The Lobby My Husband Built

And I told him no.

I told him I did not want the boy fired. I could feel Elgin thinking I had gone soft in the head. So I explained it to him the way Ward would have explained it. I said, firing him teaches him only that he picked on the wrong old woman, that the danger was that I was secretly important, that he should have checked the account balances before he chose who to be cruel to. That is the exact wrong lesson. That would make him more careful about who he was cruel to, not less cruel. I did not want him to learn to fear rich old women. I wanted him to learn what the room was for.

So here is what I asked for instead, and Elgin Whitaker, God bless him, did not argue, he just got out his pen.

I asked that the community room be reopened, officially, and that the bank host a coffee hour in it every Tuesday morning, open to the whole town but built for the folks like me, the widowed and the alone and the old, the ones a lobby chair used to serve before somebody decided a lobby chair was wasted footage. I endowed it, quietly, so it would outlive me and outlive Preston and outlive Elgin, coffee and a warm room and somebody to say your name, in perpetuity, on Ward’s corner. And I made one condition, the only one I insisted on. I said Preston Kohl keeps his job. And Preston Kohl hosts the coffee. Every Tuesday. He pours it. He learns the names. The man who called it loitering runs the room whose whole purpose is to let people loiter.

Elgin looked at me for a long moment and then he started to laugh, this surprised, delighted laugh, and he said, “Ward married way up, didn’t he,” and I said he certainly did, and we had a piece of pie.