The Popcorn Balls on Elm Street

The line

The next family was the Hoffmans, and the one after that was two high school girls dressed as cats, and after that a mother I did not know pushing a stroller with a baby in a pumpkin suit.

By six-thirty there were twelve or fifteen people waiting at once, which had never happened before, not in forty-one years.

Usually it is a steady trickle, kids running up, grabbing, running off. This was not a trickle. These people were standing still and waiting.

And a lot of them were not children. They were grown men and women, in Carhartt jackets and fleece vests and their kids’ leftover face paint, and they were standing in line with their own children for my popcorn balls.

Deputy Tom Rasmussen came through about six-forty, in uniform, with his twin girls dressed as Dorothy and the Tin Man. He is forty-two now.

I remember him as a skinny cowboy with a cap gun in 1990, so short he could barely see over the table.

“Mrs. Pruitt,” he said, and he took his hat off, which he did not have to do. “I have been eating these since I was six years old. I’d like my girls to have the same thing I had.” He handed one to each of them. Then he took one for himself and put it in his jacket pocket.

“Tom, you’re working,” I said.

“I’m on break,” he said, and he winked, and he stood off to the side of my driveway the whole rest of the night anyway, with his hands in his pockets, watching the line. I never asked him to. I never asked anybody to do anything.

Pastor Lynn came at about seven with her son, who is nine, dressed as an astronaut in a costume made out of a cardboard box and a lot of aluminum foil.

She did not say a word about the post. She just hugged me hard over the folding table and knocked my hat crooked.

“Popcorn ball communion,” she whispered in my ear, and I laughed so loud the astronaut looked up at us.

Kim Bauer, the school nurse I worked beside for nineteen years, came with her grandson in a fireman’s coat. She picked up a popcorn ball and read the label out loud, every word, slow and clear, so that the people behind her could hear it. Then she smiled at me and said, “Cleared by the nurse.”

Jeff Lindgren, who has carried the mail on Elm Street for twenty-two years, came through in a Hawkeyes sweatshirt with his three kids. “I’ve delivered your Christmas cards since 2004,” he said. “I’ve never once delivered you a complaint. Thought you should know.”

To the corner

By seven-fifteen the line went down my sidewalk, past the Henderson house, past the Wilsons’ yard with the inflatable black cat, and all the way to the stop sign at the corner of Elm and Third.

I could not see the end of it. Kids were sitting on the curb in their costumes eating Tootsie Rolls from other houses while they waited.

A man I did not know was handing out hand warmers from a box in the back of his pickup.

People kept saying things as they came to the table. “We saw the post.” “Don’t you pay any attention to that.” “My mother would have marched right over here.” “Is that girl crazy?”

When somebody said something about Kayla, I said the same thing every time, because it was true and because I knew Dennis would have wanted me to. “She’s my son’s wife, and she is a good mother. She’s just new here. She’ll come around.”

Around seven-thirty, Marlene came up the driveway with her phone held out in front of her like a lantern. “Joanne, look at this,” she said. “Look what’s happening on Kayla’s post. There’s more than three hundred comments now.”

I glanced at the screen. Somebody had posted a picture of the line from the corner, the whole sidewalk full of costumes, with my porch light way down at the far end. Under it were comments, one after another. “This is Harlow.” “Forty-one years and nobody ever got sick.” “The PTA should be ashamed of this.”

“Put that away, Marlene,” I said. “I don’t want to see it. I’m working.”