The Stranger Who Paid The Layaway

The Tuesday he came in

He came in on a Tuesday. I am sure of that, because Tuesday was when the truck came and I always smelled of cardboard by noon.

It was the second week of December and bitter, the kind of cold that comes down off the plains and sits on the square and will not leave.

The bell over the door swung and the wind came in with him. He stood a second letting his eyes adjust, the way folks do coming in out of white winter light.

He was not from here. I know everybody for thirty miles, and I did not know him.

He had on a good wool coat, charcoal gray, the kind you do not buy in this county. But his boots were old and salt-stained and broken in soft, a working man’s boots.

He came back to my counter slow, looking at the shelves like a man reading them.

He took off his hat and held it in both hands. He had gray at his temples and a face that had been out in a lot of weather.

He would not quite look at me. He looked at the brown bundles on the shelf behind me instead, one after another, like he was counting them.

“Ma’am,” he said. “Those packages. Those are children’s layaway.”

I told him they were. Coats, mostly. Some boots. Being paid off a little at a time.

He asked me how much was still owed on all of it. On every single one.

I thought I had misheard him. I asked him which child he meant.

“All of them,” he said. “The whole shelf. How much to pay off every one.”

I did not know what to say, so I did the only thing I know how to do. I opened the green book and I added it up.

My hands were cold and I made myself go slow and get it right. Fourteen bundles that year with a balance still on them. It came to three hundred and eleven dollars and some change.

I told him the number. I told him it a second time because the first time it did not seem to land.

He reached into his coat and brought out a fold of bills and laid it on the counter between us, folded once the long way.

“Mark them all paid,” he said. “Every one. Paid in full.”