After my dad’s back surgery, I spent six years running his hardware store. But when my younger sister came home with a business degree and proposed cutting a longtime employee’s hours from 40 to 12 a week, I refused. Dad shouted in front of the crew, “Your sister earned a business degree. All you’ve ever done is take,” then took the store keys off the hook and put them in her hand

My phone rang. It was Chad. He said, “Brock, I don’t know what to do.” He told me about the 12 hours. He told me about the headset. He said Aubrey had asked him that afternoon why the lumber yard needed to be open at all since people could order online and pick up out front.

He said, “I’ve worked in that yard since I was 24. What do I do?” I’ve thought a lot about what I said next. I could have said quit and come to Hale. I wanted to, but I knew what that would look like. It would look like I was taking people from my father, which was exactly what he’d yelled that I’d always done.

So I said, “Chad, I won’t ask you to quit and I won’t ask you to stay. That’s yours to decide. He was quiet. Then he said, “Okay.” He quit the next morning. He called me that afternoon and said, “I’m done there. That’s decided. Now I’m asking. You need a yard man.” Sully had a lumber shed full of pigeons and nobody to run it.

I said, “Come down Monday.” Joan called me 2 weeks later after the bruise paint and said almost the same thing. Ricky called after Aubrey cut him to one day a week. Each time I asked them the same thing first. Did you already quit? Each time, the answer was yes. Each time, Sully said, “Hire them.” By the first week of July, I had Chad in the lumber shed, which no longer had pigeons.

I had Joan at a paint counter we built out of an old church pew and a sheet of plywood, matching colors with Sully’s old shaker and a brand she knew. And I had Ricky driving Sully’s old flatbed, which he got running himself in two evenings. The builders found us on their own. Cal Lindle was the first.

He builds pole barns. He came in on a Tuesday and said, “Heard Jets down here.” He wanted lumber for a machine shed. I told him honestly, “Cal, your account at Dad’s is still there. You can go back anytime.” He laughed. He said, “Not without a card, it ain’t.” And he opened an account with us monthly like he’d always done.

Two more builders came the next week, then a plumber, then the electrician who wires half the new houses in Livingston County. Ricky went from no loads to three a day. Chad started coming in at 6:30. Sully watched all this from his rolltop desk writing on his calendar. One afternoon, he said, “I haven’t sold this much lumber since 1993.” I said, “What happened in ’93?” He said, “The flood.

Everybody needed a new floor.” The call from Aubrey came on a Thursday in July, a month and a day after I walked out. It was after 7. I was locking up. My phone rang and it said Aubrey. and I almost didn’t pick up. When I did, I didn’t hear a word for a few seconds, just breathing, then crying, the kind where you can’t get air in between.

She said, “Brock.” Then nothing. Then, “Brock, I’m at the store.” I said, “Okay.” She said, “One of the new part-timers walked out at noon. The other one called in sick. It’s just me. Everybody’s gone.” She stopped to breathe. Dad’s at home. His back is out again and mom won’t come in because she says it’s my store now and there’s a man from the county on the phone asking where his blades are and I don’t even know what blades he means.

She cried for a while. I let her. I stood in the dark in Sully’s store under the tin ceiling and I listened to my little sister cry on the other end of the line. Then she asked me, “Why did everyone quit?” I thought about Chad holding his coffee. I thought about Herb’s headset on the counter.

I thought about Otis’ mower sitting behind that sign. I thought about the $9,000 and the 6 years and the hook by the back door. I said, “Ask your degree.” And I hung up. I’m not proud of every word I’ve ever said. I’m proud of that one. 3 weeks later, on the last Thursday in July, a pickup with a trailer pulled up behind Sully’s store, and my father pushed Otis Grim’s John Deere down the ramp and through my back door.