Rosettes on the Church Steps

Gordy

It was ten-thirty when Gordy came up Water Street.

He was walking from the direction of the courthouse with his hands in his jacket pockets, headed for the coffee shop on the corner past the church.

He walks that way every Saturday morning. Everybody knows it.

I saw him before he saw us. He was looking at his phone.

Then he looked up, and he saw the crowd on the sidewalk, and the card table at the foot of the steps, and his wife standing on one side of it.

He stopped walking.

There were maybe twelve people on the sidewalk right then. Tollef was still there at the bottom of the steps, on his second rosette.

The woman from the quilting circle was there. Two of my bus drivers were there.

Nobody said anything. Nobody knew anything, really. They were just people buying cookies on a nice morning. But Gordy did not know what they knew. He only knew what he knew.

He walked up to the edge of the pavement, a few feet from the table. He looked at it. There were three dozen rosettes left on it, maybe a little less.

He looked at the blue cash box open at Mom’s hand, with the bills sorted into its little compartments.

He knew that cash box. Everybody in my family knows that cash box. Dad sold sweet corn out of it every August for thirty years from the tailgate of his pickup.

Mom looked up at him. She did not stand up. She folded her hands on the lid of the box and smiled at him the way she smiles at everybody, the way she smiled at him across her dinner table for twenty-three years.

“Good morning, Gordon,” she said. “Would you like a dozen? I’ll make your change myself.”

Gordy opened his mouth. For a second nothing came out. His face went red, from his collar up, slowly, the way a stove burner does.

“No, thank you, Inga,” he said finally. His voice was very quiet. “You’ve done well this morning.”

“I have,” Mom said. “I keep my own count now.”

That was all she said. She did not say it loud. She did not say it mean.

She said it the way you would tell somebody the weather. And Gordy stood there at the foot of the church steps and heard it.

He looked at Marit. Marit looked back at him. She did not look away, and she did not say anything, and she did not move from Mom’s side.

Then Gordy nodded once, to nobody in particular, and he turned around and walked on down the sidewalk to the coffee shop.

He did not look back. I watched him all the way to the door.

Tollef, at the bottom of the steps, finished his rosette. He brushed the powdered sugar off the front of his barn coat.

Then he said, to the sidewalk in general, “Inga Thorsrud’s rosettes. Best in the county.”