The Stranger Who Paid The Layaway

The green ledger and the stars

I want to tell you about the book, because the book is the heart of this.

That green ledger went everywhere December went. I guarded it like it was Scripture.

Somewhere along the way I started doing a thing with it. I started putting a small pencil star out beside the children I thought were going to lose their bundle.

I knew the signs by then. A column that had gone three weeks with nothing written in it. A mother who used to come Fridays and had stopped. A name I had heard was having trouble at home.

A star did not mean I had money for them. It just meant I was watching. It meant I knew.

And the funny thing was, more often than not, a starred child got paid off. Not always by me. Someone would wander up and ask which one was furthest behind, and it would be a starred one, and I would send them to it.

I came to half believe those stars pulled the kindness toward them somehow. I know that is foolishness. But I saw it enough times that I kept doing it.

I kept my own envelope too, by then. Every payday I would fold a few dollars into an envelope in my purse and that was the layaway envelope and it was spoken for.

Some years I spent all of it. Some years the town took care of its own and my envelope carried over.

I did not do it to be good. I want to be plain about that. I did it because that man had shown me, in about ninety seconds on a cold Tuesday, what a counter like mine was actually for.

It was never for selling coats. It was for making sure a child in a farm town in December did not have to stand at the bus stop with no coat and have the whole school see it.

That is a particular kind of cold, the cold of being the only child without. I understood that better than most, though I did not yet understand why that man understood it too.

I was good at my job for twenty-two years. But I was not good at it until that Tuesday. Before that I was just keeping a book. After that I was keeping watch.