The Stranger Who Paid The Layaway

The year the store almost closed

The hard year came the way hard years always come, slow and then all at once.

A big discount store went up out by the highway, forty thousand square feet of it, and you could buy a child’s coat there for less than I could sell one.

Haskell’s started to die. Old Mr. Haskell had passed by then and his granddaughter was running it, and she was doing everything right, and it did not matter.

That December the shelf behind me was thin. Not because the children had their coats. Because the mothers were buying out at the highway, where there was no book and no counter and no one who knew their name.

And still a few came to me. The ones who could not get out to the highway. The ones who needed the dollar-at-a-time book because all at once was not a thing they had.

There was a boy that year named Danny. Seven years old, I think. His mother had put a blue coat on layaway in October and come in faithful every week with two dollars.

Then in the first week of December she stopped coming.

I heard later she had gone into the hospital over in the county seat. Danny was staying with an aunt who did not have two dollars to spare, let alone the fourteen that coat still needed.

I put a star by Danny’s name and I waited, the way I always did, for the town to find him.

But the town was thin that year too. Everybody was pinched. The jar at the cafe was half what it used to be. The farmer who used to pay one off had sold his ground and moved to be near his kids.

The twenty-third came. That was the day a bundle went back on the floor.

Danny’s blue coat was fourteen dollars short, and nobody had come.

I stood there at my counter at the end of the day with that brown package in my hands and his name on the front in my own writing, and I thought about a cold Tuesday twenty years gone.

And I took out my envelope and I paid off Danny’s coat myself, every cent, and I marked it paid in full in the green book, and I told the granddaughter it was an anonymous gift, which was true enough.

I drove that blue coat out to the aunt’s house myself after we closed. I told her it was from the store. Danny was asleep on the couch under a church blanket.

I set the coat on the table and I drove home and I did not tell a soul, and that, I think, was the night I finally became the man in the gray coat, twenty years after he stood at my counter.