The Boy Who Gave His Summer Away

“I told him that was an unusual request for a customer his age,” Ed said to me later, standing in his own store with his thumbs hooked in his belt the way he stands when he is telling you something he still cannot quite get over. “And he looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘It’s not for me, Mr. Begley, it’s for somebody who’d be embarrassed if he knew.’ I’ve sold coats in this town for thirty eight years and I never once had a customer explain himself like that.”

Ed Begley is a careful man and he called Mrs. Castellano, who checked the gym locker tags without telling a soul why, and three days later Wyatt came back into that store with a hundred and thirty dollars folded into a sandwich bag inside his jacket pocket, and bought a canvas work coat and a pair of insulated boots in a twelve year old’s size eight. He counted the money out on the counter twice, the way his grandfather taught him to count anything that mattered, and asked Mr. Begley to deliver the box himself, on his own time, left on a porch with no name attached, because a delivery truck from a feed store showing up at a house is a different thing in a small town than a stranger’s car pulling up after dark.

“You don’t want the credit,” Ed said he told him, more statement than question.

“No sir,” Wyatt said. “If he knows it was me, he’ll feel like he owes me something. I don’t want him owing me anything. I just want him to have a coat.”

Ed Begley told me he went home that night and told his wife about it twice, because he could not get over a sixth grader understanding debt and shame and pride better than most of the grown men who come through his register arguing over a ten percent discount.

Then he went to the school office on a Friday during his lunch period, which I know now because Mrs. Pruitt could not keep it to herself after the supper, the way nobody who was part of this story particularly wanted to keep it to themselves once it was safe to tell. He put a hundred and ten dollars on her desk, counted twice, and asked her to put it toward Micah Dermot’s lunch account and to never, under any circumstances, say who it came from.