What My Daughter Saw At The Store

The Layaway Counter

I want to be honest about what I was afraid I would find, because the fear is part of the story.

I was afraid I would find a receipt for a wire transfer. I was afraid I would find a name I did not recognize, a man’s name, on some kind of shared account. I was afraid, in the ugliest corner of my mind, that I would find evidence that my mother-in-law, a woman who had taught three decades of this town’s children their multiplication tables, was quietly being taken apart by someone who had found her in the loneliest year of her life and known exactly what to say.

What I found instead was a woman behind the counter, sixty-some years old, reading glasses pushed up into gray hair, closing a big three-ring binder like she had just finished with it.

I did not know her personally, though her face was familiar the way most faces are familiar in a town this size. I told her my name, and before I could explain why I was standing there with my hand still wrapped around my daughter’s, she looked at me and her whole face changed.

“You’re Howard’s people,” she said. Not a question. A fact she was pleased to confirm, the way you would greet someone whose family had done right by you.

“I don’t understand.”

“Everybody who’s worked a register in the back of this store for the last dozen years knows Howard’s people,” she said, and there was real warmth in it, the kind you cannot fake standing behind a discount store counter on a Thursday afternoon. “Your mother-in-law was just here.”

“I know. I need to understand what she’s doing here every Tuesday. And today.”

She studied my face for a second, the way you study someone deciding whether you are asking out of love or out of something less kind. Whatever she saw must have satisfied her, because she reached back under the counter and pulled out the binder she had just put away, and turned it around so I could read it right side up.

Pages. Dozens of them, some of the ink gone soft and faded with age, others crisp and recent. Each page carried a family’s last name, a running list of items, a column of dollar amounts, and a date. School coats. Winter boots in three different children’s sizes. A stack of identical folders and pencil pouches for what looked like an entire classroom. Some pages were paid in full and marked closed. Others still carried a balance, waiting.

“Your father-in-law started this the year I came to work here,” she said. “Long before that too, probably, just not through this store. He’d hear about a family behind on their layaway before school started, coats they couldn’t finish paying off, and he’d come in and settle it. Never wanted his name on the paperwork. Told me once a good turn with your name stapled to it isn’t a good turn anymore, it’s a receipt.”