The Monday the Quilts Came Out

Village hall

Pam has been our village clerk for nineteen years. She sits behind the old teller window from when the building was the bank, with a little brass grate in front of her and a jar of butterscotch candies on the counter.

She saw the envelope in my hand and her whole face fell.

“Oh, Marlene.”

“It’s all right, Pam.”

“It is not all right.” She glanced at the door to the back office, which was shut, and lowered her voice anyway. “She came to the board meeting Tuesday night. During public comment. She had pictures printed out. Your line, with,” she cleared her throat, “with some of Roger’s things on it.”

“His union suits,” I said. “He wears them till May.”

Pam almost laughed, and then she didn’t.

“She said it was the first thing she saw every morning. She cried a little at the microphone. Dale didn’t know what to do, so he asked Jeff to look into it, and Jeff found the nuisance ordinance in the code book.” She lifted both hands. “He’s twenty-six. He did what the book said.”

“What does the book say, exactly?”

“I’d have to look. It’s from 1968. Most of that chapter is about junk cars and burn barrels.”

“Then I don’t need to look.”

“You can ask for a hearing,” she said. “The May meeting is the first Tuesday. Half this town would come. You know they would.”

“I know they would,” I said. “And I don’t want them to. I’m not going to stand up in front of the whole board and argue with a woman who has lived here four months and doesn’t know a soul. That’s not a fair fight, and it’s not the kind I want.”

I took out my checkbook, the one with the red barns on the checks, and wrote it out for fifty dollars. In the memo line I wrote “clothesline,” because I like my records to be clear.

I slid it under the brass grate.

“Thank you, Pam. You were doing your job, and so was Jeff. You tell him I said so. I don’t want that boy feeling bad when he reads my meter.”

Pam took the check and held it a moment like she didn’t want to put it in the drawer.

“My mother hung wash till she was ninety,” she said quietly. “If somebody’d written her up, she’d have come down here with a broom.”

“Mine too,” I said. “That’s sort of what I’m thinking about.”