He is sixty-three and has buried my husband and three of my friends, and he knows when not to ask questions. “It’s got eleven feet of pipe rod and a Christmas pageant’s worth of angel wings,” he said. “Why?”
“I’ll bring the rack,” he said. “Give me ten minutes.”
Then I walked up front to the counter where Keely was standing, and I said it as plainly as I knew how.
“I’ll take what’s left on rack fourteen.”
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She looked at me for a second. “They ring up, Mrs. Hatchett.”
“I know.”
“All of them.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“There are thirty-four.” She said it quietly, and I think she was giving me a chance to take it back. “That’s eight hundred forty-nine dollars and sixty-six cents. Before tax.”
I opened my purse. I still pay for things with a checkbook, and I knew the balance by heart: nineteen hundred and some dollars, the money Loy and I had always set aside for the Buick’s tires and the property tax.
“Then I’ll pay for the thirty-four,” I said.
I carried the thirty-four suits up to Bettina’s register myself, four at a time. Bettina would not look at me. She scanned the first and it beeped, and she scanned the second, and it beeped, and the line behind me began to fill.
I have never heard a store so quiet. There was a woman with a lamp, a man with a box of paperback westerns, and a girl with a baby on her hip, and not one of them said a thing. We all stood there and listened to thirty-four beeps.
Keely stood at the end of the counter with her arms folded. When the total came up, nine hundred seventeen dollars and sixty-three cents with the tax, she said nothing. I wrote the check slowly, in the clearest handwriting I own.
“Cleta,” Bettina whispered, as she tore it off. “You don’t have to.”
“I know it,” I said. “That’s why I’m doing it.”
Pastor Ammons came through the back door ten minutes later with the church’s rolling choir robe rack and two men from the Methodist Men’s Breakfast. We hung the thirty-four suits on it, one after another, and I said, “Brummel, I would like to do this myself.”
So I rolled it out the back door myself.
It is two hundred and twelve steps from the Goodgrove back door to the side door of the church. I counted them, in the October sun, with thirty-four suits swaying on casters and the left front wheel squealing. The orange sticker on every pocket flashed in the light.
Cars slowed on Elm Street. A woman I had known since Sunday school stood outside the hardware store with her hand over her mouth. Somebody honked, twice, friendly. I kept my eyes on the church door and kept pushing, because I did not trust myself to look at anyone.
The choir robe closet at First United Methodist is a narrow room behind the fellowship hall kitchen, with one high window and a smell of old hymnals and coffee. Eleven feet of galvanized pipe run along one wall, and for as long as I could remember it had held the Christmas pageant costumes and one pair of cardboard angel wings in service since 1974.
We moved the costumes to the back and hung the thirty-four suits on the rod, shoulder to shoulder. I stood in the middle of the room with the receipt in my purse and the shoebox of cards under my arm.
I sat down on a folding chair and cried. Not for the money, or the store. I was seventy-one years old and I had just done the one dramatic thing I had ever done in public, and nobody was clapping.