The hand-lettered sign went up in the window of Valley Hardware on Monday, and by Tuesday the store was fuller than it had been in years — full of people saying what a shame it was, what an institution the place is, and how they'd been meaning to come in.
“Everyone's been meaning to come in,” said Gus Terlizzi, 71, who bought the store in 1988 and has opened it six days a week since. “Thirty-eight years of meaning to come in.”
Valley Hardware is the kind of store that carries one of everything and knows where it is. Terlizzi keeps customer projects in his head the way other men keep box scores — he will ask, unprompted, how the swamp cooler came out, whether the gate latch held, if the drip line ever reached the far bed. On the wall behind the register are photographs of finished projects customers brought in over the decades: decks, ramadas, one regrettable gazebo he advised against.
“You can't get that online,” said longtime customer Herb Salazar, holding a single specialty washer Terlizzi had located in eleven seconds. Asked when he had last been in before this week, Salazar examined the washer for some time.
The closing sale runs through September. Terlizzi is retiring to Rocky Point, where he intends to fish, read, and — he was clear on this — not fix anything for anyone.
“The town will be fine,” he said, bagging a customer's paint rollers with the particular care of a man doing a thing a finite number of remaining times. “The town has been fine without me for years. It just didn't tell me until Monday.”
Around the Valley runs whenever the Valley gives Dot something. This week it gave her this, and she is not okay.