Part 1
At a quarter to seven on the first Monday of November, Dele Okafor unlocks the front doors of Okafor’s Market on Mill Street in Ferris Grove, Indiana, and stands for a moment on the mat, breathing in the smell of the store before the lights come on. Cold bread. Floor wax. The sharp green tang of the produce misters, which have been running since five. Under all of it, faint and familiar, the smell of old paper from the back office, where the day books have been kept since 1962.
He turns on the lights one bank at a time, the way his grandmother taught him. The long fluorescent tubes flicker and catch. The aisles come up out of the dark: canned goods on the left, dairy in the back, the tall freezer cases humming along the far wall like a row of patient animals.
Then he walks to the front of the store and looks at the register.
The dime is still there.
It is on the counter beside the cash drawer, at the very edge where the laminate meets the steel rim, taped flat with a strip of clear tape that has yellowed to the color of weak tea. The tape has curled at both ends. The dime itself is dull and worn and very thin, its face rubbed nearly smooth by sixty-four years of fingertips. The Roosevelt profile is still visible, barely. Somebody has tried to pick the tape up, once a decade or so, for as long as Dele has worked here. Nobody has ever gotten it off.
A customer walks in at seven-oh-five, a woman in a green fleece with a toddler on her hip. She stops at the register, the way everyone does, and looks down at the taped coin.
“Is that for luck?” she asks, half joking.
“Something like that,” says Dele, which is what he always says.
She laughs and pays for her milk. The dime sits beside the drawer, unbothered.
Dele’s grandmother, Esther Okafor, had run the store from 1962 until 1989, and his uncle Cal Brewer had managed it after her until 2014, and in all that time nobody in the family had ever said anything about the dime except that it was not to be touched. Dele had asked once, when he was fourteen and bored, and his uncle had looked at him very seriously over a box of canned peaches.
“It’s a debt,” Cal had said. “Not ours. Somebody else’s. We keep it till they settle.”
“Who?”
“Nobody knows,” Cal had said. “That’s the point.”
The one written reference to the dime is in the day book for 1962, which lives in a steel cabinet in the back office, behind a locked door with a brass handle worn bright by hands. Dele has read it many times. There is a single line, in his grandmother’s firm, slanting hand, dated the sixteenth of October, 1962, below an entry for a shipment of Campbell’s soup and a note about a leaking cooler.
The dime stays until R. Parks settles.
Nothing else. No explanation. No second line.
At seven-forty, the bell over the front door rings again, and it is not a customer.
Dele looks up from the register and goes very still.
A man is standing on the mat, leaning on a walker with aluminum legs and rubber feet. He is very thin, with a plaid wool coat hanging loose from his shoulders and a flat cap pulled low over ears that have gone pink with cold. His face is lined like a walnut shell, his eyes are pale blue and rheumy, and his hands on the walker grips shake with a steady, patient tremor.
He looks at the store for a long time. He looks at the aisles, and the freezers, and the bread racks, and then at the register, and the dime, and his mouth tightens.
“Is Mrs. Okafor in?” he asks.
His voice is dry and clear and very quiet.
“My grandmother passed in 1994,” says Dele carefully. “I’m her grandson. I run the store now.”
The old man nods slowly, as if this is the answer he expected and dreaded.
“Then I’ll need the day book,” he says. “The 1962 one. Before anything else.”
Part 2
The night of October 16, 1962, was cold and clear, with a thin frost forming on the windshields along Mill Street and the sky over the grain elevator as black as the inside of a coal bin.
Roland Parks was twenty-seven years old that autumn, a night clerk at the store on Mill Street, a job he had taken because it paid a dollar and ten cents an hour more than the lumberyard and because the owner, a sharp-tongued widow named Esther Okafor, had once told him that he had the steadiest hands she had ever seen behind a register.
He was proud of that. He was proud of the way he counted out change without looking, and the way he could tell a bad bill from a good one by the feel of the paper. He was proud of his wife, Lorraine, who worked days at the telephone exchange, and of the small house on Cedar Street that they were paying off a few dollars at a time.
He was not, that night, proud of anything.
The store closed at nine. Esther had gone home at half past eight, leaving Roland to count the drawer and lock the back door, and he had been alone at the front counter for twenty minutes, with the radio low and the cash tray spread out on the steel, when the bell rang over the door.
The man who came in was tall and thin and wore a gray work coat with the collar turned up and a knit cap pulled low. He did not say anything at first. He only walked to the register, lifted a revolver from his coat pocket, and held it level at Roland’s chest.
“Tray,” he said.
Roland lifted the tray. His hands were shaking so badly that the coins rattled against the steel. He held it out, and the man took it, and then, without any further word, he backed out the door and was gone into the frost.
Roland stood frozen behind the counter for almost a full minute. Then he picked up the phone and dialed the sheriff’s office, and his voice did not shake at all when he told the deputy what had happened.
The deputy came. The sheriff came. They took his statement and asked him to describe the man, and he did his best, and they told him, very kindly, that the description matched half the men in the county.
Esther Okafor arrived at ten-thirty, in her housecoat and a long wool coat, her gray hair pinned up in a hurry. She had heard the news from the deputy’s wife, who lived next door to her on Walnut Street. She walked into the store, saw the empty register, and sat down very suddenly on a stack of canned peaches.
“Roland,” she said. “Are you hurt?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“No, ma’am.”
She let out a long, unsteady breath, and then she stood up and went behind the counter and opened the cash drawer, and looked at the bills and the coins and the empty tray, and began, very calmly, to count.
It took her twenty minutes. Roland watched every move.
When she finished, she looked up at him over her reading glasses, her face tight and gray.
“You’re a dime short,” she said.
He stared at her.
“That’s not possible.”
“It is, though.” She put the glasses down. “The tray was full when you counted it at eight-thirty, and it’s a dime light now. I’ve checked it twice. So either the robber took it, or you dropped it in the scramble, or you miscounted, and I’m going to assume it’s the first one, because I know you.”
She picked up a dime from the counter, a bright, new coin from the bank bag, and held it between two fingers.
“I’m going to tape this here,” she said quietly, “beside the drawer, and I’m going to write a line in the day book. You’re going to find that dime, Roland, or you’re going to make it square some other way. But you’re not going to close this register short. Not in my store.”
“I didn’t steal it—”
“I know you didn’t,” said Esther Okafor. “That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking you to count it square or don’t close at all.”
She went to the back office, took out the 1962 day book, and wrote a single line in her firm slanting hand.
The dime stays until R. Parks settles.
Then she came back to the counter, pressed the dime to the laminate beside the cash drawer, and smoothed a strip of clear tape over it with her thumb.
Roland said nothing. He could not think of anything to say.
Part 3
Roland Parks did not go back to the store that night with the dime.
He went home. He sat at the kitchen table on Cedar Street with his coat still on and a dime in his fist, a dime he had taken from his own pocket in the car on the way home, and he looked at it for a long time under the bare bulb above the sink.
Lorraine came in from her shift at the exchange at midnight and found him there. She did not ask him what was wrong. She sat down across from him, took off her hat, and waited.
“Esther says I’m a dime short,” he said finally.
“You’re not a thief, Roland.”
“I know that.” His voice was hoarse. “She knows it too. She didn’t accuse me of anything. She just taped the dime up and wrote it down, like it was a debt I’d owed my whole life and was only now finding out about.”
Lorraine reached across the table and took his hand. “Then go back and pay her.”
He drove back at one in the morning, with the dime in his pocket and his heart pounding. The store was dark. The streetlamp outside cast a pale yellow square across the front window. He parked the car, got out, and walked up to the glass with the coin in his palm.
Through the window, he could see the register. The taped dime sat beside the drawer, catching the streetlamp’s glow.
Esther’s car was gone. The store had been locked for hours.
He stood on the sidewalk for a long time. Then he slid the dime through the mail slot in the front door, and heard it hit the floor inside with a small, bright sound, and walked back to his car without looking behind him.
He did not hear from Esther Okafor for two days.
On the third day, a note arrived at the house on Cedar Street, in an envelope with the store’s name printed across the top. It was one line long, in her firm slanting hand.
Not that one. The register has to see you settle it.
He threw the envelope in the trash, and then he took it out again and put it in his wallet.
He never went back to the store.
He shopped at the Kroger on Route 9 for the next sixty-four years. He drove an extra four miles every week to avoid Mill Street. He never once walked past the front windows of Okafor’s Market, though he knew, from people who did, that the dime was still there, taped to the register beside the drawer, a little more yellow each year.
When Esther died in 1994, he sent flowers, unsigned. When his uncle Cal took over the store, he sent a card with a single line, also unsigned: I’m still counting.
Lorraine knew about the dime, of course. She had known since the night he came home with it in his fist. She never once asked him to go back.
“You’ve been carrying that dime since before we paid off Cedar Street,” she said to him in 1986, when they were sitting on the back porch watching the sun go down over the lumberyard. “You know that, don’t you?”
“I know.”
“Then why haven’t you put it down?”
Roland had looked at the dime in his palm. It was not the one he had slid through the mail slot. That one had been swept into a dustpan the next morning. This was a second dime, bought from the bank the same week in 1962, and carried every day since in the watch pocket of every pair of trousers he owned. It was worn nearly smooth now. He could no longer see the face of it.
“Because she was right,” he said at last. “I didn’t close square. I was too proud to say so, and then I was too proud to walk back in and make it right. The register remembers what I owe it. I just never wanted to be the one who admitted it.”
Lorraine did not answer. She only took his hand, and they sat together until the lights came on across the lumberyard, and neither of them said another word about the store on Mill Street for the next forty years.
Cal Brewer, who had worked the register as a teenager in 1979, once asked Esther about the dime, late on a slow Saturday, when the store was almost empty and the radio was playing softly from the back.
“Who was R. Parks?” he asked.
Esther did not look up from the cash drawer.
“A man who counts square,” she said. “Which is more than most people can say about themselves.”
“Is he coming back?”
“When he’s ready,” said Esther. “And not before.”
Part 4
Dele Okafor brings the 1962 day book to the front counter, because the old man has asked for it there and will not sit down anywhere else until he has seen the line.
He lays the book open on the laminate beside the walker. The pages are brittle and brown at the edges. The ink has faded from black to a soft, cloudy gray, but the handwriting is still firm and clear. The entry for October 16 is halfway down the page, below the soup and the leaking cooler.
The dime stays until R. Parks settles.
The old man looks at it for a long time.
He does not touch the page. He leans over the book, very carefully, with both hands on the walker’s grips, and reads the line once, and then again, with his lips moving slightly, the way a man reads a name he has been dreading for decades.
“She wrote it in pencil first,” he says at last, very softly. “Then she went over it in ink. Pressed hard.”
“You remember that?”
“I remember everything.” He straightens with some difficulty. “I remember the sound the dime made when I dropped it through the slot. I remember it bounced twice on the floor before it stopped. I remember standing on that sidewalk in the frost, thinking I’d just paid a debt, and realizing it hadn’t been paid at all.”
He looks up at Dele for the first time since he walked in.
“Your grandmother had a rule,” he says. “You count it square or you don’t close. I broke it that night. And I broke it again every single morning I drove past this store for sixty-four years.”
“Mr. Parks,” Dele says carefully. “Why did you come back now?”
The old man’s hand moves to the inside pocket of his plaid coat. It takes him a long time. He pulls out a small leather wallet, creased and soft with age, and opens it slowly, one flap at a time, until he finds what he is looking for in a small plastic sleeve behind the photograph of a woman with dark hair and a shy smile.
He lays the coin on the counter.
It is a dime. It is dull, worn nearly smooth, almost identical to the one taped beside the drawer. But its date is still legible: 1962.
“I stopped carrying it in my pocket last spring,” says Roland Parks. “Doctor said I’d probably fall. Lorraine said I’d probably forget. She’s been gone three years now, you know. She never once asked me to come back.”
He touches the dime with one trembling finger.
“But I got the call from the hospice last month,” he says quietly. “The nurse said I had maybe six weeks. And I thought about that line in the book, and I realized I’d rather die owing nobody than live another day as the man who was too proud to walk in the door.”
Dele does not say anything. He cannot.
“So,” says Roland Parks, and his voice cracks on the word. “Let me settle it.”
Dele leans over the register and opens the cash drawer. The bills are stacked neatly in their slots, the coins sorted and rolled. He reaches for the empty tray.
The old man holds out his dime.
“Count it square,” he says. “Please.”
Dele takes it, very gently, between two fingers. He holds it up to the light for a moment, the way his grandmother did with every coin that came across this counter, and then he drops it into the open tray.
It makes a small, bright sound against the steel.
Then he lifts the tape.
It takes a long time. The tape is yellow and brittle, and it tears in two places before the last corner comes free. The dime comes away in Dele’s palm, faintly sticky, dull and thin and worn to almost nothing, and for the first time in sixty-four years, the laminate beside the register is bare.
The store is silent. A customer at the far end of the dairy case stops reaching for a carton of eggs. A stock boy in a green apron, twenty years old and newly hired, stands motionless at the end of aisle three, holding a crate of bananas against his chest. Nobody speaks.
Roland Parks looks at the bare counter for a long moment, and then he begins, very slowly, to smile.
“There,” he says. “Now it’s square.”
Dele places the old dime into the old man’s palm. The coin is warm from his hand.
The old man closes his fingers around it, and then, without another word, he turns the walker around, slowly, and begins to make his way toward the front door, one careful step at a time.
At the mat, he stops. He does not look back. He only says, to no one in particular, in a voice as dry and clear as ever: “Thank you, Esther.”
The bell rings over the door.
It is nine-oh-two on a Monday morning, and the whole store is watching, and nobody in Ferris Grove will ever be able to say afterward how long they stood there, looking at the bare counter, before someone finally remembered to breathe.
Part 5
The dime stayed off the register for exactly one business day.
On Tuesday morning, Dele Okafor came in at a quarter to seven, unlocked the front doors, turned on the lights one bank at a time, and walked to the register, and found the laminate beside the drawer bare and clean, as it had been all day Monday, and the customers in the lines had talked about nothing else.
He stood there for a long moment, with his keys in his hand.
Then he went to the back office and took out a fresh roll of clear tape and a single dime from the bank bag, bright and new, the way his grandmother had done it in 1962. He carried them both to the front of the store and taped the dime to the laminate beside the cash drawer, at the same spot where the old one had been, and smoothed the tape down with his thumb.
Then he opened the 1962 day book, and picked up his pen, and wrote a line of his own beneath his grandmother’s entry, in his own careful hand.
The second dime stays until whoever’s next settles.
He stared at the words for a long time. Then he closed the book and put it back in its cabinet and locked the door.
The new line is not written anywhere else. It is not on the wall, or the register receipt, or the training binder that the new hires read on their first day. Dele has not told anyone what it says, and nobody in the store has asked. The stock boy who saw the old man leave on Monday morning has been told only that the dime is still there, and that it is not to be touched, and that the old line in the day book has been settled.
The new line stays in the book.
There is already a theory about the third dime, of course. The night crew has been talking about it since Tuesday evening, in low voices over the cold cases, in the back room where the cardboard is baled. The theory involves the Roosevelt profile, and the sixty-four years, and something about a robber who was never caught and a debt that might belong to somebody who has not yet walked through the door.
Dele has heard it. He has smiled at it. He has said nothing.
On Thursday morning, the bell rang over the front door at seven-forty, and a thin old man in a plaid coat came in on a walker, very slowly, and stopped in the middle of the mat, and looked toward the register.
The laminate beside the drawer was bare.
Then his eyes found the new dime, bright and tight beneath its clear tape, and the old man’s mouth moved, very slightly, into a smile.
“Well,” said Roland Parks, to nobody. “Look at that.”
He walked to the bread racks, took down a single loaf of rye, and carried it to the counter with the careful, steady hands of a man who had counted square for a very long time. Dele rang it up. The old man paid with exact change, from the wallet with the photograph of the woman with dark hair, and he did not ask for a bag.
“You kept it,” he said quietly, as Dele handed him the receipt.
“Somebody had to,” said Dele.
Roland Parks nodded, and tucked the receipt into his wallet, and looked one last time at the bright new dime beside the drawer.
“Then I’ll be back,” he said, “when it’s time to settle the next one.”
He turned the walker around and made his way slowly toward the door. The bell rang over his head. Outside, on Mill Street, the morning sun had just cleared the grain elevator, and the frost on the windshields was beginning, at last, to melt.
Behind the register, the new dime sat in its place, taped flat, with its one line in the day book, waiting for whoever would come next.
The register, after all, remembers what it is owed.
