The Bagger They Called Not Fit

Pete took off his boots, put them back on, and said, “Get your coat.”

I watched them go down the street in Pete’s truck. Pete told me about it after. It is eleven miles out to Delbert’s farmhouse, down a gravel county road, and Pete did not say much on the way, because he never does, and Bradley did not need him to. When they got there, Delbert was standing on his own porch waiting, because he had seen the truck from a quarter mile away. Bradley went up the steps by himself. Pete stayed in the truck with the window down and the radio off for an hour and ten minutes, in the cold, looking at a fence line, because he understood that this visit was not his. That was all he did. It was exactly right.

Bradley came back down the steps an hour later with a strong opinion about Delbert’s coffee, which he said was too weak, and a better mood than he had left in, and he said nothing more about it all the way home except that he would be back Monday.

By Tuesday I had a rough idea of what the week was going to look like, because the town was already doing it. Nobody organized anything. I have been over this in my mind a hundred times, and that is the truth, no meeting, no flyer, no petition, no post online. People simply noticed, one at a time, that the best part of their morning at Lindell’s was gone, and when they found out why, they quietly went to do their shopping somewhere else.

Delbert had called nine of his old poker buddies from the VFW, every one of whom shopped at Lindell’s out of habit, and told them plainly that the store had fired the Dunlap boy, that he himself would be taking his business thirty minutes up the highway to the Marsh Hill supermarket, and did they want to come with him or did they want to keep giving their money to a man who threw out a good kid to save a few dollars an hour.

Nine men is not a boycott. But nine men who each spend forty or fifty dollars a week, who each tell two or three more people why they switched, that adds up in a town of four thousand people, and it added up all week.

Wednesday morning my phone buzzed in my apron pocket in the cafeteria. It was Verlene.

“Renae,” she said, and I could hear something behind her voice I could not place at first, a kind of hollow quiet. “Can you come down on your lunch? Or after work. Whenever.”

“Verlene, what is it. Is it bad?”

“No,” Verlene said, and she laughed, short and strange, like she herself could not quite believe it. “It’s not bad. It’s just the strangest week I have ever had on this register. Come see.”

I drove there on my lunch break. I sat in my car in that lot a full minute before I walked in. It was a Wednesday at noon, and the lot looked like a Tuesday in January.

The people who were there were mostly not there to shop. I watched an older woman I recognized from church walk up to the customer service desk and ask, plain as day, loud enough that three other people in line heard her, “Where is the young man who used to bag for me, Bradley, is he still working here?”