The Mittens Under the Bazaar Table

The young mom in the minivan rolled down her window. She looked at me, not at Kim. “Thank you,” she called.

“He’s been wearing those socks for a week. I get paid Friday.” Then she rolled the window back up, because the baby was in the back, and pulled out onto the county road.

Kim watched the van go until it was over the hill.

“I have to get to the office,” she said. She did not look at me.

She walked back to the Buick, got in, and sat there with both hands on the wheel for a long minute before she pulled out.

Dave had gotten out of the truck at some point. I had not noticed. He was standing by the tailgate in his chore coat with his hands in his pockets.

“You all right?” he asked.

“I’m cold,” I said, which was true, and he put me in the truck.

We drove to the other two stops on Route 4, the township corner and the Lutheran cemetery turnoff, and I gave out twenty-two more pairs.

By the time we got home I had nineteen pairs left in the basket and my back ached from the bending and I could not stop thinking about Kim’s face.

Mrs. Fischer put a post on the school’s Facebook page that afternoon. I did not know she was going to. Dave showed it to me on his phone at supper.

It was a picture somebody’s mom had taken from her car window.

Me in my puffy coat, bent over Wes in the gravel at the elevator stop, fitting a red mitten on him, with the bus stopped behind us and Gordy grinning out the window.

The post said: A big thank-you this morning to Sandra Holm, who drove Route 4 for 31 years, for the hand-knit wool mittens she gave our kids on the first cold day. Warm hands make for a good day of learning.

By the next morning it had been shared four hundred times. In a town of 1,300, that is everybody, and everybody’s cousin in Bemidji.

People stopped me at the grocery store. The lady at the post office.

Marlys from the church kitchen, who called and said, “Sandra, I saw the picture, are those the mittens from the bazaar?” And I said yes, because they were, and I was not going to lie about it.

“I never saw any mittens at the bazaar,” Marlys said.

“No,” I said. “You wouldn’t have.”

I did not say anything more than that. I want that understood. I did not tell Marlys about the index card or the tablecloth.

I did not tell the post office lady. I did not tell anybody but Dave.

But in a town like ours you do not have to tell people anything. They put it together. They remembered the front table and all those candles. They remembered that nobody saw any mittens.

And a few of them remembered that I had walked out to the truck at three o’clock with two big bins, and Kim had been standing there watching.

By Sunday, the story was all over the coffee hour. I could feel it in the way people looked at Kim when she walked into the narthex.

Polite, but a little cool. Two women stopped talking when she came by the coffee urn.

She stood at the back of the sanctuary during the service instead of sitting in her usual pew.

When it was over she left by the side door before Pastor Glen got to the end of the receiving line.