The Bagger They Called Not Fit

Saturday, Bradley stayed home, which was strange for both of us, him puttering around the house checking the blank squares on his refrigerator calendar like they might have changed. I let him be unhappy in his own way, which with Bradley is quiet, a lot of sitting near me without talking, a lot of his dog Scout pressed up against his leg like Scout could feel it too. He did call Verlene, and he talked to her for twenty minutes, and when he hung up he said she had cried and he had told her not to, and she had told him to mind his own business, and he had laughed.

Sunday we went to church, same as always, First Christian on Maple, and I will tell you the truth, I almost did not go, because I did not know yet whether I could sit in a pew and be civil about any of this. But Pete said we should go, that hiding at home would feel worse, and Bradley said he wanted to see everybody anyway. Both of them were right.

Delbert Lindgren found us in the parking lot afterward. He had his cane and his good Sunday hat, and he came across that lot faster than a man of seventy eight generally moves.

“Somebody told me something at coffee hour I did not like,” he said, no hello first. “Tell me it isn’t so.”

Bradley answered before I could. “It’s so, Mr. Lindgren. I got let go Friday. He said I wasn’t a good fit.”

Delbert went very still. I watched something move behind his eyes, and it was not the soft thing I expected, the sympathy. It was something harder.

“Not a good fit,” he repeated, like he was tasting the words to see if they were rotten. “That boy has known my wife’s day for three years and that manager has known him eleven weeks. Not a good fit for who.”

He looked at Bradley, not at me. “I’m sorry, son. You did that job better than anybody who ever stood there. That is my opinion and I am going to say it to some people.”

“I asked Mom not to call anybody,” Bradley told him. “I’m waiting a week.”

“Your mother and I are not going to call anybody,” Delbert said, and turned to me, and said, with some dignity, “I don’t make scenes. I make phone calls.”

I did not ask him what he meant by that, and he did not tell me. Word moves through a town the size of Henning the way water moves through a low field, finding every crack on its own, with or without me pouring it there. Verlene had told her sister at the beauty shop. The beauty shop had told the women who got their hair done Saturday morning. The Sunday school teacher who buys her milk every week at that store had noticed Bradley was not the one who carried her bags to the car, and had asked why, and had been told.

Monday morning Bradley got up at his usual time and put on his work shirt out of pure habit, and stood in the kitchen looking at it. I was due at the school cafeteria at six thirty. I did not say anything. When I came home that afternoon, the shirt was hung back on its hook, and Bradley was sitting on the porch with Scout, and he said, “I want to go see Mr. Lindgren.”

“Today?”

“Mondays are when I see him,” he said. “He’ll be sitting there with nobody to talk to.”