corner from the heat.

Fourteen Ninety-Five

The Red Top has no windows on the street side, so you don't know what it looks like inside until you're in it, and then you're in it all at once. The steel door was propped with the cinder block. I stepped over the block and into a long low room the temperature of a mouth, red light from bulbs painted over with red enamel, a floor of concrete painted red and worn to gray in a track from the door to the bar and from the bar to the bathrooms and from everywhere to the little stage at the back, which was a plywood riser eight inches high with a rug on it. Ceiling fans, three, turning slow enough to count the blades. Christmas lights stapled along the top of the walls in loops, green and red, in September. A smell of fried fish and spilled beer and hair oil and the sweet scorched dust of the fan motors. On the wall behind the bar, among the photographs and the pinned-up dollar bills and the hand-lettered sign about not asking for credit, a manila folder tab with my square handwriting on it: SINGS WHILE PAYING.

Calvin was at the bar already. He'd said he would be. He raised two fingers off his can of beer, and the bartender, who was Sharon, Toot's niece, looked at me and then at him and then at me and said, "Mm," in a tone that covered a great deal.

"You came," said Calvin.

"I said I would."

"People say a lot of things." He moved over on the bench so I could sit. The bench was a waiting-room seat from the old train depot, Sharon told me later, carried across town on a flatbed in 1979 by six men who were not entirely sober. "You want a catfish plate? You should get the catfish plate."

I got the catfish plate. It came through a window in the back wall on a paper plate that bent in the middle: three fillets in a cornmeal crust so crisp it shattered, a heap of fries, two slices of white bread, a spoon of coleslaw and a pickle spear and a little paper cup of hot sauce the color of a stop sign. I ate it with my fingers. Everyone did. The fish was sweet and white and came apart in flakes. The grease ran. I was beginning to understand that in Greenville the grease always runs and you are expected to deal with it.

Toot came on at nine-thirty. I hadn't actually seen him before, only heard him through the wall and across the road, and he was smaller than his voice: a narrow man in a gray suit with the jacket off, a white shirt buttoned to the collar, no tie, a straw hat with a band of red cloth. Seventy-three. His fingers were long and the knuckles big. He sat on a kitchen chair with a guitar on his knee, a big hollow-bodied one with the finish worn through to pale wood where his arm crossed it, and a boy in a ball cap sat behind him on the drums, and an older man with a belly over his belt stood to the side with the bass, and for a minute Toot didn't play at all. He tuned. He tuned like it was a private conversation with the guitar. Then without any sign I could see he started.

I don't know how to describe it. I have tried, since, a dozen times, in my notebook and out loud to my father, and it comes out wrong every time. It was slow. That's the first thing. Slower than anything I'd ever heard live; slow like walking in that heat. The bass came in underneath, round and patient. The guitar would play a line and then stop, and leave a hole, and in the hole you could hear the fans and someone laughing at the bar and a glass set down, and then Toot would sing into it, high and rough, and hold a word way past where you thought it would break, and bend it, and let it go. The song was about a woman who'd left on a train, I think. Or about a train. Or about waiting at a depot in the heat for something that wasn't coming. The words were very simple and he sang them about four times each and every time they meant something a little different. People danced. Not much, not fancy. Couples, mostly, older, moving in a small square of floor near the stage, holding each other close and loose at the same time, shuffling, the women's hands flat on the men's backs.

"Come on," said Calvin.

"I can't dance to this."

"Nobody can dance to this. That's why you do it slow." He held out his scarred hand. I took it.

---

At the break I asked Toot if I could record him. I'd asked Sharon first, and Sharon had said, "Ask him, but you know what he's going to say," and I didn't, and he said yes before I'd finished the question.

"Yes. Yes. You put my name on it. Lucius Freeman. They call me Toot. You put both." He was sitting on the edge of the stage with a towel around his neck drinking a glass of iced tea so sweet I could see the sugar settled at the bottom. "And you put that I wrote that line. The one that goes—" He sang four notes, the little descending figure the guitar kept coming back to between verses. "That's mine. I wrote that in nineteen and seventy-four."

"My grandfather says you'll tell me that."

"Your granddaddy," said Toot, "wouldn't know a guitar line from a grocery list." He grinned. Gold on one side of his mouth, two teeth. "Which is to say. Turn your little thing on."

I turned it on.

He told me about his uncle. Sings While Paying. His name was Roosevelt Freeman and he picked cotton and drove a tractor and sang everywhere he went, all day, in the field, on the tractor, at the counter at Wong's, every time he paid down his account, "because old Mr. Wong would turn that book around and Uncle Roosevelt would see that number go down and he just had to sing about it." Roosevelt taught Toot to play on a broom handle with a wire nailed to it, and then on a borrowed guitar with three strings, and then, in 1966, when Toot was thirteen, Roosevelt walked him across the road to Wong's and said to Joe Wong: "This boy needs a guitar."

"And Mr. Wong said, I sell groceries. And Uncle Roosevelt said, You sell boots. You sell shotgun shells. You sold that wedding dress to the girl out in Metcalfe. You can sell this boy a guitar." Toot laughed. "And Mr. Wong got out the catalog, the big one, from Chicago, and turned the pages till he found the guitars, and there was one for fourteen dollars and ninety-five cents, plus shipping, and Uncle Roosevelt said, That one. And Mr. Wong wrote it on the account."

"Fourteen ninety-five."

"Fourteen ninety-five. Fifty cents a week. I paid it myself. Every Saturday I swept the walk at the barber shop for a dollar and I walked straight across to Wong's and paid down fifty cents on that guitar. Took me most of a year." He wiped his face with the end of the towel. "And every week Mr. Wong would turn the book around, and I'd see it going down. And the week it got to nothing he drew the line and wrote something in Chinese, and I asked him what it said, and he told me."

"What did it say?"

"He said it said, Now go play it." He finished his tea and crunched an ice cube. "Your granddaddy told me years later it said something else. I don't care what it said. I'm telling you what Mr. Wong told me."

"Is that guitar still—"

"That guitar was a piece of junk. The neck bowed like a fishing pole in about a year. I played it six more. It's in my sister's closet." He stood and put the towel over the back of his chair. "This one I paid for in cash. Nineteen eighty-two. But I still got that book page in my head, baby. I can see it. I can see that number going down."

---

Calvin told me the river part after midnight, out front, sitting on the hood of his truck with the Red Top's door still open behind us and Toot playing the last set, slower than ever, the sound coming out into the street and spreading across the road and fading out against the dark front of my grandfather's store, where the sign hung invisible over the door.

He told me about standing watch on the head of the tow at three in the morning, out on the barges, a quarter mile ahead of the boat, in the dark, with nothing but the searchlight from the pilothouse sweeping back and forth over the river ahead, picking out the willows on the bank, silver, and a sandbar, and a buoy, and once a deer swimming. He told me how the river smells at night: mud and diesel and something green and rotten and cool. How in high water the current is so strong you can hear it pulling at the barge rakes like a creek over rocks, only huge, a sound you feel in your shins. How there's a bend below Greenville, a long one, and when the boat comes around it at night going south you can see the lights of the town on the levee for about four minutes, and then they're gone, and he always goes out on deck to watch them.

"Pop thinks it's just water going downhill."

"It is just water going downhill."

"Yeah," said Calvin. "That's what's so crazy about it."

I liked him. I should say that plainly. I liked him in a way that was inconvenient, because I was leaving on the twenty-seventh, and he was going back on the boat on the twentieth for twenty-eight days, and these were facts, like the river was a fact.

"You going to take that promotion?" he said. I'd told him about it at the bar. Shreya had emailed: a senior planner position, the Westside corridor, the biggest plan the city had going. Leading the engagement. More meetings. More dots.

"I don't know."

"You don't sound excited."

"I'm excited. I'm just—" I didn't have the words for it. "I've been here three weeks and I've learned more about how a neighborhood works from Mr. Otis on a crate than in five years of dots."

"Pop would love to hear that."

"Don't you dare tell him."

He laughed, then quit, and turned to look at the store across the road.

"Who's he selling it to?"

"I don't know. He's got two offers."

"Tasha's one." He knew. Everybody knew. "Who's the other one?"

"A man from Jackson with a voice like a car commercial."

Calvin was quiet. Inside, the bass walked down, and the guitar stopped, and Toot held a word.

"Well," said Calvin. "That's his business."

That was what everyone said. That's his business. Mr. Otis said it. Ora Mae said it, tightly, with the radio up. Mrs. Gaines said it while handing me a pecan pie wrapped in foil for my grandfather. Everyone said it and then looked at me, as if I were his business too.

---

At a quarter to one, my grandfather walked in.

I didn't see him at first. I'd come back inside for my bag. I saw Sharon see him: her hand stopped on the beer tap. Then I turned and he was standing just inside the steel door, in his white short-sleeved shirt and gray trousers, as if he'd come in to check on a delivery, and the room did something I can only describe as a shift in weight, like a boat when somebody steps aboard.

He walked down the worn gray path to the bar. He sat on the depot bench next to the spot I'd been sitting. Sharon put a can of ginger ale in front of him without his asking. He hadn't been in the Red Top in eleven years, she told me later. Not since a few months after my grandmother died. Before that, she said, he came in every few months, late, always late, always alone, and drank one ginger ale and left.

Toot saw him from the stage. Toot didn't stop playing. But at the end of the song he leaned into the microphone and said, in his speaking voice, which was even rougher than his singing one, "This next one my uncle Roosevelt used to sing at the counter at Wong's. Mr. Henry knows the one."

And he played it. A bright, bouncing, walking thing, not slow at all, the kind of song you'd sing on a tractor. A song about money, I think, about having a little and spending it, about Saturday. The old couples on the floor started to grin. My grandfather didn't move, didn't nod, didn't do anything but sit there with his ginger ale, but I was standing close enough to see that his right hand was flat on the bar, and his index finger was tapping out the beat, very small, on the wood.

Yellow Paper

Bernice Hollowell does not consent to be recorded. She told my granddaughter so on the walk in front of the store on the first Saturday, and she told her again on the telephone the following Wednesday, and she told her a third time on Tuesday of the third week, standing at my counter with her purse in both hands like a shield.

"I spent thirty-eight years talking in front of a room," she said. "Every word I said in that room went into a child's head, and that is where I want it to stay. I do not want my voice in a little box. I do not want it played in the Heritage Circle meeting hall between the lemon bars and the coffee urn."

"Yes, ma'am," said Ashley.

"I'll write it."

"You'll—"

"I will write it down. In my own hand. On paper. And you may have the paper." She looked at Ashley over the tops of her glasses, the same look she used on me in 1987 when I tried to charge her for a box of crayons I had given her on sale the week before. "And then I will read it out at your history night. Myself. In person. With my own mouth. Is that acceptable?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Ashley again. I had never heard her say yes ma'am so often to one human being. She seemed to be enjoying it.

That was six days ago. This morning, Monday, Bernice came in at nine with eleven pages of yellow legal paper folded in thirds, written front and back in blue ink, and put them on the counter, and said, "Henry Wong, I want you to read that and tell me if I got your mother right."

---

I have known Bernice since I was born. That is not a figure of speech. She was four when I came along on the cot in the back room, and her mother did ironing for two white families on Main Street and for my mother, too, for a while, in exchange for groceries, and Bernice used to sit on a crate in the alley beside the salted fish while her mother worked, and she says the first thing she remembers in her life is my mother picking her up so she could see the new baby. I have no reason to doubt this. Bernice does not make things up. She was the most accurate person I have ever known, and I have known a great many grocers.

She taught fifth grade for thirty-eight years at the elementary school on the east side, and then for the last six of them she was the principal, and in all those years she bought school supplies for her students at my store on credit. Pencils, composition books, crayons, glue, rulers, those big pink erasers. She'd come in the week before school started with a list as long as her arm and I'd fill a box, two boxes, and write it in the book under Miss H.—Class, and she'd pay it down on the first and fifteenth of every month out of her own salary, and she never once in thirty-eight years asked the school district for a dime of it back, because she said the forms took more time than the pencils were worth.

I sold those pencils to her at cost. I have never told her that. My father started it. I kept it up. It's in the book. She has never asked to see the page, and I hope she won't, because she would be furious.

There's a crank pencil sharpener screwed onto the end of my counter, by the register. It's been there since 1961. Children who came in with Miss Hollowell's lists would sharpen their new pencils at it before they left, every one, so they could start school with a point. You can see where the paint has worn off the counter under it from forty years of elbows.

---

I read her pages standing at the register, while she sat on Otis's crate. I want to say that plainly, because Otis was there, too, standing on the walk with his cane and his orange soda, having been displaced, and he did not say one word about it. He looked at Bernice on his crate and he looked at me through the glass and he raised his eyebrows to his hairline and he sat down on the curb.

The pages were about my mother.

They were about a little girl named Bernice in 1950 who sat in the alley behind the Chinese store while her mother ironed, and the new Chinese woman who came out in the evenings to take down the salted fish from the wire, and who could not speak more than ten words of English, and who was, Bernice wrote, "the loneliest-looking grown person I had ever seen in my life up to that time, which was not long, but long enough to know lonely when I saw it, since there was a good deal of it in our part of town."

How the Chinese woman began to point at things and say the Chinese word, and wait. How Bernice, who was six, understood that she was supposed to say the English word back. Line. Fish. Shirt. Sky. Poke. "I told her a paper sack was a poke because that is what my mother called it, and I did not know any better, and I have since learned that she called it a poke for the rest of her life, for which I take full responsibility and make no apology."

Fixing to. Might could. Over yonder. Bernice taught her all of it. Bernice taught my mother to count money in English, there on the steps, with real coins, and my mother taught Bernice to do it on the abacus that hung on a nail by the kitchen door, and by the time Bernice was eight she could add faster than her teacher, "which made me insufferable, and which was the beginning of my career."

How my mother taught her to make jook one winter when Bernice's mother was down with pneumonia, a whole pot, and sent her home with it in a lard bucket, wrapped in a towel. "I carried it eight blocks and did not spill a drop and it was still hot when I got there. My mother said it tasted like nothing. Then she ate the whole bucket."

How my mother, who never learned to read English well, made Bernice read her the newspaper on Saturdays, and paid her with a cold drink and a pickled egg, and how Bernice read her everything, the front page and the obituaries and the grocery ads and the funnies, and my mother would stop her every few lines and ask what a word meant, and Bernice didn't always know, and they'd look it up together in a dictionary my father kept under the register to settle arguments with salesmen.

"That," Bernice wrote, "was the first classroom I ever taught in. It was a set of wooden steps in an alley that smelled of fish, and I had one student, and she was grown, and she was the best student I ever had, and I believe I have been trying to find another one like her for seventy years."

I read it twice. Then I folded the pages back up in thirds, the way she'd folded them, and put them on the counter, and went out to the walk.

"Well?" she said.

"You got her right."

"All of it?"

"She called it a poke till the day she died," I said. "And she never once had pneumonia jook. She was very particular. She'd say there was no such thing as sick-person food, there was only food."

"Then I'll take that line out."

"Leave it in. She'd have liked being argued with in public."

Bernice looked at me a long time from the crate, and something went on in her face that I didn't try to name, and then she stood up, briskly, and smoothed her skirt.

"Otis," she said. "Your seat."

"Thank you, Miss Hollowell," said Otis, from the curb, with tremendous dignity. He got up, slowly, with the cane. He sat back down on the crate. Bernice went back inside to the counter and took her pages and put them in her purse.

"Now," she said to me. "What are you going to do with that building."

---

I had a paper sack on the counter under the register. A big one, a number twenty, flattened out. On the back of it, in pencil, I had been making a list. I hadn't shown it to anybody. Bernice saw it before I could put my elbow on it, because she was the kind of teacher who could read a note being passed at the back of the room from her desk.

The list said:

SIGN —
SCALE (BIG) —
SCALE (COUNTER) —
BOOKS —
BUILDING —
CRATE — OTIS (obviously)
SAFE — too heavy, stays
PENCIL SHARPENER —
A. KEMP BOOTS — ??

Some of the dashes had names after them, written and then crossed out. The building had two names after it, both crossed out, and then a question mark, and then the question mark crossed out too.

Bernice put her finger on the pencil sharpener line.

"Me," she said.

"You want the sharpener?"

"I want the sharpener. I will put it on the edge of my kitchen table and every time one of my great-grandchildren comes to visit I will make them sharpen a pencil." She moved her finger down. "And the boots."

"You know who Arthur Kemp is?"

"Arthur Kemp," said Bernice, "was my mother's cousin. He was a big tall man with a stutter who worked at the compress. He ordered a pair of boots here in the spring of nineteen sixty-four because his feet were too big for the store in town. And the week before they came, he got on the train to Chicago with a cardboard suitcase and a job at a meatpacking plant, and he never came back to Mississippi but once, in nineteen eighty, for my mother's funeral. He said the winters up there nearly killed him the first year, because he didn't have proper boots."

"They've been sitting in my back room for sixty-two years."

"Well, I didn't know that, Henry, or I'd have told you." She almost laughed. "His grandson is a firefighter in Chicago. Big as a refrigerator. I'll call him tonight. He'll want them. He'll want them for the story." She took her finger off the paper sack. "Now. The building."

"I haven't decided."

"I know you haven't decided. That's why it's crossed out three times." She gave me the look over her glasses. "I won't tell you what to do, because I'm not your teacher, and I never was, more's the pity. I'm going to ask you one question and then I'm going home."

"All right."

"When that man from Jackson came in here," she said, "what did he buy?"

I thought about it. Brent Lassiter had come in person on Saturday. Pressed shirt, a little silver pin on his collar of the state outline. He'd shaken my hand and walked the store with me and looked at the pressed-tin ceiling and said "Wow" about the ceiling and taken photographs of the back room and asked about the electrical and the roof, which I told him about honestly, Tennessee and all.

"He bought a bottle of water."

"Did he drink it?"

"He drank about half of it in my back room and left the rest on the potato sacks."

"Mm-hm," said Bernice, and picked up her purse, and went home.

---

That afternoon, at closing, I took the pencil off my ear and wrote on the back of the paper sack, after PENCIL SHARPENER: Bernice. After A. KEMP BOOTS: Chicago (Bernice will call). I did not cross either of them out.

Then I sat at the counter in the dark for a while with the last light coming through the front window across the bare top shelves, the sardines long gone, the canned peaches half gone, the jar of pickled eggs down to four eggs floating pink in their juice like small moons. Across the road somebody was setting up chairs at the Red Top for the Thursday crowd, scraping them on the concrete. Next door through the wall Ora Mae's radio was playing low, an old soul and blues station out of Clarksdale she has had on since 1985, which I have heard through that wall so many evenings I could hum every song, and don't.

I looked at the word BUILDING on the paper sack with its two crossed-out names and its crossed-out question mark. Then I wrote a third name after it, very lightly, and did not cross it out, and did not write over it either, and turned the sack face down, and went home.

Butcher Paper

The roll of butcher paper hangs on an iron bracket at the end of the meat block, a big heavy cylinder of it, pinkish-white and waxy on one side, and my grandfather tears it off against a serrated blade with a flick of the wrist that makes a sound like a short sneeze. He has been doing it since he was eleven. The roll on the bracket now is the last one. He told me so on the second Monday, when I asked if I could have about eight feet of it, and he looked at the roll and then at me and said, "What for?" and I said, "A map," and he said, "Of what," and I said, "Of everything that used to be here," and he tore it off without another word, sneeze, and handed it over.

I taped it to the back wall of the store above the potato bins, where the shelves had been cleared, with the waxy side facing in. On the top in black marker I wrote NELSON STREET AND AROUND, and in the bottom right corner I drew a small square for the store, and wrote WONG'S, and that was all I drew. I put a coffee can of markers on the potato bin underneath. Then I waited.

In Atlanta, when I do this, I put up a printed base map from the city's mapping office with every parcel outlined and every street labeled, and I hand people sticky dots and ask them to put a dot where they live and a dot where they work and a dot where they feel unsafe. It takes about forty minutes. It produces a very tidy picture that I turn into a heat map for the report.

Here I left a blank piece of butcher paper and a coffee can. It took ten days. It produced something I don't have a word for.

---

Mr. Otis went first. Of course he did. He came in on the second Tuesday for his orange soda and looked at the paper and said, "What's that?" and I said, "Draw where things were," and he said, "Where what things were," and I said, "Anything. Where you lived. Where you worked. Where you used to go," and he put down his soda and took a black marker out of the can and uncapped it and stood in front of the paper for so long I thought he'd changed his mind.

Then he drew a line. Off the left edge of the paper, almost to the bottom, an arrow pointing out into the wall. He wrote along it in his tall looped capitals: BELLE ARBOR PLACE — 9 MILES — THIS WAY. Then above the store, about where the corner of Nelson and the next street would be, a little rectangle: GIN OFFICE (KNOB). Then a dotted line from the rectangle to the store, and next to the dotted line: WALKED IT 1959-1980. Then a square two blocks over: HOUSE. VERNELL. Then he capped the marker and put it back in the can and picked up his soda and went out to the crate.

That was all. It was enough. By the end of that week there was ink on every part of the paper.

Mrs. Gaines drew her mother's house, and the chicken yard behind it, and a dotted line from the chicken yard to the store with the words EGGS GOING THE WRONG WAY, which made my grandfather laugh so hard at the register that a customer asked if he was all right. Buddy Carr drew the airstrip out on the Leland road, a long thin rectangle way off in the upper right corner, and a tiny airplane over it, and then, in a balloon coming out of the airplane, SARDINES. Toot drew the barber shop where he swept the walk for a dollar on Saturdays, and next to it, carefully, a little guitar with a price tag: $14.95. Sharon drew the Red Top, and then drew the old Red Top, the first building, which had burned in 1977 and had stood across the road. I didn't know about that. Nobody had told me. The burned one and the new one sat on the map facing each other across the street like a before and after.

Dre drew his granddaddy's garden behind the tamale shop, in green marker, row by row: OKRA, COLLARDS, PEPPERS (HOT), PEPPERS (NOT), TOMATOES, a scarecrow wearing a ball cap. Then he drew the downtown farmers market, and his folding table, with a stick figure behind it and a balloon that said ONE DOLLAR EACH NO SCALE. My grandfather saw that one and said, "Hm," and didn't say anything else, which for my grandfather is a paragraph.

My grandfather drew the Chinese stores.

He didn't want to. He walked past the map every day for a week like it was a dog that might bite. Then one evening after closing I came back from Ora Mae's with tamales and found him standing in front of it with a red marker and his reading glasses on, and he'd drawn eleven small squares, scattered over the whole paper, each with a name in his neat pencil-man capitals done in red. LUM'S. CHOW BROS. GONG'S DRY GOODS. JUE'S. QUONG'S. WONG'S (NOT US). WONG'S (ALSO NOT US). LEE'S. FONG'S. JOE'S MARKET. PANG'S.

He'd put a date range under each one, the year it opened and the year it closed. The last close date before ours was 2011. Jue's, on the east side. He'd gone to the closing. He'd bought the scale.

"That's the counter scale?" I said. "The red one by the register?"

"Jue's," he said. "Our old one broke in 2011. I bought his at the closing for forty dollars. He tried to give it to me. I wouldn't let him." He capped the red marker. "Then he moved to Houston. He's buried there. May goes to see him."

He went back to the register. He hadn't drawn our store's dates. The little square in the corner just said WONG'S, in my writing, with nothing under it.

---

Ora Mae said yes to being recorded on the condition that she didn't have to sit down.

"I can't talk sitting down. I never sat down in my life. You want my story, you stand in my kitchen."

So I stood in her kitchen. It's the back half of the shotgun, behind the counter and the window where she hands out the bags, a room maybe twelve by fourteen with a six-burner stove and two huge aluminum stockpots on it and a stainless table down the middle where she rolls the tamales, and it was, at four in the afternoon in September, the hottest room I have ever been in. Hotter than the Red Top. Hotter than Highway 82 at noon. Steam came off the pots in sheets. The big fan in the back door just moved the heat around like a spoon in soup. The air smelled of chili powder and cumin and boiling pork and wet corn shucks, which smell, when they've been soaking, like a field after a rain.

I held the recorder up in the steam. The case fogged. I asked again, there, with it on, whether she was sure, and she said, "Baby, I said yes. Don't make me say it twice, I got two hundred dozen to roll."

Her hands never stopped. She'd take a soaked shuck off the stack, flatten it with her palm, slap on a spoon of the cornmeal dough with the spoon's back in one stroke, lay a line of meat down the middle with her fingers, roll it, fold the end, and drop it in a pan, and she did this every three seconds, every three seconds, the whole time she talked, and in the hour I stood there she never once looked at her hands.

She told me about Gold Tooth. Her grandmother, Hattie Bell, who sold tamales out of a bucket hung from a stick across her shoulders, walking the line of the cotton compress at lunchtime, calling out. About her mother, Ora Lee, who got a cart in 1952—"a real cart, with a wheel and a box, Daddy built it"—and set up next to Wong's because Joe Wong said she could and because it was a corner and a corner gets people. About the wheel breaking in 1955, an iron wheel off an old seed drill, and Joe Wong taking the wheel off his own delivery wagon, which by then he wasn't using, and putting it on her mother's cart, "and never charged her one penny for it, and she paid him back anyway, in tamales, every Saturday, a dozen, for eleven years." About the shotgun building coming up for rent in 1966 and her mother moving in. About learning to roll when she was six, standing on a milk crate at this same table.

"My hands knew it before my head did," she said. "That's how you know you're going to do a thing all your life. Your hands get there first."

Then she told me about Tasha.

"My daughter has been saving nine years for that building," she said, without breaking rhythm. Shuck, slap, line, roll, fold, drop. "Nine years. She caters. Weddings, funerals, family reunions, the big ones out at the county park every July. She's got a list as long as my arm of people who want her to cook, and no place to cook it but this kitchen and her own kitchen at home, and she has wanted to knock a door in that wall since she was nineteen years old." Shuck, slap. "And then this Jackson man comes."

"He hasn't decided," I said.

"I know he hasn't decided. I'm not asking you what he's going to do. I'm not asking you anything." Line, roll. "I'm telling you because you asked me for my story, and that's my story. My story's this kitchen and that wall."

I kept quiet. I had nothing useful to offer. She kept rolling. After a while she said, more quietly, still not looking up: "You put on there that I said that. With my name on it. You don't put Ora Mae's daughter wants. You put Ora Mae Tillman says."

"I'll put Ora Mae Tillman says."

"All right then." Fold, drop. "Now get out of my kitchen before that little box melts."

---

Shreya called on the Tuesday of the last week, while I was on a ladder in aisle three taking down the top-shelf price tags.

"Ashley. I'm so sorry to do this. You know the Westside kickoff? It got moved. The council member wants it on the twenty-fourth. Thursday. They want you to lead it. It's yours if you want it, the whole project, the senior position, but they really want you there for the launch. I know you're on leave. I know. But if you could fly back Wednesday night—"

The twenty-fourth was the history night.

I stood on the ladder with a handful of faded paper price tags, CORN 89¢, CORN 79¢, CORN 69¢, three decades of corn, and looked down the whole store. Mr. Otis on the crate through the front window. My grandfather at the register explaining to a man in a hard hat that no, he did not have any more pork rinds, and no, he was not going to get any more pork rinds, ever. On the back wall the butcher paper, covered now from edge to edge in different hands and inks: houses, a gin, a chicken yard, an airplane saying sardines, a burned juke joint and a new one, eleven red squares, a scarecrow, a guitar with a price tag, and down the whole left edge, in blue marker, a long curving river with a bend in it and four tiny lights drawn on the bank of the bend and a note in small careful capitals I recognized: 4 MIN. — C.P.

Calvin had drawn it the night before he went back on the boat. He'd asked first if he could. Then he'd stood in front of the paper a long time, the way his grandfather had.

"Shreya," I said. "I can't. I'm sorry. It's the same night. I've got twenty minutes at the Heritage Circle and I promised."

"Ashley, this is the job."

"I know it is."

The line went silent. Behind her, the office kept up its noises: the copier, someone's speakerphone, the HVAC that never worked on the fourth floor.

"Okay," said Shreya, and to her credit she meant it. "Okay. I'll tell them. I'll tell them you'll do the second meeting." Another pause. "What are you doing at this thing? The Heritage Circle."

"Playing recordings," I said. "Of people talking about a store."

"And that's—" She stopped. She was a good boss. She didn't finish.

"Yeah," I said. "It is."

I climbed down the ladder with the corn tags and put them in my apron pocket with the others. Then I went to the back wall, and took the marker out of the coffee can, and under the little square in the corner that said WONG'S, I wrote 1938, and a dash, and stopped. I left the space after the dash empty. It wasn't mine to fill in.

Weights and Measures

There are two scales in my store, and they do not agree with each other, and they have not agreed since 2011, and I have never told a customer which one I believe.

The big one hangs over the meat block from a hook screwed into a beam. It is a hanging dial scale, cast iron, painted white once and now the color of old teeth, with a round face the size of a dinner plate behind a glass that has a crack across the bottom like a frown. The needle is black and long and has a little curl at the tip. The pan hangs beneath it on three brass chains, a wide shallow brass pan dented in a dozen places and polished in the middle to a soft gold by eighty-five years of neck bones, hoop cheese, salt pork, chitterlings, catfish, rag bologna, sweet potatoes, peanuts, crawfish in season, and once, in 1972, a baby, because Mrs. Gaines's sister wanted to know how much the new one weighed and the hospital had sent her home without telling her. Nine pounds two ounces. The baby now coaches high school football in Indianola and is not small. My father wrote the weight on the beam in pencil beside the date he hung the scale, 1941, and it is still there.

On the side of the dial is a row of small paper stickers from the state, one on top of another, the inspector's seal for every year somebody from Jackson came and put a set of brass weights in my pan and frowned at the needle and signed. The oldest stickers have gone to brown flakes. The newest says 2025. In fifty years that scale has failed inspection once, in 1984, by half an ounce, because Otis had been leaning on it.

The little one sits on the counter by the register. It's a red enamel counter scale with a glass face and a flat steel plate, the kind every corner grocery in America used to have, and it was Billy Jue's, on the east side, until the day he closed in 2011 and I bought it for forty dollars over his objections. It reads a quarter ounce heavier than the big one. Billy always said his was right and mine was wrong, and I always said the opposite, and we argued about it for thirty years at every Chinese New Year banquet in the Delta, and now he is buried in Houston and his scale is on my counter and I weigh peanuts on it every day, and I am still not sure which of us was right. I suspect neither. I suspect we both knew and liked the argument.

---

On Wednesday at three-thirty Dre came in, and I said, "Come here," and he came, and I took down the pan.

He looked alarmed. Nobody takes down the pan. I have taken down the pan perhaps a dozen times in my life, to clean it with vinegar and salt, and every time Otis has stood at the window like a man watching someone take down a flag.

"Here," I said. "Hold it."

He held it. It's heavier than it looks. His arms dipped.

"Your granddaddy's peppers," I said. "The hot ones. You sell them how?"

"A dollar each."

"How many in a pound?"

"I don't know, Mr. Henry."

"That's why you sell them a dollar each." I hung the pan back on its hook, slowly, letting the chains take it, the needle swinging up and around and settling back at zero with a small shiver. "Go get me a pound of your hot peppers. From the garden. Don't count them. Just pick what looks like a pound."

He went next door and out back and came back in twenty minutes with a paper sack of long red and green peppers, the thin twisted kind, still warm from the sun, smelling sharp and green and a little like a struck match. He held the sack out.

"Put them in the pan."

He put them in. The needle went around. Fourteen ounces.

"Two ounces short," I said. "Close. Go get me two more ounces."

He went out and came back with a fistful. Into the pan. A pound and three ounces.

"Now you're three over. Take some out."

He took some out. He took out too many. He put one back. He stood and watched the needle quiver and settle, and his face did what Ashley's face does when she reads, a kind of inward folding, and I watched him the way my father watched me, from the side, pretending to price something.

"Sixteen," he said.

"Sixteen what?"

"Sixteen ounces. One pound." He looked up. "That's twenty-two peppers. Mr. Henry. That's twenty-two peppers. I been selling them a dollar each. I been selling a pound of peppers for twenty-two dollars."

"Did anybody buy them?"

"Not a lot."

"Hm," I said.

He looked at the peppers in the brass pan, and at the needle, and at me, and then he started laughing, and kept laughing, with his hands on his knees, and I think it was the first time I ever heard Dre Tillman really laugh, a high delighted honk like a goose. Otis came to the door to see what had happened.

"Boy found out what a pound is," I told him.

"About time," said Otis, and went back to the crate.

I spent the next hour showing Dre the scale. How you check zero with the pan empty every morning, before anything. How you tare a sack. How you read the dial straight on and not from the side, because from the side the needle lies. How you put the thing in the pan and take your hand away, all the way away, and keep it away, and let the customer see you keep it away. How you call out the weight, out loud, every time, so the customer hears it and the next customer in line hears it and nobody has to wonder. My father did that. He said the weight in English and then in Chinese, under his breath, to himself, as if he needed to hear it twice. I do it in English only. I have heard myself do it so many times I sometimes hear it in my sleep. Pound and a quarter. Two pounds even. Seven ounces, little light, I'll give you one more.

I put my thumb on that pan exactly once. I was nine. A man came in who had called my mother a name on the sidewalk the week before, a name I will not write here, and he asked for a pound of salt pork, and my father was in the back, and I cut it and laid it in the pan and set my thumb on the rim, lightly, and watched the needle climb two ounces past the truth, and I thought I was very clever. I said, "Pound and two." The man paid and left. Then I turned around and my father was standing in the door of the back room with a sack of meal on his shoulder. He set the sack down. He didn't say a word to me. He took two ounces of salt pork off the slab, wrapped it in paper, put on his hat, and walked four blocks in the August heat to the man's house and gave it to him. Back again, he went straight to the meat block and went on cutting, and he did not speak to me until supper, and at supper all he said was, "The scale is not yours."

Dre did it too. He weighed the rest of the peppers, and then he weighed a bag of sweet potatoes, and then he weighed a hoop of cheese, and every time he called it out loud, too loud, to the whole empty store, and every time I said, "Good," and that was all I said.

At the end he said, "Mr. Henry. When you close. What happens to this scale?"

I looked at the paper sack under the register. It was facing down.

"I haven't decided," I said.

---

My sister arrived at five-fifteen in a rental car the size of a boat, from the airport in Jackson, wearing a pink tracksuit and enormous sunglasses and carrying a box of Houston pastries on her flat palm like a waiter. She is seventy-five. She walked into the store, looked at the bare shelves, said, "Oh, Henry, it looks terrible," and burst into tears, and then stopped crying almost immediately, because she is a pharmacist and does not believe in wasting anything.

"You're early," I said.

"I'm on time. You said Wednesday. It's Wednesday." She put the pastries on the counter and kissed Ashley on both cheeks and held her at arm's length. "You cut your hair."

"In March, Auntie May."

"It's short." She turned to the hanging scale. "Is that the scale? Is that Ba's scale? You're not selling it."

"I'm not selling anything. I'm giving it away."

"To who?"

"I haven't decided."

"You haven't decided." She looked at Ashley. "He hasn't decided. Three weeks. Has he decided anything?"

"He decided about the pencil sharpener," said Ashley. "And some boots."

"Boots?"

"It's a long story."

"Everything's a long story with him." May went to the counter and put her hand flat on the red counter scale, Billy Jue's scale, and stood very still. "This is Billy's."

"Yes."

"I go see him. Every Qingming, every year." She said it lightly, the Chinese word, and then, for Ashley, in English: "Grave-sweeping day. In April. I take Raymond and we clean the stone and bring him oranges. His daughter Cynthia lives in Sugar Land. She comes too." She took her hand off the scale. "His daughter would like this scale, Henry."

I hadn't thought of that. Of course I hadn't thought of that. Billy's daughter, who used to sit on the counter of Jue's Market in pigtails reading comic books and sucking on a pickle, and who now has grandchildren of her own and a house in Sugar Land with a swimming pool.

"Would she," I said.

"She asked me at Qingming. This April. She said, if Henry ever closes. She said she wanted it to come home." May put her sunglasses up on her head. "I said I'd ask. I'm asking."

I took the pencil from behind my ear. I knelt down under the register, knees, ice, and turned the paper sack face up, and next to SCALE (COUNTER) I wrote: Cynthia Jue. Houston. May takes it.

May leaned over the counter to read it. She was quiet for a moment.

"What about Ma's abacus?" she said. "On the nail by the kitchen door. Where's that?"

"In the back. In a box."

"I want it."

I didn't write anything. I put the pencil back behind my ear.

"Henry."

"I heard you."

"I'm the oldest."

"You're the oldest," I agreed.

"Then I want the abacus."

"There's a woman in this town," I said, "who learned to add on that abacus in 1952 sitting on the back steps with Ma. She's going to read something at the Heritage Circle tomorrow night. I want you to hear it before you ask me again."

May studied me. Then she studied Ashley. Then, without a word, she opened the box of Houston pastries, and took out an egg tart, and handed it to me, and took out another one and handed it to Ashley, and took out a third one for herself, and bit into it, and said, with her mouth full, "Fine."

---

Brent Lassiter called at six. He said his client had been very patient. He said his client needed an answer by Friday at noon or would be pursuing another property in Leland. He said he hoped I understood it was nothing personal.

"I understand," I said. "Mr. Lassiter. Can I ask you something?"

"Of course, sir."

"What does your client want to put in my building?"

There was the little adjusting pause.

"I'm not at liberty to say, sir."

"Then I'm not at liberty to sell it to him," I said, pleasantly, and hung up, and felt very good for about four seconds, and then went and stood in front of the butcher-paper map on the back wall for a long time with my reading glasses on, looking at the little square in the corner that said WONG'S and 1938 and a dash, and nothing after the dash.

Next door through the wall Ora Mae's radio was playing. Dre was singing along to it, badly, a half step flat, the way he sings when he's happy. I could hear pans going down on the steel table, and the back door banging in the wind off the fan, and then Ora Mae telling him to hush.

Twenty Minutes

The Washington County Heritage Circle meets on the fourth Thursday of every month in the lobby of a bank that closed in 1989. The vault door is still there at the back, round and steel and as tall as a man, swung open on its great hinge and propped with a rubber wedge, and inside the vault, where the money used to be, they keep the folding chairs and the coffee urn. The floor is marble, gray with white veins, worn into a shallow dip in front of where the teller windows were. The ceiling is two stories up and coffered, and there are four brass chandeliers, only two of which work, so the light falls in two warm pools with a dimness in between. It smells of floor wax and burnt coffee and the particular cold mineral smell of old stone that's been air-conditioned for forty years.

By six-forty, every chair was full, and they'd brought out more from the vault, and people stood three deep along the back wall under the old clock, which said ten past three and had said so since 1989.

I had expected thirty people. The Heritage Circle president, a retired surveyor named Mr. Fenwick with a bow tie and a white mustache, had told me to expect thirty people, "on a good night, if there's pie." There was pie. Mrs. Gaines had brought three pecan pies and a sweet potato pie, Sharon had brought a sheet cake from the Red Top kitchen, Ora Mae had sent over twelve dozen tamales in two coolers with Dre to carry them, and Auntie May had set out the Houston pastries on a silver tray she'd found in the vault and was standing over it guarding it like a sentry. And there were not thirty people. There were a hundred and forty. Mr. Fenwick counted twice. He came up to me during the coffee with his bow tie slightly crooked and said, "Miss Wong, nine years I've been president of this organization and not one time have I seen it like this," sounding like a man struck by something pleasant and heavy.

My mother and father had driven over that afternoon from Atlanta. My father stood at the side near the vault door with his arms folded, the way he stands at my cousins' graduations, looking at his own father across the room with an expression I couldn't read. My mother had already found Mrs. Gaines and was being told about the gallbladder.

My grandfather sat in the front row in a gray suit I had never seen before, with a tie, between Mr. Otis, who was also in a suit, a dark brown one with a vest, and Miss Bernice, who was in navy blue with a white collar and had her eleven yellow pages on her lap folded in thirds.

I was going to be sick.

---

I'd made a table at the front, beside the little podium. A folding table with a white cloth on it borrowed from the vault. On the table I'd set the things my grandfather had let me bring from the store, each one with a card in front of it in my square lettering. The crank pencil sharpener, unscrewed from the counter for the night: Installed 1961. Used by thirty-eight years of Miss B. Hollowell's fifth-grade classes. Going to Miss Hollowell. Arthur Kemp's boots in their box with the penciled lid: Ordered 1964, never collected. Going to Chicago. The framed grocery list from behind the register, with a second card that I'd written with my grandfather's permission and that he had corrected twice: Wong Kwok Leung's list of first stock, 1938. Not a blessing. Ends with nails, small. Billy Jue's red counter scale. The bone-handled magnifying glass. One of my grandmother's six aprons, the stitched WONG'S a little crooked on the bib.

Next to each card, smaller, a line: Who made it. Who used it. Where it's going. Some of the lines were blank where nobody knew. I'd left them blank on purpose. People came up during the coffee and stood in front of the table and read the cards and, more than once, took the pen I'd left there and wrote in a blank: That was my uncle's. Or: Bought there 1974. Or, under the boots, in a shaky hand I didn't recognize: I REMEMBER ARTHUR. HE COULD LIFT A BALE.

I had twenty minutes. I used thirty-one. Mr. Fenwick did not stop me.

---

I played Mr. Otis first. The gin part and the phone part. Not the check. I'd built a little speaker out of a borrowed system from the high school and it filled that marble room much better than I'd expected, so that his voice, coming out of it, sounded enormous and close and slightly unreal, a voice in a train station, and when he said "You don't put a saw back. You put a saw in," a man near the back laughed out loud and then said "That's right," and then several other men who had obviously worked in gins said "That's right" too. Mr. Otis, in the front row, did not move a muscle. But when the phone part came, Vernell's three minutes on Sunday evenings, and Joe Wong turning the pages of his Chinese newspaper loud, there was a sound in the room, a kind of collective soft exhale, and I saw Mr. Otis lift his chin very slightly, as if he were listening for her voice too.

I played Toot. The guitar. Fourteen ninety-five, fifty cents a week. Now go play it. Toot was standing at the back with Sharon and when his recorded voice said "I wrote that in nineteen and seventy-four" he said, live, over it, "I did," and the room fell apart laughing, and he took off his straw hat and bowed.

I played Mrs. Gaines. The Woman Who Argues About Eggs. I'd scanned twelve of her photographs with the names on the backs, with her permission, and I showed them on the screen behind me, one at a time, as she talked: her mother in the wide straw hat, unsmiling; her mother holding the egg up to the camera like a prize, with the caption Mrs. Gaines had made me write: This one was a joke. The whole room got the joke. A woman in the third row said "Look at her" in a voice of pure love.

I played Buddy.

I hadn't planned to. He'd only let me record him on Tuesday, and only on the condition that I didn't tell my grandfather what was on it until it was played. So I hadn't. I'd listened to it eleven times on my own and I still wasn't sure. But Buddy was in the second row, in a pressed plaid shirt, and he caught my eye before I started and nodded once, hard, so I put it on.

It was short. Four minutes. Buddy Carr in his own voice, the slight wheeze, telling about the year 1985, when the price of everything went up and the price of cotton went down and the farmers stopped paying their bills and the crop-dusting outfit he'd built with his own two hands went under in a single season. How he lost the planes. How he didn't tell his wife, Tonya, for four months. How for those four months he got up every morning and put on his flight jacket and drove off as if he were going to work, and drove to Nelson Street instead, and sat in his truck outside Wong's Grocery until ten o'clock, and then went in and bought his lunch.

"And Henry Wong," said the recording of Buddy, "never said one word. I'd come in, sardines, crackers, a pie and a drink, and I'd go to pay, and he'd say, Buddy, I'll put it on the book. Every day. Four months. I said Henry, I don't have a book here, and he said, You do now. And I didn't. I found out later. There wasn't any book. He just wasn't charging me." A pause. A wheeze. "When I got back on my feet I went in to pay, and he said, Pay what? And I said, The book, and he said, What book? And he never took one dime. So I been eating lunch at ten o'clock in that store for forty-one years. That's why. That's the only reason. It's not the sardines. Don't let him tell you it's the sardines. Those sardines are terrible."

The room broke up. People laughed so hard they had to hold on to the chair backs ahead of them. Tonya Carr, beside Buddy, was laughing and crying and swatting him with her program. And in the front row my grandfather sat with his hands on his knees, absolutely still, and I watched the back of his neck above the collar of the gray suit go slowly, deeply red.

---

Then I played Ora Mae.

I'd asked her that afternoon one more time if I could play it, the kitchen and the wall and Tasha's nine years, and she'd said, "You put it on there with my name. That means you play it." So I played it. In the vault-cold marble lobby of a dead bank, the sound of a hot kitchen: the hiss of steam, the roar of the fan, a spoon striking a shuck, and Ora Mae's voice over all of it, carrying, the way she can carry over a boiling pot. My story's this kitchen and that wall.

Tasha was there. I hadn't met her before. A woman about forty in a black chef's jacket, standing near the coolers next to Dre with her arms crossed. When her mother's voice said nine years, she looked at the floor. She didn't look at my grandfather. Neither did anybody else, very carefully, and that was how I knew that everybody in the room knew about the man from Jackson.

My grandfather didn't turn around.

---

Then Miss Bernice stood up.

She didn't use the podium. She stood in front of the table with the pencil sharpener and the boots, between the two pools of chandelier light, and she unfolded her eleven yellow pages, and she set a second pair of glasses on top of the first, and she read them out in her own voice, with her own mouth, as she had said she would.

I'm not going to write down what it sounded like. I have the pages; she gave them to me afterward, and they are in a folder with her name on the tab, and what's in them is hers. But I'll say that she read the part about the poke and the room laughed. She read the part about the abacus on the nail by the kitchen door, and the coins on the steps, and I saw Auntie May, standing by the silver tray, take off her enormous sunglasses for the first time all day. She read the part about the newspaper on Saturdays and the dictionary under the register. And she read the last part, the steps in the alley that smelled of fish, one student, grown, the best she ever had, and I heard my father beside the vault door make a small sound, and when I looked over he had his hand flat over his own breastbone, as if checking something was still there.

When she finished, she folded the pages back in thirds and sat down. That was all. She didn't wait for anything.

---

Afterward, in the dim stretch of marble between the two chandeliers, while people crowded the table and the pies and wrote in the blanks on the cards, I watched Auntie May walk across the lobby to the front row.

She was carrying something. A shoebox. She must have brought it from the store, from the back room; she must have gone and found it that afternoon without asking my grandfather. She stopped in front of Miss Bernice. They had never met before that night. I know because I'd asked.

"Miss Hollowell," said Auntie May, in her pharmacist voice, the one she uses to explain dosages. "I'm May. Henry's sister. I'm the oldest."

"I know who you are," said Miss Bernice. "You were the one who ate eleven tamales the night he was born."

Auntie May blinked. Then she opened the shoebox. Inside, wrapped in a dishtowel with cherries on it, the same cherries as the old oilcloth, was a wooden abacus, dark with handling, its beads worn smooth and pale at the tops where seventy years of fingers had pushed them.

"My mother would want you to have this," said Auntie May. "I want you to have it. Henry hasn't decided yet. But I'm the oldest. So I decided."

Miss Bernice looked at the abacus a long time. She didn't take it right away. She reached out one finger, and slid one bead, on the far right column, up the rod with a soft dry click.

"One," she said.

Across the lobby, my grandfather had seen. He was standing by the vault door with my father, both of them in their suits, and he looked at his sister and at Miss Bernice and at the shoebox, and then he took the pencil out of his inside breast pocket, where he had apparently been carrying it all evening, and a folded paper sack, and wrote something on it against the vault door, and put them both away.

Turned Around

At eleven fifty-eight on Friday morning I telephoned Brent Lassiter of Delta Commercial out of Jackson and told him his client would have to pursue the property in Leland. He said he was sorry to hear it. He asked if there was any number at which I would reconsider. I said I didn't know, because he had never told me what his client wanted to sell, and a man ought to know what's going to be sold on his corner before he names a price for it. He said he understood. He said he hoped I'd have a good retirement. I believe he meant it. Then I hung up the phone, the black wall phone by the register that my father put in in 1946, and I took my apron off and folded it and put it on the counter and went next door.

I went in the front, through Ora Mae's door, not the back. In seventy-four years of sharing a wall I have come in her back door ten thousand times and her front door perhaps a dozen, and every one of those dozen times was for a funeral or a birth. There were five people on her step waiting for tamales, and they parted for me without a word, and the boy at the window, one of Tasha's cousins, looked at me with his mouth open.

The kitchen was in full steam. Ora Mae at the stainless table rolling, Tasha at the stove with a long wooden paddle in one of the stockpots, Dre at the sink scrubbing a pan. The radio up loud. The fan roaring in the back door. Nobody heard me come in. I stood in the doorway between the counter and the kitchen, in the wall of heat, and waited, and finally Ora Mae looked up, and her hands stopped, and when her hands stop, the whole kitchen stops, the way a mill stops when the wheel does.

"Tasha," I said. "Sixty-one."

Tasha put the paddle down very slowly across the top of the pot.

"Sixty-one," she said.

"That's what you offered. That's the price. Dale Hale is going to look at the contract for both of us so nobody gets cheated, and if you need to pay it out over time, we'll write it in a book." I looked at the wall. Their side of it is painted yellow, with a calendar from a seed company and a picture of Ora Mae's mother at her cart in 1958, laughing, a gold tooth catching the light. "You can knock your door through. Wherever you want it. Except leave the beam with the pencil on it. Over the meat block. Don't paint that."

"Mr. Henry—"

"And one more thing. That window by the front, where the onions are. On Saturdays it's Dre's. For his table. You give him the window and the electric for a cold case if he wants one, and he pays you what's fair, and you work out what's fair between you, because I'm not going to be there to referee."

Dre had turned around from the sink with the pan dripping in his hands.

Ora Mae didn't say anything. She stared at me across the steel table, across two hundred tamales in rows, with the cornmeal to her elbows. Then, without looking, she put out a hand to the radio and turned the knob until it clicked. Off.

In seventy-four years I had never once heard that radio go off. I didn't know how it would sound. It sounded like the fan and the pots and a pan dripping on the floor, and my own heart, and then Tasha crossing the kitchen and hugging me so hard my reading glasses fell off into a box of corn shucks.

---

I spent the afternoon turning the books around.

I want to explain this carefully, so nobody thinks I did something noble. I did not. I did something my father would have done in about five minutes, and it took me three weeks to make up my mind to do it, which tells you which of us was the better grocer.

There were forty-one open accounts in my last book. I had added them all up on Thursday morning, before the Heritage Circle, with a pencil on the back of the paper sack. Two thousand three hundred eighteen dollars and forty cents. Some of those families had been paying on the first of the month for twenty years. Some had a balance of nine dollars. One, a young woman named Keisha who works nights at the hospital and has three boys, had a balance of a hundred and four dollars, mostly milk and cereal and diapers, from a bad spring, and had been paying it down at eight dollars every two weeks since April, regular as the bread man.

I'd called every one of them on Thursday. Told them the store was closing. Told them to come by Friday afternoon or Saturday if they could, because I had their page, and I wanted to show it to them. Most of them asked how much they owed. I said, Come see.

So on Friday afternoon they came. Not a crowd. One at a time, mostly, through the afternoon, between the people coming in for the last of the canned goods and the people coming in just to stand and look at the bare shelves and say what a shame. They'd come to the counter. I'd find their page in the book. I'd turn the book around on the counter so they could read it, the way my father did, the way I have done ten thousand times.

At the bottom of every page, in pencil, I had ruled a line clear across. Under the line I had written the date, and the word PAID, and my initials.

Most of them read it twice. Some said, "Mr. Henry, I can't let you." Some didn't say anything. A man named Pernell Sykes, who is eighty and has been on my books since 1979 and has never in all those years owed more than eleven dollars, read his page and said, "Well, now I'm going to have to find something else to worry about." Keisha read hers with her littlest boy on her hip and asked me straight out, "Why?" and I said, "Because the store's closing, and a balance on a closed store is just a number in a book that nobody's going to read," which is true, and she knew it wasn't the whole reason, and let me have it anyway.

Then I asked each of them if they wanted the page.

That was the part I'd stayed up with. If they wanted it, I'd cut it out with my father's razor, along the gutter, slowly, and hand it to them, and it was theirs, and nobody would ever see it again unless they chose to show it. If they didn't want it, it stayed in the book.

About half took their pages. Keisha folded hers into her purse. Pernell put his in his shirt pocket and patted it. A man whose name I'll keep to myself took his outside and tore it into small pieces and dropped them in the trash barrel on the walk, and then came back in and shook my hand, and I understood that, too. And about half said, "Leave it in the book, Mr. Henry," and when I asked why, the answers were all different and all the same. "That's where it goes." "Leave it with the others." "My mama's in there." One old woman, Mrs. Odessa Pryor, said, "If you take mine out, there'll be a hole, and people will wonder what was in it."

Around four a boy of about twelve came in alone, in a school polo shirt with the collar flipped up on one side, and put a coffee can on the counter. It was full of coins, mostly pennies, some nickels, two quarters, and a folded five. He said his grandmother had sent him. Her name was Velma Rush. She had a balance of sixteen dollars and twenty cents, and her hip was bad this month and she couldn't walk the four blocks, and she said to tell Mr. Henry she wasn't about to let a store close owing it.

I showed him the page. I turned the book around for him the way I would for a grown man. He read the line, and the word PAID, and my initials, and frowned, and looked at the coffee can, and looked at me, plainly unsure which of the two of us was going to get in trouble with his grandmother.

"Tell her I said it was paid in nineteen and ninety-one," I said, "and I just forgot to write it down."

"Was it?"

"No."

He thought about that. Then he took the coffee can and went out, and on the walk I heard Otis say to him, "What'd he tell you?" and the boy say, "He said he forgot to write it down," and Otis laugh until he coughed.

---

At five o'clock my son came in the back door with two paper cups of coffee from the gas station and stood beside me at the counter and drank his coffee and watched me turn a book around for a man named Lester Bell.

When Lester had gone, with his page, David said, "Ashley told me. About Ole Miss."

"Ashley talks too much for a planner."

"Why didn't you ever tell me?"

I thought about it. I had known he would ask, too, the way I knew Ashley would ask at the cemetery. I'd had three weeks. Before that I'd had fifty years.

"You'd have stayed," I said.

He put his coffee down.

"If I told you I gave up a scholarship to keep the books for my father," I said, "you'd have felt like you had to give up something to keep them for me. You'd have stayed. You'd be standing behind this counter right now with your bad back, selling neck bones, instead of fixing teeth in Atlanta. And I didn't want that. I wanted you to go. That's what your grandfather wanted for me. He just didn't get it." I picked up my coffee. "I got it for him, one generation late."

David didn't say anything for a while. He is a dentist; he is good at waiting. Then he reached across the counter and touched the black cloth cover of the last book, the way Ashley had touched the first one on that first Tuesday, just laid his fingers on it.

"I'd have been a terrible grocer," he said.

"You'd have been fine. You'd have overcharged for floss."

He laughed. It was my father's laugh, coming out of him. I had never noticed that before.

---

After closing I sat Ashley down at the meat block under the one light and took out the paper sack and smoothed it flat on the wood and turned it around so she could read it.

SIGN — Red Top. Sharon and Lucius. Hang it inside, on the wall facing the street, so when somebody asks where the tamales are, they can still say across from Wong's.
SCALE (BIG) — Dre.
SCALE (COUNTER) — Cynthia Jue. Houston. May takes it.
BUILDING — Tillman. (Ora Mae, Tasha, Dre.) 61.
CRATE — Otis (obviously).
SAFE — too heavy, stays. Tasha can keep her cash in it.
PENCIL SHARPENER — Bernice.
ABACUS — Bernice. (May decided. May was right.)
A. KEMP BOOTS — Chicago. Bernice called.
BOOKS —

After BOOKS there was nothing. She looked up.

"Thirty-four books," I said. "Minus the pages people took tonight. Minus the pages people take tomorrow. Whatever's left."

"Yeh-Yeh—"

"They're not mine to give. I told you that the first week. I meant it." I put my hand on the stack. "But they're not anybody else's to keep, either. Not the Heritage Circle's, not the university in Jackson, not the museum in Cleveland, though they asked, and they'd take good care. Those are people's business. Somebody has to keep people's business who knows it's people's business. Somebody who'll turn it around when a family comes asking to see their page. And who won't carry it to their porch in a folder."

She was looking at me with Pat's chin, and Pat's eyes, and her own face, which is like nobody else's.

"You," I said. "If you want them. You'd have to come back. Not to live. Just when somebody asks. You'd have to learn enough of your great-grandfather's writing to read the names, or ask me while I'm here to read them, and after that, ask May. You'd have to keep them somewhere dry. You'd have to say no to people sometimes. You'd have to say no to yourself."

"I know," she said.

"I know you know. You learned it on Dale Hale's porch."

She put her hand on the stack next to mine. Then she took the pencil from behind my ear, which nobody has done since my father, and wrote after BOOKS, in her square planner's capitals that stand up straight: ASHLEY. TURN THEM AROUND.

The Last Inventory

A front came through in the night. I heard it at about two in the morning from the narrow bed in my grandfather's spare room: first the wind in the pecan in his yard, a long dry rattle like somebody shaking out a sheet of newspaper, then the rain all at once on the carport roof, loud as gravel, then thunder walking off east toward Indianola. By four it had stopped. By five, when I gave up on sleeping and got dressed in the dark and let myself out the kitchen door, the air had changed completely. For the first time since I'd crossed the Yalobusha, it was cool. Not cold. Just cool, and washed, and smelling of wet asphalt and crushed pecan leaves and the river, which I could smell now that the heat had lifted off it, a brown green muddy smell coming up over the levee from a mile away.

I walked to the store. Eleven blocks. Down Alexander, across the tracks, along the edge of the empty lot where the single step leads into the air. The streetlights still on, haloed in mist. Crickets in the Johnson grass, slower than in August, like they were running down. A dog, possibly the same dog, explaining something over toward the levee. A rooster somewhere, which I hadn't known you could hear in town.

My grandfather had given me a key on Friday night, after the paper sack. A brass one on a loop of red string. He'd said, "In case you need to get in before me," and I'd said, "Why would I need to get in before you?" and he'd said, "I don't know. In case." I understood that morning that he had known exactly why.

---

I turned on one light. The one over the meat block. Then I stood in the doorway between the front and the back room with my hands in my sweatshirt pocket and looked at the store.

It was nearly empty. I want to get this down exactly, because in a year I won't remember, and in ten nobody will.

Aisle one: the bottom shelf had four cans of black-eyed peas, a sack of cornmeal with a tear in one corner taped shut, and a single box of baking powder. Everything above was bare. Aisle two: three jars of pickled pig feet, no pickled eggs, a sleeve of saltines Buddy had left on purpose, and the empty ring where the leaking can rusted through in 1999. Aisle three: motor oil, two quarts, and a fly swatter. The cold case hummed with almost nothing in it: some sodas, two orange ones at the front, set apart, where Mr. Otis would reach. The ice cream freezer had been unplugged on Thursday and stood with its lid open, drying out, smelling faintly of vanilla and old coolant. The potato bins in the back were empty except for a few loose papery skins and one small sprouting potato that nobody had wanted, its eyes putting out pale purple shoots toward the light.

On the back wall, the butcher paper. Every inch of it covered now. The gin. The chicken yard and the eggs going the wrong way. The airplane saying sardines. The two Red Tops facing each other. Eleven red squares. The scarecrow in the ball cap. Calvin's long blue river down the left edge and the four lights on the bend. And in the corner, in my handwriting, WONG'S, 1938, a dash, and the space after it.

I had a stack of index cards and a marker. I'd done the table cards for the Heritage Circle that way. This morning I did every object that was left in the store.

The hanging scale. Hung 1941 by Wong Kwok Leung. Used by him, by Henry Wong, by Lai Ying Wong, and once to weigh a baby. Pan cleaned with vinegar and salt about a dozen times in eighty-five years. Going to Andre Tillman, for his table at the market, where he will call the weights out loud.

The meat block. Maple, three feet square, ten inches thick, hollowed in the center by fifty years of cleaver. Bought used in 1946 from a butcher in Leland. Going with the building, because it's too heavy to go anywhere else.

The crate. Soft-drink case, Greenwood bottler, 1960s. Sat on by Wong Kwok Leung, 1977 to 1988, and by Otis Pettway, 1988 to today. Going to Otis Pettway. Obviously.

The safe. The black wall phone. The pressed-tin ceiling with Tennessee on it. The roll of butcher paper on its iron bracket, with about two feet left, which I suspected would be torn off at some point today with a sound like a sneeze.

Then I did the little things. The bone-handled magnifying glass. My grandmother's last apron, which I had on. The serrated blade. The coffee percolator. The cigarette gate that nobody had sold cigarettes from since 2002. A ledger book's red leather spine, cracked, lying alone on a shelf, from book six, from the gutter my grandfather had cut the Hale page out of. I didn't know where to put that one. I wrote a card for it anyway. Belonged to the Hale page. Now belongs to the book again.

I wrote until the window had gone from black through gray to the color of a wet peach. I took a photograph of each object with its card in front of it, and I sent the photographs to the private family space with the tree and the line of moves, where Auntie May would find them and add her opinions in the comments by seven a.m. Houston time, and where my father would look at them later on his lunch break at the practice, quietly, without saying he had.

I did not write a card for the framed grocery list behind the register. Not because I forgot. Because it wasn't on the paper sack. He'd given everything away, every single object in the store, to somebody, and written it down, and the list wasn't on there. I stood in front of it a long time. Rice, lard, salt meat, coal oil, matches, snuff, flour, tobacco, canned milk. Nails, small. I couldn't read a single character of it. I knew it by heart anyway.

---

Then I packed Arthur Kemp's boots.

Miss Bernice had called his grandson on Wednesday night as she'd promised. His name was Marcus Kemp, and he was a lieutenant in the Chicago fire department, and he had called my grandfather the next morning, and my grandfather had come off the phone and stood at the register for a while and then said only, "He wears an eleven, too." Miss Bernice had given me a letter to put in the box. A single sheet of yellow legal paper, folded in thirds, not sealed, because she said a letter between family didn't need gluing shut, and I hadn't read it, because it wasn't mine.

I found a good box in the back room, a heavy one that had held cases of canned milk. I put the boot box inside it, the old one with the penciled lid, ARTHUR KEMP, so he'd see the name in the handwriting it was written in. I stuffed the corners with the last of the brown paper sacks, number twenties, crumpled. The dry leather of the boots creaked when I moved them, and a few flakes of the rotted laces came loose on my fingers, fine as tobacco. I laid Miss Bernice's letter on top. Then I wrote a card, the same as the others, and laid it beside the letter.

Boots, men's, size 11. Ordered spring 1964 by Arthur Kemp, who worked at the compress and could lift a bale. Came the week after he left for Chicago. Waited on a shelf in Wong's Grocery, Greenville, for sixty-two years. Going home.

I taped the box shut, and taped it again, the way my grandfather tapes everything, as if the post office were a personal enemy. I wrote the address in black marker on the top. Then I set it by the front door on the floor where I'd see it, to carry to the post office when it opened at nine, and I sat down on the edge of the empty potato bin for a minute, and found I needed to.

At six I sent an email to Shreya. I'd written it four times in my head on the walk over.

I said yes to the senior position. I said I'd be back Monday. I said I wanted to lead the Westside engagement, and that I wanted to run it differently, and that I'd explain when I got there, but the short version was fewer cafeterias and more porches, and I was going to need a budget line for folding stools. I said I'd need a long weekend, every so often, unpaid if necessary, to go to Mississippi when somebody asked to see a page in a book, and that this was not negotiable. I read it over twice. Then I took out the word "every so often" and put in "whenever." Then I sent it.

She wrote back in four minutes, which meant she was already up, which meant she was a better boss than I had ever given her credit for.

Folding stools. OK. We'll talk Monday. Glad you went. —P.

---

Calvin texted at six-twenty. He was somewhere above Rosedale, he said, on the head of the tow, coming south with fifteen barges of grain. Sunrise on the river. He sent a picture: a flat sheet of water the color of a nickel, a line of black willows, the sky behind them going from lavender to a pale clear yellow, and the long dark shapes of the barges stretching ahead like a road.

Then: We'll come round the bend below town tonight about 9. If you're on the levee you'll see the searchlight. I'll be on deck.

Then: Four minutes.

I wrote back: I'll be there. I'll bring Yeh-Yeh.

Then: And tamales.

He sent back a picture of a towboat deckhand's lunch on a steel table, a plastic container of something gray, with no comment, and I laughed out loud alone in the store, and the sound went up into the pressed tin and came back down.

---

At six-thirty I swept the walk. I don't know why. He'd never asked me to; it was his. But it was still wet from the night's rain and covered in leaves and a few small branches from the pecan across the street, and I got the push broom from the back room and did it, the way I'd watched him do it every morning for a month, from the door outward, in long strokes, the bristles hissing on the concrete. Then I hosed it. The water ran off the curb into the gutter carrying a little brown river of leaf bits and the last cotton lint from the fields, which had been blowing in for weeks and caught in every crack in town like snow that refused to melt.

I set the crate in its spot, to the left of the door. I wiped it down with a dry rag because the rain had blown under the awning and beaded on the wood.

At six forty-five, from the other end of Nelson Street, I saw him coming. Walking. Not in the car. In his white short-sleeved shirt and gray trousers, with his reading glasses on his forehead and his hands in his pockets. Not hurrying. The streetlights went off one by one above him as he came, the way they do on a timer at dawn, so it looked as if he were turning them off as he passed, block by block, the whole length of the street, on his way to open the store one last time.

He stopped at the walk. He looked at the wet concrete, swept and hosed, and at the crate wiped down, and at me standing in the door in Pat's last apron with the push broom.

"You missed a spot," he said.

"Where?"

He pointed at nothing. Then he grinned, very good teeth, and took his key on its ring out of his pocket and held it up, and I took mine on its red string out of my apron pocket and held it up too, and we stood there on the walk holding up our keys at each other like two people who had both brought the same dish to a party.

"Well," he said. "Somebody turn on the lights."

Across From Wong's

Otis was the first customer, at seven-oh-two, which is early for him. He came up the walk in his brown suit with the vest, the one from the Heritage Circle, and his hickory cane with the doorknob, and he did not stop to read the notice, which by now had curled at all four corners, and he did not sit on the crate. He came straight in and went to the cold case and took out one of the two orange sodas Ashley had set apart at the front and brought it to the counter and put down a dollar and a quarter, exact, with the quarter on top.

"Otis," I said. "Put your money away."

"I will not."

"It's the last day. It's on the house."

"It is not on the house. There's no house. You sold the house." He pushed the money an inch toward me with one finger. "Ring it up."

So I rang it up. The register is an old one, a heavy gray thing with round keys, and it makes a sound when the drawer comes out like a small bell being hit with a spoon, and I have heard that bell perhaps a million times in my life, and I listened to it that morning as if I had never heard it before. I put his dollar in the drawer and his quarter in the drawer. I gave him his receipt. He creased it once and tucked it in his vest pocket.

"Now," he said, "I'm going to go sit on my crate."

"It's your crate."

"I know it is. I'm just telling you where I'll be."

---

I won't tell the whole day. I couldn't. It went too fast and too slow at once, the way the last day of anything does, and a great deal of it was people standing in the store saying what a shame, and me saying I know it, and them looking at the pressed-tin ceiling. Tennessee was bigger than ever. The rain in the night had come through the roof again and left a fresh brown edge along its eastern border, around Knoxville, and I stood under it at one point with a mop and Otis said through the open door that if I'd fixed the roof in 1983 like he told me, I wouldn't have to mop on my last day, and I said if I'd fixed the roof in 1983 he wouldn't have had anything to talk about for forty-three years.

Buddy came at ten for the sleeve of saltines we'd held back. He paid. He shook my hand across the counter. He said, "Well, hell, Henry," and went out to his truck, and then came back in and said, "The sardines really are terrible," and went out again.

May packed Billy Jue's counter scale. It took her an hour and a half and an entire roll of bubble wrap and she would not let anybody help. When it was done it looked like a cocoon from a film about insects from outer space. She put it in the back seat of her rental car and buckled the seat belt across it.

Bernice came at eleven with a screwdriver in her purse. She unscrewed the pencil sharpener from the end of the counter herself, all four screws, with her mouth set, and dropped the screws into an envelope and licked it shut and wrote SHARPENER SCREWS on it in her blue ink, and put the sharpener and the envelope and the abacus in a canvas tote bag, and then she stood looking at the four small holes in the counter and the pale patch of worn paint around them, and she put a fingertip in one of the holes.

"Leave those," she said. "When Tasha paints. Tell her to leave those holes."

"I'll tell her."

"Some child is going to ask what was there."

Ashley carried a box to the post office at nine and came back without it.

---

At two, Dre and I took down the hanging scale.

I let him do it. I stood on the floor and he stood on the meat block, which I have never let anyone stand on, in his socks, because I wouldn't let him stand on it in his shoes. He unhooked the brass pan from its chains and handed it down to me. Then he lifted the scale off the hook in the beam, carefully, both arms, the way you'd lift a sleeping child out of a car, and handed that down too, and I took it, and it was heavier than I remembered.

Above the meat block, where it had hung, the beam was paler in a small circle around the hook. And beside it, in pencil, still there, very small, my father's writing. 1941. And under that, in my mother's writing, which I had forgotten was hers: 9 lb 2 oz. The baby.

Dre stood on the meat block in his socks and looked at it.

"Don't paint that," I said.

"I heard you tell Mama Tasha."

"I'm telling you."

"I'm not going to paint it, Mr. Henry."

I set the scale on the meat block at his feet. I set the brass pan beside it, and then on an impulse I hung the pan back on its chains, from the scale's hook, so that the whole thing was assembled, sitting on the wood, the dial facing up at the ceiling.

"Check zero," I said.

He got down and crouched and read the dial straight on, not from the side, with his face close to the cracked glass.

"Zero," he said. Loud. To the whole store.

---

The sign came down at four.

Sharon brought three of Toot's nephews and two aluminum ladders and a socket set, and they set the ladders against the brick on either side of the door, and Otis moved his crate exactly one foot to the left without being asked, and I stood across the road in front of the Red Top with Ashley and David and his wife Laura and May and watched. Toot stood beside me in his straw hat. Ora Mae came out of her front door in her orange apron and stood on her step with her arms crossed. Tasha stood beside her. A few dozen people I knew and a few I didn't stood up and down the walk in the long afternoon light, which was clear and cool and slanting gold off the brick—not gold, I want to say this right: the color of the inside of a sweet potato, that orange that has a little red under it—and nobody said much.

The bolts were rusted. It took them forty minutes. When the last bolt came out, the sign tipped, and both men on the ladders caught it, and for a second it hung there between them over the door, ten feet of cream-colored sheet metal with the red letters outlined in black, WONG'S GROCERY, GROCERIES MEATS NOTIONS, and then they walked it down.

Behind where it had hung, the brick was a different color. Darker, redder, cleaner, sheltered from eighty years of sun and rain, a long rectangle of the brick's real color. And faintly in it, if you stood across the road where I was standing, you could see the shadow of the letters themselves, where the paint on the back of the sign had pressed against the brick for so long that the brick had kept a little of it. WONG'S. Ghosted. Backward and forward at the same time.

They carried the sign across the road. Six men, three on each side, the way you'd carry a canoe. Sharon held the steel door of the Red Top open with the cinder block and they took it inside and laid it on the pool table, and later that night they'd bolt it to the wall facing the street, above the bar, between the photographs and the pinned-up dollar bills and SINGS WHILE PAYING.

"Now when folks ask where the tamales are," he said, "we say across from Wong's. And they say, where's Wong's. And we say, Look up."

---

The last sale was at six fifty-eight.

It was Velma Rush's grandson, the boy with the polo shirt and the flipped collar. He came in alone again, with a nickel. He said his grandmother had sent him to be the last customer, because a store ought to close on a sale and not on a goodbye. I asked him what he wanted to buy. He looked around the store, at the bare shelves, the empty cold case, the open freezer, the space over the meat block where the scale had hung. Then he walked to the potato bins in the back and came back with the one small sprouting potato nobody had wanted, its pale purple shoots curling, and put it on the counter.

The scales were gone. I picked the potato up and weighed it in my palm. I have weighed ten thousand potatoes in my palm. You learn.

"Three ounces," I said. Out loud. To the whole store.

"Is that a nickel?"

"That's exactly a nickel."

He gave me the nickel. I rang it up. The bell. I gave him his receipt, and he creased it and tucked it into his shirt pocket the way Otis does, and took his potato and went home, and I closed the drawer.

---

I didn't count the drawer that night. I just took the bag out and put it in my pocket. I pulled the light strings, front to back, one aisle at a time, and the store went dark in stages like a theater, and the last one I pulled was the one over the meat block, and then it was only the light from the street coming in through the front window over the curled notice and lying on the floor in a long pale shape.

I locked the front door and the iron gate. Then I gave the keys to Tasha Tillman, who was waiting on the walk, all of them on their ring, and she took them in both hands, and Ora Mae beside her said, "Lord, Henry," which was all she said, and turned around and went inside, and in a minute I heard her radio come on through the wall, low.

---

At a quarter to nine we went up on the levee. Ashley and David and Laura and May and me. Ashley carried a dozen of Ora Mae's tamales in newspaper, held out away from her body like a baby with a diaper, and the grease had come through the paper already in three places, and she didn't complain about it once.

The levee at night is a long grass ridge with the town on one side, lights in a low scatter, and on the other side the batture woods and then the river, which you can't see in the dark, but which you can smell and feel, a cool damp breathing coming up through the willows. The cotton lint was caught in the grass along the levee crown and showed white in the moonlight like frost. Crickets. A truck on the bridge far off to the north. May had brought folding chairs from the trunk of her rental car, of course, and we sat in a row on the crown of the levee facing the water and ate tamales in the dark and got the grease on our fingers and wiped our fingers on the grass.

At ten after nine a light came around the bend.

A searchlight, white and very bright, sweeping slow back and forth across the water, catching the willows on the far bank and turning them silver, then swinging back across toward us. Behind it, low on the water, the long black shape of the tow, a quarter mile of barges with a single lit boat at the back pushing them, its engines a deep slow thrum I felt in the folding chair before I heard it.

The searchlight came across the river and found the levee and swept along it, and found us, five people in folding chairs with a sack of tamales, and stopped. Held there. I put my hand up against it. Ashley stood up and waved both arms over her head, the way she'd stretched getting out of her car on the first day, the tamales held out in one hand, and somebody on the head of the tow, out in front of the barges, a small dark figure in the glare, waved back.

Then the light moved on, and swept down the levee and back across the water, and the tow went on down the river toward Vicksburg in the dark with its engines thrumming, and its lights got smaller around the bottom of the bend, and then they were gone.

I had counted. I always count. It was four minutes and a little over.

Ashley sat back down beside me in her folding chair, breathing hard, with tamale grease on her elbow.

"Yeh-Yeh," she said. "Are you going to be okay? Tomorrow, I mean. With nothing to open."

I thought about it. I thought about the lawn mower in my carport, and Otis, who had told me at four o'clock that on Monday morning I was going to drive him out to Arcola in the truck to see where the gin office used to be, and Dale Hale, who had asked me to bring him the contract on Tuesday and stay for coffee. I thought about thirty-four black books with red spines in a dry closet in an apartment in Atlanta, and a girl who would come back when somebody asked to see their page.

"I'll get up at five," I said. "I'll make jook. I'll walk down Nelson Street and buy a dozen tamales from the Tillmans, and look up at the wall of the Red Top to make sure the sign's still straight." I licked the grease off my thumb. "Then I'll tell Tasha what she's doing wrong."