The Mittens Under the Bazaar Table

Down the road I heard Gordy’s bus coming before I saw it, that low diesel grumble and the squeal of the brakes on the downhill.

It came around the bend with its amber lights flashing, then red, and pulled onto the shoulder. The stop arm swung out with its sign.

Gordy rolled down his window and leaned out, grinning, steam coming off his coffee mug. “Take your time, Sandra! Peterson lane can wait one minute!”

The kids who already had mittens started climbing on, holding their hands up to show her. I heard him say, “Oh, look at those, those are beautiful,” to every single one.

I was still bent over Wes working the second mitten onto Wes, trying to get his thumb where it belonged, when a silver Buick pulled onto the shoulder behind the bus.

I knew that car. Everybody in town knows that car. Kim does the books at the church office on Tuesday mornings, and the elevator road is her way in from the farm.

She sat there for a minute with the engine running and her headlights on us. I could not see her face through the glare.

Then her door opened. She got out in her long camel coat, no hat, and walked straight toward us across the gravel.

I straightened up. My back did not want me to.

I braced myself, because I thought I knew what was coming, something about how this looked, or about the church’s mittens, or about making the Holm family look bad in front of the whole school.

But Kim did not look at me.

She was looking past me, at one of the cars on the shoulder. A rusted green minivan with a cracked windshield and the motor running.

A young woman sat behind the wheel with a toddler in a car seat behind her.

I knew that face too, a second later. It was the young mom from the bazaar. The one with the two little ones in hand-me-down snowsuits. The one I meant to catch and never did.

Wes turned and waved his red mittens at the van. “Mom! Look! Miss Sandra made them!”

Kim stopped walking. She stood there in the gravel with her arms at her sides, and her face did something I had never seen it do in twenty-six years of Thanksgiving dinners.

“She asked me,” Kim said. She said it so quietly I barely heard it over the bus engine.

“Who asked you what?”

“That girl. At the bazaar.” Kim’s eyes were still on the minivan.

“She came up to the front table around noon with those two babies. She asked if we had any winter things for kids. Hats or mittens or anything.” Kim swallowed.

“And I said I didn’t think we had anything like that this year.”

The wind came across the field and neither of us moved.

“I wasn’t lying to her, Sandra. I’d forgotten. I had put them under there at eight in the morning, and I had four hundred things in my head, and I honestly forgot they were there. I looked right at that girl and told her no.”

I did not say anything. There was nothing I could say that would have made it better, and anything I said could have made it worse.

Behind us, Gordy called, “Last one, Wes, hop on, buddy,” and Wes ran for the steps with his red mittens held up high, and the door folded shut, and the stop arm swung in, and the bus pulled away toward the Peterson lane.