The Stranger Who Paid The Layaway

The dollar-at-a-time book

People think layaway is about money. It is really about pride.

A mother who could not hand her child a coat on the spot could still walk in every Friday with two dollars and know that coat was being held, with her boy’s name on it, just for him.

That mattered. I came to see how much it mattered.

There was a woman, I will not use her name, who paid on a snowsuit the whole fall. A quarter some weeks. She worked nights at the canning plant out on the highway.

She came in the second week of December and told me, quiet, that she could not finish it. Her hours had been cut.

I told her the snowsuit would keep. I told her there was no hurry in the world and that it was not going anywhere.

That was mostly a kindness. Mr. Haskell’s rule was that an unpaid bundle went back on the floor on the twenty-third so it could still sell for Christmas.

I bent that rule more than he ever knew. I would take a dollar of my own and write it in her column so the book never showed her behind.

I did it for a lot of them over the years, a dollar at a time out of my own pay. It was not much. I was not raising children of my own, and it seemed like the Lord had put me right where that dollar was needed.

Mr. Haskell was not a hard man. But he had a store to keep open, and a store that gives everything away does not stay open, and a town with no store is a sadder place than a town with a strict one.

So I understood the rule. I just worked around its edges where I could.

I kept a cigar box under the counter with a slot cut in the lid. Folks who had a little extra would drop a coin in it, and I would use it to round up a column that was a dime or a quarter shy.

Nobody ever asked me where the box money went. In a town like ours you do not ask. You just know that a counter like mine is a place where small kindnesses pass hands quiet.

I learned the children too, not just the columns. I knew which boy was going to need a size bigger by January because he was shooting up. I knew which little girl would want the coat with the hood because she was shy and liked to hide in it.

That is the thing the big stores out on the highway never could sell. They could sell you a coat for less. They could not know your boy.

The thing you learn on a layaway counter is how a whole town is doing, long before the bank knows.

In a good year the bundles went out fast and the shelf was bare by Christmas Eve. In a hard year the paper packages sat up there into January, and some of them went back on the floor, and I learned the names of the children who would go cold.

I hated those years. I would look at that shelf and know exactly which coat was not going home.